Klarinet Archive - Posting 000037.txt from 2006/05
From: "Tony Pay" <tony.p@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] Grand Duo
Date: Thu, 04 May 2006 20:07:52 -0400
Dan Leeson wrote:
>> After arriving at a clean slate, and being deterred from muddying
the waters with Pamela's ideas, Lori is then advised that things that
Carl Baermann might have remembered about what his father did, plus
his own thoughts are all worth looking at. That is debatable.
>> And 1-2-3, one gets back into a hodgepodge of ideas of uncertain
authority and possibly questionable value.>>
I then wrote:
>> The thing is, Weber collaborated with Baermann, and they actually
wrote one piece together. Sometimes Weber is quite sketchy, and we
know that Baermann decorated some of the material. If you have a
sense of how the harmonic language works, you incorporate such
embellishment into your performance in a way that doesn't undermine
the strength of what Weber wrote. Some of the dynamics, taken
literally, do undermine that strength, and limit your choices.>>
I want to say just a little bit more about this.
*Of course* it would be nice if we could always have 'a clean slate'
and just deal with what some genius composer wrote. Sometimes we may
get close to that, when such a composer controls a situation in which
their notation is particularly explicit -- but more often we have to
deal with a murky situation in which such clear choices fail in
obvious ways.
Such a situation exists with Weber. We have a sketchy autograph, and
an overly edited part representing what his closest collaborator did,
and what he might therefore have expected as an outcome of the
performance of his autograph.
I claim that we need to look at both of these pieces of evidence, and
weigh them in the balance of our own response.
Of course, we cannot do this if we have no expertise in performance,
and no expertise in the style of the composer as related to the
background of the style he was responding to. (That constitutes my
beef with Pamela Weston.)
We cannot understand, for example, how to play the bar-by-bar slurs of
the Brahms first sonata if we do not understand that Brahms was
writing in an environment in which long-line sostenuto was beginning
to be the norm. By writing those repetitive slurs, he was
*correcting* the dismissal of the barline, insisting that, for his
music, the barline and its negation by the notation of phrasing was an
important expressive device.
So, going back to Weber, we need to understand what he expected from
his performers -- in particular, from Baermann.
But, to understand *Baermann*, we need to understand the classical
background of Weber. If we just play Baermann's markings with modern
eyes, we miss that he was writing against a current musical
sensibility that, for example, understood the function of the
appoggiatura. (Someone who understands how appoggiaturas work, as
accented notes outside the harmony resolving to consonance, doesn't
play Baermann's editions in the same way that a naive modern college
student would.)
So, unfortunately, we need both bits -- Weber's original, and
Baermann's edition -- plus an understanding of how they interact.
What's great about the Henle editions is that they provide both of
these bits, and rightly leave the responsibility for judging the
balance between them to the performer.
What's *not* great about Pamela Weston is that she obscures any
possible solution, because she has not even a notion of the problem.
Tony
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