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Authenticity

Musical Hermeneutics: The ‘Authentic’ Performance of Early Music

What does make a musical performance authentic? What do we mean by authenticity anyway? Michael Graubart looks for some answers.

Bach fugues on the clavichord or the piano? Handel arias with added ornaments or plain? Mozart concertos on a fortepiano, gut-strung violins and valveless horns or on a Steinway grand piano and modern orchestral instruments? Beethoven symphonies at the breakneck speeds indicated by the metronome marks he later added to his scores or at the tempi that conductors have traditionally found to be musically appropriate? Such questions are much in the minds of concert-goers and CD-buyers as well as of performers these days. As a matter of fact, they are only particular examples of what determines a performer’s ‘interpretation’ of any piece of music, but they concentrate the mind on tangible, objective aspects of performance, in contrast to the subtle, elusive, often almost unanalyzable complexes of phrasings, articulations, dynamic and agogic nuances and internal textural balances that more generally differentiate one performance of a given piece from another.

Hermeneutics – in philosophy but also in other contexts – is the theory of interpretation or understanding. Any hermeneutic enterprise concerned with written-down music must begin with the notation – the ‘alphabet’ of signs – used in the score. Establishing an authoritative text from sources such as the autograph, manuscript copies, printed scores, orchestral parts – with or without alterations by the composer or his first performers – proof corrections, letters from the composer and verbal descriptions of early performances is a matter of textual criticism and scholarship.

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