Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Early Music Revival: A History by Harry Haskell

Review by: Elizabeth Roche
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 382-384
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/735472
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 REVIEWS OF BOOKS

EARLY MUSIC: ITS REVIVAL AND INTERPRETATION

The Early Music Revial: a History. By Harry Haskell. pp. 232. (Thames & Hudson, Lon-
don, 1988, ?15.95. ISBN 0-500-01449-3.)

We live in an age when the definition of what constitutes 'early music' is conti
panding. Today an early music event may be anything from a reconstruction of
liturgy to a performance of Winterreise with a fortepiano; the time may not be
when it will also apply to Elgar symphonies performed with string portamenti m
those of the composer's own recordings. The term can also embrace any revival, however
bizarre, of a Baroque opera. The so-called 'early music revival', therefore, comprises two
separate classes of activity: the rehabilitation of long-disused music whose whole style may
well seem somewhat alien to modern ears and which imperatively requires its own proper in-
struments; and the attempt to find an 'authentic' approach to performing eighteenth-
century and more recent music, some at least of which is a comfortably familiar part of the
ordinary repertory, and which can be (and of course not infrequently is) played on modern
instruments. It is one of the weaknesses of Haskell's book that he fails to distinguish suffi-
ciently clearly between these two strands. Obviously they do intertwine to some extent, in
that all responsible performers, whether of early medieval or early Romantic music, have
an equal duty to get as near as possible to the sound envisaged by the composer. Moreover,
the vogue for Baroque instruments has revived the fortunes of a good many forgotten
Kleinmezster, and some individuals, such as Dolmetsch, have worked simultaneously on
rediscovering both a corpus of music and the instruments necessary to perform it. But to
date the revival, as Haskell does, from Mendelssohn's first performance of the St. Matthew
Passion, and generally to equate the nineteenth century's efforts to elevate Bach to a
pedestal alongside Handel's with the parallel reawakening of interest in Renaissance music is
too simplistic, especially when it tends to lead to the assumption that everything that has
happened in this field within the last 150-plus years can be seen as part of a definable 'early
music movement'. It may be reasonable to use such a phrase to cover the multifarious
developments of the last three decades, but applying it indiscriminately to the whole period
gives an air of spurious coherence to an enormously varied range of activities, scattered, as
Dr. Watson put it, over many nations and three separate continents. (It also leads to the ir-
ritating anachronism of referring throughout to 'early' music, when for more than half the
book's time-span the accepted terms were 'old', 'ancient' or even 'antique'.)
This approach and its attendant problems may well be the result of trying to cover every
aspect of the revival, not only in the English-speaking world but also in Continental Europe,
and with a glance at Japan for good measure, in some 200 pages. It is a monumental task,
requiring not only the evident enthusiasm that Haskell brings to it but also a degree of total
familiarity with every possible aspect of the subject in every country dealt with which he does
not quite possess-which indeed no single author could realistically be expected to possess.
Developments in early music are inextricably bound up with the general conditions of
musical life in their respective centres, and an author who lacks a full background
knowledge of these conditions runs the risk of making inaccurate, or at best misleading,
statements which can falsify the picture quite seriously. Haskell's failure to understand the
nature of the competitive festival movement in Britain, and the vital part it played in
disseminating early music among provincial audiences, is a case in point, and so is his use of

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a characteristically trenchant quotation from Sir Richard Terry, fulminating against the
Handel festivals of the 1 920s, as direct evidence of the conditions encountered by Dolmetsch
when he came to England 40 years before.
Another essential qualification for an author dealing with a subject which has bred a
many myths as the early music revival is a thorough acquaintance with an appropriate sele
tion of primary sources. Here Haskell's record is patchy. The chapters where he makes
liberal use of such material, notably that on the revival of Baroque opera, read not only
more authoritatively but also more interestingly than those which seem to owe more to
secondary literature, or to contain rather too many lists of names. A good example of the
former is his section, in any case disproportionately long, on Arnold Dolmetsch. The time is
now surely ripe for a dispassionate analysis of Dolmetsch's work and its true significance sub
specie aeternitatis, based at least to some extent on press criticisms and similar contem-
porary reports from the 1890s onwards (there is certainly no shortage). But the evidence is
that Haskell has relied mainly on the existing literature, with the result that he adds nothing
to our understanding of the subject. In particular, it seems likely that he has used Percy
Scholes's anthology The Mirror of Music as the basis for his Musical Times material rather
than the journal itself- thus denying us any account of the controversy that blew up over the
proposal to establish what became the Dolmetsch Foundation. This is a pity, since the affair
throws a good deal of light not only on Dolmetsch's own reputation in the late 1 920s but also
on critical attitudes to early music in general at that time.
Criticism, though, is not one of Haskell's primary concerns, and neither is detailed
consideration of the precise repertories cultivated by the many performers he mentions.
This is particularly regrettable in the chapters on music and the electronic media and on
developments since the 1950s-we are left, for instance, with no clear idea of what music the
Early Music Consort of London actually performed so brilliantly, nor of how their repertory
differed from that of the Consort of Musicke. A few references to the groups' principal
recordings would have clarified such points and also made it possible to appreciate the dif-
ference between, say, the Clerkes of Oxenford and Gothic Voices, which are simply listed
without further comment as unaccompanied vocal ensembles. Such comments could easily
have been accommodated by cutting the sections dealing with modern works which use early
instruments or composition methods -an interesting topic, and clearly of great concern to
the author, but not really deserving nearly 10 per cent of the book's length. Alternatively
this space might have been used to improve the coverage of the revival of purely vocal music.
There is far more to early music than early instruments; indeed it was, for sufficiently ob-
vious reasons, with vocal genres such as the madrigal that the revival of pre-Baroque music
began, but this whole area gets pretty short shrift. The Schola Cantorum is well covered, but
such things as the Bach Choir's revival of a whole series of Palestrina Masses, the work of
specialist British groups like Kennedy Scott's Oriana Madrigal Society, Sir Richard Terry's
remarkable achievements at Westminster Cathedral in bringing an enormous quantity of
Latin polyphony (including all Taverner's Masses) back into liturgical use, and the 1920s
fashion for Elizabethan music, are dismissed far too cursorily. And the current trend
towards presenting sacred polyphony as part of a liturgical reconstruction is not discussed at
all, though it is probably one of the most significant recent developments in the whole field
of early music. Moreover, a number of really rather important repertories might as well not
exist -the Italian madrigal, for example, or the Burgundian chanson -and one might be
forgiven for imagining that Monteverdi wrote nothing but opera.
For Baroque opera is the one non-instrumental genre that really engages Haskell's atten-
tion. He is plainly at his happiest in his chapter on this subject, and indeed, much of what he
has to say will probably come as a revelation to British and American readers who have had
little opportunity of discovering just how active French and German musicians have been in
this field -and for how long. The history of major revivals of Baroque opera in Britain dates
back only as far as the Oxford Monteverdi productions of the mid 1920s, but Hamburg had
enjoyed a staging of Handel's Almira as early as 1879, and the first decade of this century
saw Rameau's Platee produced at Munich and his Hippolyte et Aricie given both in Geneva
and at the Paris Opera. Monteverdi's Orfeo itself had its first modern stage performance in
1911 (money was saved by using the sets for a production of Maeterlinck's L'Oiseau bleu).

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On the whole Monteverdi and Rameau seem to have been the chief beneficiaries of the
revivalists' enthusiasm in the early years of the century (though there was a performance of
Gagliano's Dafne in Moscow in 1911, for which a balalaika was added to the continuo group
and which surely ought to constitute some sort of record). It must be said that not all the
revivals were fully staged, and even those that were tended to be special events rather than
part of a theatre's normal season, since they would be too esoteric for the regular patrons.
And it goes without saying that in most cases the music was cut, allocated to the wrong
voices, reorchestrated, and generally reduced to a condition very different from that in-
tended by the composer.
Haskell's account of this whole development, including the post-1918 explosion of Handel
revivals in Germany and America, and its more familiar post-1945 manifestations, is
thorough and well documented. He succeeds in conveying a good idea of the salient
characteristics of editions, production details (a selection of well-chosen plates is helpful
here), and audience reaction. Indeed, there is much both in this chapter and in the
thoughtful discussion of the question of playing Bach 'his way' that makes one wonder
whether he might not have been happier confining himself to a book more specifically on
the revival of Baroque music and its instruments, rather than venturing into more distant
realms where he is not so completely at home.
Problems of organizing the material into a logical sequence of chapters, which sometimes
leads the reader to feel that individual topics are not dealt with in the most obvious place,
are inseparable from a book on a subject with so many ramifications. And by present-day
standards the misprint count is gratifyingly low, though it is worrying to find the title of
George Moore's 'early music' novel Evelyn Innes misspelt every time it occurs. And the cap-
tions to the photographs really must be checked and corrected before any second edition
appears: David Munrow did not die in 1973, and the English Singers' first records were
issued in 1921, not 1925.
ELIZABETH ROCHE

Authenticity in Music. By Raymond Leppard. pp. [iv] + 80. (Faber Music, London &
Boston, 1988 [1989], ?4.95. ISBN 0-571-10088-0.)

One feels some sympathy for Raymond Leppard. In the 1960s and '70s his performan
and recordings of, say, Monteverdi's and Cavalli's Venetian operas were nothing short of
revelatory for scholars, students and the public at large. Yet Leppard was soon reviled by
younger trend-setters of the 'authenticist' movement. Is there any other contemporary musi-
cian whose achievement has been so completely scorned by a cult that he did so much to
create?
As a result, Leppard's statements on authenticity in the late 1980s must inevitably be
viewed in the light of personal, nay historical, circumstances. Not surprisingly, in this short
book he assumes a defensive air of special pleading in the face of a hostile academic and
musical establishment. The rise of the authenticity movement is sketched out in a rather
peremptory manner, and the basic issues of period instruments, Urtext editions and per-
forming practices are swiftly surveyed. The fetish for authenticity is conventionally linked to
the modernist (and also, in this case, post-Hiroshima) crisis of the twentieth century. In a
fragmented world where Victorian ideas of progress have clearly proved illusory, we
desperately latch on to notions of a stable past as a way of exorcising our fears for an uncer-
tain future. But what is this 'authentic' past that we seek to recover? Leppard, like his
authenticist colleagues, seems confused. With some side-swipes at musicology and at bad
performers of period instruments, Leppard deplores the 'false' authenticity characteristic of
recent trends in the early music movement (for example a too pedantic adherence to
sources and instruments). Instead, he asserts the value of, and indeed necessity for, 'com-
promise' as a way of allowing the past to speak to the present. Thus Leppard's authenticity
seems to lie in seeking to re-create the 'spirit' of the past ('ethos' is another favourite term),
modifying the letter to accommodate the different needs of a modern audience.

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