These 6 classes take as a basic assumption the idea that we should strive to play the music of all periods in a way that  each composer would have wished. They examine the evidence for what we have come to call “Historically Informed Performance” (HIP) It’s the term many of us use instead of the misleading word “Authenticity”. We can never be genuinely authentic, but we can all try to be relevant by using the available historical evidence.

In the 1960s the medical world started a big debate about whether the best research was really being used in the treatment of patients. The new thinking was called “Evidence-Based Medicine” and it replaced the rather alarming old reliance on “tradition”.

At exactly the same period  a remarkably similar question began to be asked by some of us in the musical world. Historically Informed Practice is, in effect, Evidence Based Music, like Evidence Based Medicine. We wanted evidence for how to play music of the past in a way its composers would have recognised.

As conductors we are offered  an immense inheritance of astonishing music, written over a period of 400 years by incredibly gifted people. Personally I have always supposed that we have an artistic, and indeed a moral, duty to perform it, not only as well, but as suitably as we possibly can.

With living composers decisions about performance are easy. We can talk to them, or ring them up. I personally knew Britten and Tippett, Vaughan Williams and Nicholas Maw, Luciano Berio and Wolfgang Rihm. I have been in the same room as Stravinsky, Walton, and Hindemith. But as we look further back through history we very quickly run out of that personal contact. Then we have to use research instead. Even 19th Century music was not necessarily performed as we often hear it today. And the 18th and 17th centuries are yet more unfamiliar, but equally fascinating, countries to explore.

Approaching music of the past, two very different possible paths confront us. One is simply to follow the traditions of our teachers and immediate forbears,- to presume that some sort of “tradition” is still valid. The other is to look at the evidence of performance practice at the time of each composer, and to search for what they themselves, and their audiences, expected to hear.

I was brought up in the 1940s and 50s, on the first path.  Lots of very impressive conductors seemed to know what they were doing. Surely that must be how the music goes?   But by the 1960s I was getting uncomfortable with the gap between many of those conductors’ interpretations and what I saw in the scores I was studying. Could it be right to play a Beethoven slow movement at under half the speed that the composer prescribed? Does a large heavyweight orchestra really suit the Classical precision of Haydn and Mozart? Did Brahms think of himself as writing “Romantic” music, or was it just “modern”? Did Mahler want his already highly detailed instructions wildly exaggerated?

It was with the Baroque that we began. Along with the usual repertoire of Brahms and Tchaikovsky I was much involved at that time with Early Baroque (Monteverdi and Schütz), Middle Baroque (Lully and Vivaldi), and Late Baroque (Bach and Handel). I came to realise that poor J.S. Bach for instance was weighted down with all sorts of misunderstood “tradition” and needed to be dug out alive. Earlier composers than that didn’t even have existing traditions.

Luckily, just at that time, quite a few of my friends were experimenting with historical instruments,- especially since modern ones seemed somewhat alien to the Baroque.

The use of these instruments proved a real breakthrough. The music sounded sweeter and less pressurised. It became easier to follow the instructions of theorists like Quantz, Bach’s son C.P.E. Bach, and a host of others, who explained about pure tone, dance, phraseing, and gesture. This was a relatively straightforward progress, but a great success with the musical public.

Most people assumed that our researches would cease at 1750, with the death of J.S.Bach. But, after several years of pleasurable Baroqueing, I and others began to wonder how Haydn and Mozart would sound on what were  in fact the same stringed instruments, and very similar wind  and brass. After all, the Baroque and Classical styles were close together in time; Haydn was already 18 when Bach died.

Our experiments with Haydn and Mozart were positive, indeed thrilling. Speeds, balances and sound made sense to us as never before.  The success of these experiments led us inexorably forward into the 19th century, with stunning  Beethoven for a starting point. You may have heard the set of symphonies I recorded with the London Classical Players in the 1980s. They caused a sensation at the time and have been available in stores ever since.

As we got used to each new period, and found much to delight us, our curiosity led us to continue ever further. As we moved forward we were bowled over by the results. From the sources we learned how to play each style more appropriately, adapting our playing methods all the time,- just as players and conductors themselves must have done during the 18th and 19th centuries.

So on we marched through Berlioz, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner, and eventually Mahler. It was an extraordinary journey, in which we often felt we were hearing works as if for the first time.

Some listeners and critics found our work upset what they are used to, and thought we were wrong to try. But we were suspicious of what they were used to.

So let’s return to why we wanted to upset the apple cart in the first place. Why was it that performances had changed so much over time? Why did we feel we had to  risk our careers by spilling those apples all over the street?  The short answer is Chinese Whispers (Telephone in the States). You know, the party game where a message is passed from person to person, inevitably changing as it goes?

In the 18th century there was no repertoire; people just played new music. Haydn heard very few of his symphonies more than once. But, starting with Beethoven, an accepted repertoire gradually began to accrue: a bit of Spohr, a Rossini Overture or two, a Mendelssohn Symphony, and so on.

As this repertoire continued to be repeated, its performance gradually changed with the times. And sometimes quite noticeably:  Mozart rescored  Handel Oratorios, to bring them up to date. Wagner, with his vivid subjective imagination, looked for constant elasticity of tempo. Mahler rewrote all Schumann’s Symphonies to “improve” them. One way and another an old style gradually gave way to a new.

Tempi also changed with the taste of the times,- even Beethoven’s for him all-important  metronome marks were ignored.  In the 20th Century things became yet more extreme, with a new permanent vibrato complicating the scene, and the arrival of grandiose concepts like Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism. Any idea that there was an unbroken “tradition” since 1750, as some Viennese would still like to think, was clearly untenable.

I picture the relationship between score and performance as an elastic band which stretched, and stretched, until it finally broke around 1960. At that point I personally felt we simply had to start again; to follow, not our modern traditions, but the old traditions of each composer’s own time.

As soon as we realised that, we looked and found a mass of contemporary evidence staring us in the face. There were 18th and 19th century treatises on composition, violin, flute, voice, piano, trumpet and even conducting, all offering us the evidence we were looking for.

Evidence was the key to our progress,- a key that could unlock the rules of the game. And surprisingly, to our ears at least, this study of past traditions always seemed to make the music, not more ancient, but brighter, clearer, even perhaps more “modern”. As I said earlier it was an extremely exciting and rewarding journey;  and not just studious but also intensely creative.

This idea of using actual evidence, to me so obvious, seemed to scare some other conductors witless. How could they bring their all important “inspiration” to bear when they were hedged about with all these “rules”? But of course the answer was: very easily. The so-called rules don’t have to be a constraint. They can be tools. They help us to give performances that are historically relevant, so as not to makes fools of ourselves with ignorant stylistic mistakes. The tools can liberate us to be free of what Mahler called schlamperei,- lazy tradition. There’s still plenty of room for “inspiration”.

For in all performance two things are essential: Evidence and Fantasy. It makes me think of a circus ring where I once saw an artiste riding two horses, standing up with very long reins. His left foot was on a white horse and his right on a black. As they cantered around the ring the two horses rose and fell at different times and it was impressive to see how well the fellow balanced on them.

Think of the white horse as Fantasy, and the black as Evidence. For a perfect performance of a piece of music an accurate balance between the two is essential. Too much stress on evidence will be boring; but too much fantasy, without the balance of evidence, can easily betray a composer’s aims.

An interesting comment on this balance comes from George Henschel, first conductor of the Boston Symphony (1881), the London Symphony Orchestra (1886), and the Scottish National Orchestra (1893). In his memoirs he says that in his day he didn’t expect to “interpret” a symphony, just to play it as well as possible. Then along came Nikisch, he said,  and started to bring personal fantasy to bear. I guess it was again Wagner who had started this idea. After Wagner there were two distinct lines of conductors, subjective and objective, typified in the 20th century by Furtwängler the fantasist, and Toscanini the disciplinarian.

I find the Henschel statement particularly interesting. Of course music must come from the heart, must move us. But let’s not overplay the “interpretation’’. Keeping carefully within the evident conventions of each period, let’s just try to play the music as well as we can.

The vehicles for my own research were the London Baroque Players, the Schütz Choirs, and the London Classical Players, full of adventurous and idealistic young freelance musicians. When we reached Bruckner and Wagner it felt right to wind up what had in effect been a music research lab. No one in our Conservatoires taught us these things; we found them out for ourselves.

In the 1970s we had thought that the right instruments were crucial. Now it became clear that the revolution could take place more in the mind than in the instruments, and it was time to give modern orchestras the bulk of my attention.

So in my work with modern-instrument orchestras, I

gradually introduced the same tried and tested historical playing styles, and was pleased to discover that there was less resistance to them than I had expected.

Almost everything turned out to be transferable to the traditional orchestras of which I was Chief Conductor,  the Stuttgart Radio, the Salzburg Camerata, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and the Orchestra of St Lukes in New York. Even with the many orchestras where I was just a guest I often found plenty of interest among the musicians in what I was offering.

In whichever musical period I worked I developed a sort of matrix that I still find useful today. It can conveniently be thought of as The Six S’s:

SOURCES, SIZE, SEATING, SOUND, SPEED, STYLE

Here are some examples of the potential contents of these matrices:

SOURCES

One of the big surprises of our voyage has been to discover what a wealth of historical opinion exists for each period. There are theoretical texts, instrumental handbooks, autobiographies, reviews, letters, orchestra archives, newspaper articles, stage plans, and (in the 20th century) photos.

SIZE

Orchestra sizes varied enormously over 400 years. Early on only 1 instrument to a part was normal. Size increased during the Baroque period, but as late as 1780 Haydn was used to just 3 first violins in Esterhaza, although he was delighted later to meet 8 in London. What was crucial was the balance between strings and winds. When the Vienna Philharmonic moved into the Musikverein in 1870 they moved up from 8 to 12 first violins, but immediately doubled the woodwind. The modern tradition of 16 firsts and single wind is quite unhistorical, as well as impractical for balance.

SEATING

Early 18th century groups stood in a circle around the harpsichord. When they got a little bigger the first and second violins split right and left. All sorts of standing and seated arrangements followed, but the antiphonal violins remained constant, whether for Mozart, Brahms, or Mahler, with the trumpets and horns also often on two different sides. Cellos and Basses were usually placed as centrally as possible.

SOUND

some sources of all periods mention vibrato for solo strings as an ornament, but very often only to discourage its over-use. However until around 1920 its use in orchestras was distinctly frowned upon, because it upset the “noble cantilena” of the bow and the warm sound of the group. As late as 1904 (that’s in my father’s lifetime) Joachim was stating that if a soloist used vibrato all the time he would be “showing the world he cannot play the instrument”, and that vibrato was “a replacement when real feeling was missing”. The Vienna Phil didn’t vibrate until 1938. Mahler had been dead for nearly 40 years.

SPEED

In the Baroque era tempo was calculated from the metre and the smallest prevailing note-values. Italian tempo words were mainly used only to modify Tempi Ordinarii,- standard tempi. In the Classical period tempo words gradually began to imply speed connections. What those were is a study in itself, until the arrival of the mechanical metronome  made tempo more scientific.

In the Classical era speed indications of the Italian words were more “grouped together” than later on. Sure, Presto meant fast, but very slow tempi were almost unknown. Allegro (“Cheerful”) bordered on Allegretto; Andante (“Moving”) bordered on Adagio (“Easy”).

Today Haydn’s and Mozart’s Andante is the most misunderstood term, and is often played much too slowly. For some 18th century sources it meant “halfway between fast and slow”. For others it must move along so that it “kisses the skirts of Allegro“.

Likewise Adagio was just a relaxed Andante, not a really slow tempo. Lento means “Slow” in Italian, but that word never appears in Haydn and Mozart. Their music needs to move, to dance, not linger. Dance was how audiences felt about music. They all did it a lot.

In the 19th century too speeds need examining closely. With Beethoven the metronome makes the case obvious. But Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler all also require evidence-based attention.

STYLE

This term encompasses a lot of small, but very important details:

Bowing, Note length, Phraseing, Alla corda, Staccato and Portato, Slurring, Decoration, and Trills.

But out of all this material I guess the three crucial elements that inform all that I do in any period of music are Size, Sound, and Speed.

Endeavouring to be a useful conductor is a huge task: Repertoire, Technique, Balance, Harmony,- the list is endless. Have we really got time to fiddle about with all that HIP stuff? Well, you know my views. I think putting the music into its rightful context is a central, and vital duty. Once you’ve learnt a bit about it, it can come a normal part of preparing a score.

All those marvellous composers had strong views about how their music should go. Looking for evidence is more than a duty, it’s a joy.

In the following parts of the course I examine five periods of musical history. I pick some typical composers for each period, to make more particular what could become vague generalities.