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The Glyndebourne Phoenix
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16624 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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10 / 1989 |
2,262 Words |
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Herb Greer
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There is a kind of subtext in much of today's approach to musical classics that attempts to intuit music from other centuries as a quasi-divine escape hatch that will bring us into a more peaceful age of sound and shelter us from the fury to which our contemporary ears are subjected. The catchword for this sympathetically magic approach is authenticity.
According to The Economist, authenticity has become something of a modern obsession, encompassing not only performances of "older" music, but also extending to the work of composers as late as Igor Stravinsky and, heaven help us, George Gershwin. On the face of it, this preoccupation is even more irrational than the usual influence of fashion in the arts--a twentieth-century chapter for the Charles Mackay classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Musical sound is not a phenomenon that exists in a vacuum, either physically or culturally. An attempt to capture the "original sound" of, say, Josquin De Prez, or Ockeghem, or of a composer we think we know well, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, would of course involve not just the notes and orchestration of the work but actual penetration of the very aural experience and context of the composer himself and his audience. This would need much more than a simple reconstruction of old instruments, concert halls, and orchestral or other setups. It would require a feat that no one has yet been able to manage successfully, in other words, the building of a time machine.
Twentieth-Century Lust
Obviously the "authentic" or "original" sound of a work is an illusion, yet another aesthetic ignis fatuus flickering across the landscape of modern performance. It is a way of catering to the peculiarly desperate twentieth-century lust for novelty. The question about such performances is not the extent of their authenticity (which is really a problem of cultural archaeology) but of what they give us in the noisy context of our own time.
I have already mentioned one such gift--the comforting dream of escape into the past. But there are others, especially when the work in question is a complex or artificial aesthetic hybrid like opera. These gifts have been beautifully wrapped and presented by the 1989 Glyndebourne Opera Festival, in a production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; this show was accompanied by period instruments played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and brilliantly conducted by Simon Rattle.
It was the custom in Mozart's time to bill such a piece as a drama by the librettist (Lorenzo de Ponte in this case, from a play by Beaumarchais), with music by Mozart. Today the composer gets top billing. For all its dramatic and literary content, our experience of opera tends to classify it as a kind of highly decorated concert-with-action--often a rather cerebral sort of action--dominated by the music. The audience relates to the drama through the musical content of the work.
In the Glyndebourne production of The Marriage of Figaro the effect is not quite like that. The period instruments give a much lighter texture to Mozart's score, with the curious and interesting result that this famous work by one of Europe's greatest composers comes across the footlights very much like what Americans call a musical
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