Yuppp · 2026-08-11 · 0 helpful
The odd thing about the authenticity claim is that its most serious advocates gave it up thirty years ago and the practice built upon it has flourished ever since. Nobody who works with period instruments now argues in public that a performance on gut strings at A=415 recovers what an eighteenth-century audience heard. The claim is understood to have been a rhetorical device, and one that did considerable damage to those who took it literally. Yet the orchestras multiply, the recordings sell, the conservatoires teach the technique, and funding bodies continue to award grants on the strength of a scholarly apparatus whose animating proposition has been withdrawn.
Gunnar Weisz's essay of 1988 did most of the withdrawing. His argument was that the movement's characteristic sound — lean, quick, unsentimental, the phrasing subordinated to a steady pulse — corresponded to nothing much in the eighteenth century and to a great deal in the twentieth. It was the aesthetic of Stravinsky and of the modernist objection to interpretative licence, projected backwards and supplied with a genealogy. What the movement had accomplished, on his account, was not the recovery of an old style but the invention of a new one, which is a considerable achievement and an entirely different one.
The documentary basis is thinner than the confidence with which it is deployed. Treatises survive in quantity, but a treatise is a prescriptive document written for amateurs by an author with a position to defend, and treatises contradict one another on nearly every point that matters: how much vibrato, how much rhythmic freedom, whether an appoggiatura is long or short. Quantz and Leopold Mozart disagree, and both are cited as authorities by performers who take opposite decisions. The surviving instruments have meanwhile been rebuilt, restrung and re-set so often that the sound of a 1720 oboe is a modern reconstruction of a modern hypothesis.
The defence now offered is pragmatic, and it is a good deal stronger. An instrument with a short sustain and an uneven scale will not permit the long legato line a modern player takes for granted; it obliges shorter phrases, more articulation, a different relation between one note and the next. The constraint is real whether or not it is historical, and it has produced performances that a great many listeners find more alive than the alternatives. Nobody has to believe anything at all about 1720 for the oboe to behave as it does.
Taken seriously, though, the pragmatic defence dissolves the institution it was offered to protect. If the value lies in the constraint rather than in the recovery, there is no reason to stop at instruments that happen to have existed, and no reason for a conservatoire to teach ornamentation out of treatises rather than out of taste. More awkwardly, there is no argument left for the money. A grant to reconstruct an eighteenth-century bow is defensible as scholarship; with the eighteenth century removed it is a subsidy to one aesthetic among several, and would have to be defended as such.
Gunnar Weisz's essay of 1988 did most of the withdrawing. His argument was that the movement's characteristic sound — lean, quick, unsentimental, the phrasing subordinated to a steady pulse — corresponded to nothing much in the eighteenth century and to a great deal in the twentieth. It was the aesthetic of Stravinsky and of the modernist objection to interpretative licence, projected backwards and supplied with a genealogy. What the movement had accomplished, on his account, was not the recovery of an old style but the invention of a new one, which is a considerable achievement and an entirely different one.
The documentary basis is thinner than the confidence with which it is deployed. Treatises survive in quantity, but a treatise is a prescriptive document written for amateurs by an author with a position to defend, and treatises contradict one another on nearly every point that matters: how much vibrato, how much rhythmic freedom, whether an appoggiatura is long or short. Quantz and Leopold Mozart disagree, and both are cited as authorities by performers who take opposite decisions. The surviving instruments have meanwhile been rebuilt, restrung and re-set so often that the sound of a 1720 oboe is a modern reconstruction of a modern hypothesis.
The defence now offered is pragmatic, and it is a good deal stronger. An instrument with a short sustain and an uneven scale will not permit the long legato line a modern player takes for granted; it obliges shorter phrases, more articulation, a different relation between one note and the next. The constraint is real whether or not it is historical, and it has produced performances that a great many listeners find more alive than the alternatives. Nobody has to believe anything at all about 1720 for the oboe to behave as it does.
Taken seriously, though, the pragmatic defence dissolves the institution it was offered to protect. If the value lies in the constraint rather than in the recovery, there is no reason to stop at instruments that happen to have existed, and no reason for a conservatoire to teach ornamentation out of treatises rather than out of taste. More awkwardly, there is no argument left for the money. A grant to reconstruct an eighteenth-century bow is defensible as scholarship; with the eighteenth century removed it is a subsidy to one aesthetic among several, and would have to be defended as such.