Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective

Summary

My first practical engagement with historical performance occurred in the early 1980s. This was an intoxicating time for period recordings, thanks largely to the new medium of the compact disc. Christopher Hogwood's pioneering Mozart Symphonies for L'Oiseau Lyre was proving an important driver in propelling the entire movement towards classical repertory. In 1976 Neal Zaslaw had heralded Hogwood's project by taking as inspiration the celebrated orchestra at Mannheim, as it was recalled by Burney and Schubart. The rallying cry of ‘an army of generals equally fit to plan a battle as to fight it’ was a true promise of historical riches. Little of this heady ambition was reflected in Eric van Tassel's review of the complete set some eight years later, which observed tartly that ‘the … minimalist approach, which even in the last symphonies consists simply in getting all the details right, need not prevent our penetrating the surface of the music if we are willing to make some imaginative effort … a performance not merely under-interpreted but un-interpreted offers potentially an experience of unequalled authenticity’. The role of character and personality in ‘historical’ music-making was beginning to attract wider discussion that went far beyond the argument that any decision on tempo or dynamics must constitute interpretation. For example, Laurence Dreyfus pointed out that the ‘authentic’ musician acted willingly in the service of the composer, denying any form of glorifying self-expression, but attained this by following the text-book rules for ‘scientific method’, with a strictly empirical programme to verify historical practices.