6 - Performance practice

Summary

Introduction: the issues

Is the kind of performance expected by Brahms in his own day valid for later generations of players? We can never really answer that question, if only because so many relevant parameters have changed during the last century or so. For example, the discipline imposed by the microphone and the implications of air travel are two factors which have brought about such changes that we cannot turn back the clock. Even if we could hear Richard Mühlfeld's première of Brahms's Quintet we should not necessarily want to adopt all its features; like all performers of our own day we should continue to exercise elements of choice and taste as much characteristic of our own day as Mühlfeld's. But the mere fact that the original performance conditions can now seem at all relevant marks a radical shift in our musical thinking. As this book is being written, players of various nationalities are beginning to think it worthwhile to acquire copies of the Baermann-Ottensteiner clarinets used by Mühlfeld, in an attempt to come closer to his sound-world. Nevertheless, notation in Brahms's scores leaves a number of ambiguities, even though it dates from a period relatively close to our own.

Changes in musical taste

Any assessment of the available documentary and critical evidence needs to take into account the nature of musical taste of the 1890s. Early recordings are an important guide, and the evidence they provide has recently been subject to detailed analysis.