Progetto Martha Argerich

Info

• Info 2010
• An existential view of music
• Grammy Award
• Modernity through the interpreter
• Music's gran señora
• The Spirit of Lugano
• Audiences and high society
• Pianists in Lugano
• On the radio

Modernity through the interpreter

Given the fact that the music most often performed in concert halls is the music of the past rather than that of the present, we may legitimately ask whether today's performers carry out their task at the same level as they did in previous decades. In the 1930s, for instance, composers such as Rachmaninoff, Bartók and Prokofiev were still active as interpreters, and in the '60s Stravinsky was still frequently conducting his own compositions - to indicate but a few of the most recent composers whose works have taken their places in the permanent repertoire and who were also interpreters of their own works - thereby forcing other performers to take into account not only the authors' aesthetic choices but also their performance practices. A bit further back we find a Debussy or a Saint-Saëns performing their own music. Brahms, too, was a first-rate pianist and thus became a reference-point for the interpretation of his works, as worthy of creating performing precedents as were the great performers of his day, such as (where Brahms's music was concerned) the violinist Joseph Joachim, with his celebrated career. But the composers who currently figure in concert organisations' season programmes are long dead. Composer-performers have disappeared from the concert stage and have given way to interpreters whose role as mediators has been legitimised. There is much discussion of this type of mediation, as a result of the creation of a system that has virtually blocked creative contemporaneousness, relegating music to the past and creating a timeless relationship to the greats of music history (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and so on), as if they, rather than today's composers (who are increasingly extraneous to the ways of feeling that we hold in common), were the centres of gravity of our expressive needs. In addition to the marketing tactics that foment this sort of polarisation (which is not to be found in the visual arts, for instance, whose contemporary practitioners still attract crowds to exhibitions in museums and galleries), surely part of the problem is attributable to the way in which contemporary music has adopted languages that have alienated it from the general public. This is not the proper place for discussing this matter; we must simply recognise that for the first time, performers are facing a new series of interpretive choices. Interest in re-establishing period performing practices - now commonly adopted with respect to Baroque music - is indicative of the overall situation. A century ago this problem did not exist, not because there were no musicological studies that could have directed performers towards different interpretative styles for the music of the past, but because that music was not perceived as a separate, historicised reality but rather as a legacy organically connected to and united with the contemporary music of the day. Mendelssohn's music reflects his familiarity with Bach, Brahms's reflects his familiarity with Beethoven, Reger's his familiarity with both Bach and Beethoven. In those days, mediation was more a function of the composers, through their creative aesthetic, than of performers. Today, in the absence of a shared compositional reference-point, it is no longer the composers who direct our listening habits (and certainly not composer-performers, of whom there is no longer a trace), but rather the performers, pure and simple, who, however, are experiencing a sort of disorientation. The reconstruction of period performance practices fills this vacuum, and it is not by chance that this method is no longer applied only to seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century music but - significantly - also to Mozart, Haydn and onward to Beethoven, Mendelssohn and even Brahms, as the various Brüggens, Harnoncourts, Norringtons and so on have demonstrated. Thus a paradox has been set up: on the one hand, the great names of those past epochs hold sway over current concert programmes and have been accepted by audiences as if they were part of today's world, a surrogate for the contemporary repertoire that no longer puts down roots; in effect, those names fill the vacuum left by modern music, which has become extraneous to modern existence. On the other hand, the performers who are called upon to act as mediators are increasingly aware of the conceptual aesthetic distance that separates them from us and that creates the problem of interpreting correctly. This is particularly clear where the piano is concerned: it has become a modern instrument, with a powerful, well-modulated sound, and this is not what it was at the outset. The occasional use of the "fortepiano" makes it obvious that modern performances impose a superstructure on those composers and that our consciousness projects onto them a dimension that is of our time, not of theirs. And whereas in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century an interest in the music of Bach and Handel was cultivated by Baron van Swieten, a pioneer of early music who commissioned Mozart to re-orchestrate Messiah and other works of the recent past so as to make them acceptable to new audiences, in recent times a developing historic conscience demands justifications for such changes and a level of cultural awareness that has led to clear-cut aesthetic distinctions.

If we look carefully, however, we will notice that the supposed resurrection of original performance practices depends less upon the application of interpretative norms drawn from treatises of the day (so-called musical philology) than upon models based on the aesthetics of twentieth-century music, which, through Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Milhaud and others detached itself from the exaggerated expressiveness of the previous century. In other words, the real change took place first at a compositional level, thanks above all to the "neo-classicism" of the 1920s and '30s as deliberately contrasted with previous ways of thinking; later, as a result of this type of music, interpreters were induced to adopt constructivist styles and manners that attempted to make use of the energetic aspects of a work rather than its psychology (i.e., its emotional underpinnings), as had been the case with the Romantic viewpoint. Dynamic extremes, the striving for the material effects of sound, and the increase in speed are manifestations of this trend, which not only guides interpreters of Baroque repertoire in readings that we stubbornly continue to call "philological" (whereas in fact the music from that distant past is being updated), but also influences even those who interpret nineteenth-century repertoire on the same instruments that that century handed down to us (especially the "grand" piano) through a type of research that subjects them to various pressures.

Martha Argerich is a supreme example of this, thanks to the structural sense of her interpretative concept. In her readings of a Prokofiev or a Shostakovich - whose works are characterised by geometrical musculature - she brings out types of development that allow for no underlings, no tributes to the religion of sound that is always restricted to physical feeling, to the pulsation of the sound-matter. References to her "savage" and "explosive" way of attacking the keyboard resort too often to descriptions of her "lion-like", "demonic" temperament, as if these were manifestations of her individuality. The truth is that the impact she makes, the sometimes mad impulsiveness and the overwhelming rhythm of her performances are the result, above all, of her being wholly a woman of the twentieth century - a century that, thanks to urbanisation and the multiplication of interpersonal relationships, transformed not only the external landscape but also mankind's internal landscape.

Martha Argerich is the incarnation of this type of sensitivity, and this makes her not only the perfect interpreter of the aforementioned modern composers but also one who is finely attuned to the nineteenth-century repertoire - an artist capable of reproducing that repertoire in a way that can extend its reach to the present day. In listening to her Beethoven or her Schumann, we are not merely going over the well-trodden terrain of past epochs through the poetic spell that she manages to cast over us; we also perceive the aspects of those works that connect their aesthetic roots to later compositional developments. She leaves behind the passionate outpourings of Romantic feeling, the pallid tremors of Decadence and the gossamer haze of Impressionism, and she opens our consciousness to the recouping of musical expression's structural values.

This is why we may claim that if contemporary music has to a certain extent been banished, we are not necessarily witnessing, in our concert halls, only a return to the past. We are, rather, re-reading the past in accordance with forms that artists such as Martha Argerich are able to provide within this complicated dialectic; and this re-reading makes up for other things. Contemporary composers seem to have lost the ability to dominate the stage, but contemporary aesthetics have in any case won, thanks to the maturity of great interpreters who have assimilated them and who breathe life into them through their modern readings of the masterpieces of the past.

Carlo Piccardi