Fischer or Fidelity? (Part 2 of 2)

Asking readers to hear the difference between a harpsichord and a piano, as I did in Friday's post, is one thing. Asking them to hear tiny distinctions in musical phrasing is another. I still think my readers will be up to that task, so if you want to test your auditory mettle, read on.

Once again, you'll need to open this playlist in Spotify to hear today's examples. The last two tracks in that playlist are recordings of J.S. Bach's Fugue in F Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I. Close listening reveals the significant differences between the interpretations of the two performers, Edwin Fischer and Bob van Asperen.

The fugue begins with a distinct musical phrase played in only one voice. Musicians call this phrase the subject of the fugue. The following excerpt from the composer's manuscript (courtesy of imslp.org) shows the subject in the score.

Listen to track four, Asperen's performance, first. Hear how the first five notes are all separate from one another. You might almost imagine Asperen's fingers bouncing over the keys as he begins the subject. Listen for a while longer, noticing the distinct articulation of the subject each time it repeats.

Now listen closely to Fischer on the third track. When he plays the subject, he slurs the first two notes together, and he plays the second note louder than the first. This interpretation is also distinctive, but it's not very Baroque.

If you look at the excerpt from the score, you'll see that the first two notes are separated by a bar line. Bach rarely indicated phrasing in his music, but when he did, he wouldn't connect notes across bar lines. Bach's phrasing conventions were closely tied to the physical limitations of his instruments. If Fischer tried to transfer his interpretation to a harpsichord, his playing would sound muddled. By slurring the first two notes, he would hide the downbeat. On the piano, Fischer can and does emphasize the downbeat by accenting the second note of the subject, but he wouldn't be able to make that note sound any louder on a harpsichord. Without a clear downbeat, Bach's already complex texture would become even more dense, and the entire piece would lag.

Textual and musical evidence shows that Asperen is more faithful to Baroque style than Fischer. Nevertheless, Fischer's recording demonstrates lively playing and a creative use of pianistic resources. I'll leave it to you to decide which performance is better. Tell me what you think in the comments, and come back soon for a celebration of an important musical birthday.

Performing Like a Lawyer

During law school, I met a lot of people who looked at me funny when I told them I had studied music in college. Some articulated their confusion with a question: "What does music have to do with law?" Their implication was clear. In their minds, the rigorous, precise world of legal thinking was incompatible with the fuzzy, feel-good world of music.

Those people must not have known Gustav Leonhardt. Today as I reflected on the great Dutch harpsichordist's passing, the questions from my classmates reminded me of how important Leonhardt's work was.

If you've never heard of Leonhardt, this New York Times article summarizes his life well. The article notes that Leonhardt helped to define the historical performance movement. Unfortunately, many readers don't know anything about that movement.

Many keyboardists in the first half of the twentieth century played Baroque music the same way they played music by Romantic composers, such as Liszt or Brahms, who lived over a century after the Baroque period ended. They played on pianos, used heavy pedaling and legato phrasing, and made dramatic dynamic shifts. In the middle of the century, several performers, one of the most prominent of whom was Leonhardt, criticized that performance style. They argued that such playing was inappropriate because it would have been impossible on typical Baroque instruments. Bach and his contemporaries usually played on harpsichords, which lack pedals and don't allow performers to play louder or softer by varying their touch.

Leonhardt wasn't content to focus on Baroque instruments while interpreting music. He read musical instruction books written in the 17th and 18th centuries. He scoured archives to find early compositional drafts and compared different versions of pieces to determine which editions best represented composers' preferences. He approached music the way lawyers approach cases -- he researched texts thoroughly and carefully evaluated contrasting approaches before presenting his conclusions to an audience.

Leonhardt's life testifies to the power of rigorous thinking applied to heartfelt music making. The combination of those qualities revolutionized keyboard performance and inspired a generation of musicians to look to the past as a guide for the present. Just as importantly, it sustained a musical career that, as the video below shows, remained vital until its final days.