At the end of January, I attended a “Mozart on Period Instruments” concert at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. It set me to thinking about the new audience that in recent years has been created for old Mozart and the new sense of the musical past—and perhaps of the past itself—that this new and younger audience seems to be seeking. The program, part of the Lincoln Center commitment to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Mozart’s death by playing every note he wrote, did not contain any of Mozart’s famous works. There were two sets of piano variations, K.179 and K.265, the latter using as the theme a tune we know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; the Fantasy for Piano, K.396; the Sonata for Violin and Piano, K.305; two solo piano concertos, K.37 and K.40; and the Concerto for Three Pianos, subtitled “Lodron,” K.242.
The mise en scène for this program was provided by the audience.
The main performers were the three renowned fortepianists Melvyn Tan, Steven Lubin, and Malcolm Bilson. All three have made many well-received fortepiano recordings, both as soloists and with small and larger ensembles. The Singapore-born Tan and the American Lubin have each recorded all the Beethoven piano—or should it be fortepiano?—concertos, Tan with Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players for EMI, and Lubin with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music for L’Oiseau Lyre. The American Bilson has recorded all the Mozart piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists for Deutsche Grammophon. Each of the three has made many other recordings as well, and their appearance on one program provided an opportunity to sample the fortepiano phenomenon at what one must assume is its best. The keyboard players were assisted in the concerted works by the American violinist Daniel Stepner, who served as the concertmaster of the tiny accompanying orchestra, which was made up of six violins, two violas, two cellos, one bass, two oboes, two horns, and two trumpets. Three different fortepianos were used. Each was a recent copy of an instrument of Mozart’s time. Each fortepianist had his favorite instrument, which he used when the work being played called, as did all but one on the program, for a single keyboard; in the three-keyboard concerto, the fortepianists changed places and pianos with each other between the work’s three movements.
The mise en scène for this program was provided by the audience. For this concert, Tully Hall was perhaps three-quarters full, though I was unable to see how many people there were upstairs. The audience seemed quite young, with the average age being perhaps thirty-five, rather than the fifty-plus one sees attending New York’s great halls for traditional recital, chamber-music, and orchestral programs. Perhaps I was in a sentimental mood, but it seemed to me that I saw a remarkable number of couples obviously in love with each other. Then, too, the audience seemed plainly dressed, as compared with a normal concert audience, and in general seemed quiet, thoughtful, and almost shy. With their humble mien, the “Mozart on Period Instruments” audience seemed to provide a stark contrast to the self-assured and perhaps even arrogant bearing of the concert public that I, at least, have known all my life. The audience response to the performers was warm, both in welcoming their coming on the stage and in approving their playing at the conclusion of each piece; the conversation between pieces and during the intermission seemed subdued and, when I overheard discussions of the music, highly respectful.
I am afraid that I don’t have anything very enthusiastic to say about the performances. I have always thought the sound of the fortepiano to resemble nothing so much as that of an old upright piano, better maintained and certainly in better tune than most uprights ever are, but sounding like an upright nonetheless. The fortepiano, as a transitional instrument between the plucked harpsichord and the hammer-struck modern piano, has, in slow passages, a plonking, short-lived timbre; in fast passages the instrument tends to sound like a whole beehive suddenly excited. As on the harpsichord, pitch definition is poor; when many notes are played together or in rapid sequence, the exact pitch-quality of each note remains in doubt even to a listener who knows the piece being played or is following the performance with the music. Furthermore, because the fortepiano has a wooden, rather than a metal, frame on which its strings are stretched, the carrying power of the instrument is small. This diminished carrying power, when allied to the fortepiano’s short tone, guarantees that even excitingly played performances will remain prevailingly small-scale.
Thus every element of the evening—the program, the audience, and the performances—was modest in scale.
Thus every element of the evening—the program, the audience, and the performances—was modest in scale. Of course, there were differences between the fortepianists and between the fortepianos. Melvyn Tan seemed to have the most flair in his playing, Steven Lubin seemed to have the fleetest fingers, and Malcolm Bilson seemed to be, in contrast to his two colleagues, a rather messy executant. None of the fortepianists—Tan in the Twelve Variations on a Minuet by J. C. Fischer, K.179, and in the Concerto in D major, K.40; Lubin in the Variations on “Ah vous dirai-je, maman,” K.265, and the Concerto in F major, K.37; Bilson in the Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major, K.305, and the Fantasy in C minor, K.396; and all of them together in the Triple Concerto in F major, K. 242—seemed able to communicate very much drama or excitement in his playing; like the music itself, the playing seemed to burn at a fairly tepid temperature.
But it must be said that each musician’s playing was not without individuality or a frequently interesting turn of phrase. But for my taste, what stifled the merits that these players undoubtedly possess was the basically unacceptable generic sound of the fortepiano. I liked best the sound of Lubin’s instrument, a copy of an original Anton Walter fortepiano (or so I gathered from Bilson’s not terribly well-projected stage announcement); unfortunately, what Lubin’s instrument gained in a rather more pleasing and longer-toned treble it lost in even further reduced definition in the bass. Sadly, whichever fortepiano was being used, the instrument simply failed to provide—at least in a modern and reasonably large concert hall—a vivid and pleasurable listening experience.
The orchestral playing was up to the usual low level of so-called authentic performances. Daniel Stepner, the concertmaster of the orchestra and the violinist in the sonata, managed to produce a tight, almost vibrato-less sound, and was frequently drowned out (in the sonata) by the hardly massive sound of Bilson’s fortepiano. The string playing in the orchestra was suffused overall by a certain wheezing quality, and the wind and brass playing ranged from acceptable to shaky. Rapid passages were frequently not together, and the general effect, aside from a virtuous air of authenticity—all the orchestral players, save the cellists, stood—was one of under-rehearsal.
For most of my life I have been a pianist, and after the concert I gave a good deal of thought to the reasons for the evolution of the modern piano. The piano that we know now, of which the Steinway is certainly the finest example, reached its present form sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century. It had been developed throughout the century to become an ever louder, ever more brilliant instrument. Those responsible for the inventions that made this development possible were responding to the demands of the extraordinary music written for keyboard performance from the time of Beethoven on. The piano, like the pianist, was asked to play more and more notes, to create always greater washes of sound—and to keep distinct, when the composer and the performer so wished, each note and each harmony. The piano as it exists today is a remarkable achievement in its beauty and brilliance of tone, in its ability to produce both very loud and very soft sounds and every dynamic level in between. Like the great Italian string instruments of earlier centuries, the modern piano seems incapable either of improvement or further development.
Despite the greatness of the modern piano, it has come under extraordinary attack in recent years.
Despite the greatness of the modern piano, it has come under extraordinary attack in recent years. First Bach, the foundation of our classical tradition, was removed from the mighty piano’s purview, and only the twanging and tinkling harpsichord was judged proper for Bach performance. Then Mozart and Haydn were given over to the fortepiano in the interest of a smaller-scale, more refined conception of the music. And then even Beethoven, who kept demanding more from each new kind of piano that he tried than it could possibly give him, was given over, at first experimentally and now increasingly, to a later version of the fortepiano that one had always thought the composer yearned to see replaced by something more sturdy and powerful.
It was possible to suspect this supercession of the modern piano by its predecessors as long ago as the 1960s. It was then that started the vogue for the Steinway made in Germany over the Steinway made in New York. The German Steinway, with a faster and more responsive action, and hammers made of wool of a different origin from that of its American counterpart, sounded rather old-fashioned: shorter-toned, less powerful and brilliant, more mellow, and altogether more gentle; for the most “musical” European artists, the German Steinway was a more artistic medium, an instrument palpably closer to the nineteenth-century composers who wrote their greatest works for the piano. Indeed, with the wisdom of hindsight, one can see the vogue for the German Steinway as a transitional development— backward—connecting the modern Steinway to the old fortepiano.
What explains this turn of artists, and with them their audience, toward older-sounding instruments, played in older-sounding ways, for the performance of classic music? I think the answer to this complex question must be found in a deep revulsion on the part of contemporary musical audiences for the ambiance of contemporary life. It is widely recognized that taste for a particular kind of music is more than a simply aesthetic decision to prefer one kind of art to another; taste for a particular kind of music is in fact a choice of an entire world, a universe of existence and feeling of which music is both a reflection and an embodiment. To choose avant-garde music is to choose a particular kind of life and what is now so grossly called a life style; to choose an older music is to opt for an older way of life. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the choice of the new music—actually called Zukunftsmusik (the music of the future)—was a choice of the future in life as against the present and the past; in our own time, the choice of “Mozart on Period Instruments” is a choice, however unconsciously made and however dimly comprehended, of a former world now perceived to have been more gracious, kinder, gentler—in a word, better—than ours. This is not just a rejection of contemporary music, though it certainly is that. Even more, it is a rejection of contemporary life, a rejection that any number of economic, political, and social realities make impossible overtly but that art makes possible covertly.
The past two years have seen a veritable orgy of Mozartomania.
The past two years have seen a veritable orgy of Mozartomania. In Europe, America, and the Orient, Mozart has become the hottest of all musical commodities. It is tempting to see in this almost absurd concentration on one composer’s admittedly great body of work a cynical manipulation of the market by sinister commercial forces ready to make a buck out of anything, even wonderful music. There is a market in music, and there undoubtedly are people making money out of its every twist and turn. But markets are not simply about manipulation; they are also about, and are reflections of, our deepest thoughts and hopes.
And so what seems to me so important about the phenomenon represented by the Mozart concert I attended at Tully Hall was the news the concert conveyed to me about the decision young people—certainly people younger than I—have already made about their preferred direction of life. We must take very seriously the undoubted fact that it is not the old and stodgy among us who have chosen older ways of performing older music. It is the young, and in so doing they are proclaiming, however subtly, that the world in which they now find themselves is profoundly unsatisfactory and unsatisfying.
It is easy to tell the new audience for Mozart that it is impossible to turn back any clock, whether artistic or human. What is very difficult to tell them is that their choice is wrong. In art, as in life, the choice of one’s past is the most important statement one can make about the world. What young music lovers have to tell us about the music in itself is not clear, but what they have to say tells us much about themselves, and about our future.
