László Somfai

The Genius of the Place

The Fifth Hungarian Haydn Society Festival
Esterházy Palace, Fertőd-Eszterháza,
1-10 September 2002 

 

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In the workshop: period instruments and the rhetoric of performance

An inspirational workshop atmosphere pervades Fertoýd-Eszterháza in a multitude of ways. To go into greater detail, I would use the example of Tom Beghin, one of the artists making his debut there this year - and the participant who was responsible for most of what was new. Beghin is a 35-year-old pianist, a Belgian, who completed his fortepiano studies with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University, went on to earn a doctorate, and is currently a professor at UCLA. At the invitation of the Festival's programming committee, he undertook, first of all, to bring instruments. As a result, this was the first occasion on which a quartet of instruments ideal for Haydn's keyboard music had been assembled: copies of a c. 1760 clavichord and an Italian-style harpsichord of the late eighteenth-century, a copy of a Viennese-action fortepiano (the Haydn Festival's own instrument) and, lastly, an English-action piano-forte made in 1798. Beghin played on all four in the concerts. The single-manual harpsichord (the prime instrument for Haydn's keyboard music in all the works written up to the end of the 1770s) made a first outing in an early trio and a concerto during the Festetics String Quartet's chamber evening. In the first half of his solo recital, in the palace's ground-floor Sala Terrena, Beghin chose the amazingly intimate sound of the clavichord to perform Sonatas No. 44 in G minor and No. 32 in B minor, amongst other masterpieces, whilst for the second half, now back in the Music Hall on the first floor, he presented three sonatas from the 1780s on the Viennese-action fortepiano. The English master instrument from Longman, Clementi & Co. featured in a trio evening during which three of Haydn's grandiose 'London' Piano Trios (in C major, E major and E flat major) were played. I have been attending Haydn conferences, festivals and special keyboard meetings for a long time now, but this was the first time I was able to hear all four authentic Haydn instruments played by one and the same soloist. It is a mark of the workshop feel that Beghin himself is still undecided as to whether the instruments he tried out here will be those used in the forthcoming recording of the complete set of Haydn keyboard sonatas.
It has become widely accepted that period instruments are key prerequisites but no guarantee in themselves for bringing Haydn's music to life 'in the flesh' - for us to believe that, of all the things art is able to express in music, what we are hearing here and now is the finest, most exquisite, most intense statement that can be made about human emotions. To achieve this sort of authenticity, greater weight than before may be given to an aspect of performance that is nowadays being explored under the heading of the rhetoric of music, in some cases from the angle of interpretation, in others from that of theory. Tom Beghin is an expert in both approaches: he has published an essay, organised an international symposium, and is now planning a book on the subject; first and foremost, however, he makes known what we should know (and dare) about music performance - and about the solo keyboard genre in Haydn's oeuvre in particular - in his own interpretations. The starting-point of his interpretative approach is that compositions of Haydn's era stand in very close relation to high-flown speech, a rhetoric that rests on a long tradition of oratory that was still being taught in schools during the eighteenth century. Put in more musical terms, it is a matter of elements of performance that lie beyond the notes on the pages, of freedom of interpretation. This is not just a matter of musicians smuggling into their playing agogics that derive from modern music taste, but of their knowing and daring to apply tricks of the rhetorical trade that go back to Cicero in a way that of course still has its effect. Now, one may argue whether that requires being able to specify the different rhetorical figures, but it is hard to dispute that a rhetorically con-sidered and constructed performance has power and projection; every sound gains sense, even the individual decorations and variations built into repeats have their clear function.
Of course, virtually every one of the musicians taking part at the Eszterháza Haydn Festival senses, and in some way cultivates, a rhetoric in the eighteenth-century spirit. Truly stunning in that sense was the flute solo by Ildikó Kertész in the Adagio cantabile of Symphony No. 24 in D major - as good as a movement in a flute concerto - in the first of the concerts given by the Orfeo Orchestra. In her performance of the first set of German lieder, Anna Korondi made the most of every shade and underlying meaning of the texts to build up a riveting declamation that marshalled big contrasts and also took on board a dramatic thrust. Amongst the solo pieces given by her fortepianist partner, Katalin Komlós - who over the years has done more than anybody else with her coaching to win a respected and crowd-pleasing place in the repertoire for Haydn's German lieder and English songs, his vocal trios and quartets with piano - gave an eloquent example of the judicious exploitation of rhetoric in her interpretations with a particularly fine, intimate performance of the F minor Variations. And in their own more restrained manner, Simon Standage from England and Jaap Schröder from Holland, the two foreign chamber-music violinists at this year's festival, showed themselves to be adepts of every trick in the rhetorical book.

Star-studded hours of chamber music

If I were forced to name the most inspiring concerts that were most in keeping with the spirit of Haydn, I would have to plump for two evenings of chamber music. The Salomon String Quartet, likewise from England, performed three particularly interesting string quartets - Op. 20 No. 4 in D major, Op. 33 No. 3 in C (The Bird), and Op. 74 No. 3 in G minor (The Rider) - with captivating richness of detail and matchless rhythmic vitality, despite the fact that, with their regular second violinist being ill, a young English colleague had to step in at short notice to save the performance from cancellation. The only rehearsal time they had was on the spot, to the pleasure of many, because those rehearsals in the Music Hall of the palace amounted to a postgraduate seminar in Haydn interpretation. Possibly even more miraculous was the trio recital given by an ad hoc grouping of a Dutch violinist, an English cellist (Jennifer Ward-Clarke) and a Belgian-American fortepianist, representing essentially three different generations of period music performers. Beghin took the lead, in accordance with the qualities of the genre (these piano trios were justly called accompanied clavier sonatas), but Jaap Schröder's violin playing was an additional delight. Even amongst period-music gurus, few are capable of the perfection of elastic bowing technique and finely honed articulation of the 77-year-old Schröder, who can call on boundless experience as a soloist, string quartet first violin or stand-up leader of a chamber orchestra in both Baroque and Classical music.

 

László Somfai
is Director of the Bartók Archives in Budapest and Professor of Musicology at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. His books include The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn (1995) and Béla Bartók: Composition, Concept, and Autograph Sources (1996).