Klarinet Archive - Posting 000098.txt from 1998/11

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Fingering Help ... etc.
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 07:34:57 -0500

This thread makes me keep thinking of a saying attributed to Beethoven. He
is supposed to have told his piano students, "Do not be the prisoner of the
score!"

>However...I played the Liszt last spring. With the conductor's
concurrence, the
>clarinets played soft staccato eighths notes , and left the "ducka-ducka"
>stuff to the flutes. It's not that we clarinets couldn't play the passage,
>it just sounded a lot better this way!

>> Ah, but now you have offended the composer by not following his
>> instructions EXACTLY! Poor Franz will be burning out the bearings in his
>> grave!

(and so on)

I've never gone deeply into musicology, but isn't it true that most of the
scores we use are extensively edited and emended, and that in quite a few
cases it's uncertain what the original was like, because it's lost?
Improvisation and ad-lib ornamentation were expected during the baroque and
earlier periods. Virtuosi of the romantic period used to take great
liberties with tempi and phrasing, and use rubato incessantly (I'm thinking
of pianists mostly here). Records by of the last survivors of that era,
Rachmaninov. show that he certainly did. And as a performer, wasn't Franz
Liszt himself reported to be far from slavish in the interpretation of his
own and other people's work?

Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>

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