In 1970 or thereabouts I bought a vinyl recording of Beethoven's Dances and was particularly fond of the "Eleven Modlinger Dances, WoO17". About twenty years later I found that, according to the Beethoven Compendium, they are now regarded as spurious. They have been excluded from both Complete Beethoven compilations but I do have a Naxos CD which includes them but expresses doubts about their authenticity.
Anyway, the point I am making is that since I discovered that they were not by Beethoven, I have hardly played them. And why should this be? The music which I once enjoyed hasn't changed so why should my perception of it do so?
Today, I came across this article which really sums it up. I will now dig out my Naxos CD and play WoO17 .........................
MUSIC VIEW; LISTENERS ARE CAPTIVES OF MUSICAL HISTORY By DONAL HENAHAN
Published: April 13, 1986
The annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Anonymous Art will now come to order. The first order of business is your secretary's report on this season's concerts, many of which featured ''blind'' performances by musicians, both famous and unknown, seated behind screens. As specified in our bylaws, no work was identified beforehand either by composer or title and no program notes were provided. Listeners were left entirely on their own, without the crutches of appreciation provided at most concerts. Understandably, many of the randomly selected auditors at this season's concerts found the uncertainty unbearable and left in anger or agitation. Others stayed to the end but went away in apparent confusion, refusing to fill out the Association's brief questionnaire about the quality of the music and the proficiency of the players. Only a few eccentrics, stimulated by the idea of listening to music in a historical vacuum, dared to offer opinions. If there is no objection, their thoughts will be entered into the minutes. . . .
The foregoing paragraph, as shrewd readers will have guessed, is fanciful. To my knowledge, no one has incorporated anything like the A.A.A.A. in the state of New York or elsewhere, even though the idea of anonymous art is worth any listener's toying with now and then as an exercise in esthetics. Why, for instance, should we care who composed Mozart's Requiem? Or Verdi's? Or Faure's? Does it really make a work better or worse to know the name of its author? If we are moved by the mass that bears Mozart's name, should it make a difference that much of it was composed by Mozart's pupil, F. X. Sussmayr? For those of us who have been trained to believe it should, it does. Innocence has been lost and unless civilization is wiped away it is not going to be regained. We have reached the stage in Western culture where it would not be possible for music by an unknown composer to be accepted as great art. Wouldn't the fact that the master could not be identified disqualify it, ipso facto, from masterpiece status? We are prisoners of history who have lost the ability, if human listeners ever had it, to hear a new piece naively, for its musical impact alone.
Well then, what about the work whose pedigree is merely diluted or muddled? Sometimes, just often enough to keep one wondering if anonymous art may be possible after all, the public will take to its heart a work whose authenticity is partly questionable. Although purists may deplore their lack of discrimination, most listeners accept the Mozart Requiem in full, overlooking the sometimes clumsy completions by his student. Operagoers learned to love ''Boris Godunov,'' with its colorful Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrations, long before scholars succeeded in forcing impresarios to produce the work with Mussorgsky's own rugged scoring. On the other hand, in some works the retoucher's skills are simply not accepted as necessary by the public. None of the many completions of Schubert's ''Unfinished'' has taken the place of the world's most famous musical torso, and probably never will. It seems we would rather have the fragmentary Schubert, with all its Romantic resonances, than one more complete symphony, no matter how successfully the completion might work in theory.
For musicologists and other art historians, it can be embarrassing when hard-earned assumptions and preconceptions suddenly fall away. There was a time when something identified as Beethoven's ''Jena'' Symphony turned up now and then at concerts and was discussed seriously - or as seriously, anyway, as his ''Battle Symphony.'' At least half a dozen 78-rpm recordings of the ''Jena'' were issued, a couple of which survived into the LP era. When scholars finally persuaded themselves that the symphony was not by Beethoven, the piece simply disappeared from concert programs. Record catalogues now do not admit that it ever existed. And yet, the ''Jena'' is the same work now that it was before being proclaimed spurious Beethoven. A similar fate overtook Haydn's ''Toy'' Symphony after it was discovered to be by someone else, probably Leopold Mozart.
The sad litany could be extended almost indefinitely. Whatever happened to all those works by unknowns that unscrupulous publishers formerly attributed to Haydn? To the Wenzel Matiegka trio for flute, violin and guitar that used to be attributed to Schubert, who merely made it into a quartet by adding a cello part? To the ''Wiegenlied'' that Elisabeth Schumann and many other singers recorded in the belief that it was by Mozart but which vanished after it was found to be by Bernhard Flies? Most of the pieces that Bach copied into the ''Anna Magdalena Notebook'' for his wife have been traced to other composers, including the lovely ''Bist du bei mir,'' once a wedding staple. Even today, concert programs and record jackets occasionally neglect to attribute it to G.H. Stolzel.
Name brands command loyalty, usually for good reason, but they also may weaken our power to discriminate. If several piano sonatas and string quartets were to turn up tomorrow in Beethoven's hand, would the musical world be turned upside down? Of course. But what if it subsequently were learned that these works were by Georges Onslow, Beethoven's underappreciated contemporary? Would the furor quickly quiet down? Of course, even though the quality of the music itself would be the same as before.
Musicologists, because their fealty to the scientific method requires them to continually revise opinions when new evidence arises, find it hard to avoid such traps. A program annotator who fails to keep up with the latest research risks looking a little foolish, as one did recently, when he discerned ''autumnal mastery'' in Bach's Cantata No. 199, ''Mein Herze schwimmt in Blut.'' That high number might indeed indicate that it is the composer's last completed cantata. But, though it is still listed in reference books as No. 199, this cantata is one of Bach's early essays in the form. Or take Dufay's famous ''Caput'' Mass, which many Renaissance scholars now contend is not his work, but that of an unknown English composer. As Margaret Bent, the president of the American Musicological Society, pointed out recently in Musical Times, a great deal of Dufay scholarship that was based on this apparently faulty attribution must now be reassessed. Who knows how many doctoral theses have had to be hastily revised or perhaps even declared kaput because of the new evidence?
Caught as we all are in the historical web, it is easy to be trapped into looking in a piece of music for what its history suggests should be there. At Avery Fisher Hall the other evening the program notes, discussing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat (K. 595), asked rhetorically: ''. . . what can match the two great instrumental compositions of his last year, the Clarinet Concerto (K. 622) and this piano concerto?'' In hearing death-year thoughts in this concerto, the annotator stood in good company. Alfred Einstein, the scholar who revised the Kochel listings, wrote that the first theme of the concerto (which Mozart completed in January 1791, 11 months before his death) ''has the resigned cheerfulness that comes from the knowledge that this is the last spring.'' Putting aside the possibility that spring may have come remarkably early in Vienna that year, another quibble arises. As Miss Bent points out in the same Musical Times article, the musicologist Alan Tyson has turned up evidence that ''the essentials of that movement were already drafted in the summer of 1788, along with the three great symphonies.''
The dangers inherent in knowing as much as possible about a work of art and its maker are probably outweighed by the advantages. Historical awareness cannot, at any rate, be legislated out of existence. The time when music could be listened to innocently is long past, if there ever was such a time. In that regard, we are all lost souls, doomed to hear every piece of music as a piece of history and addicted to our reference books and program notes. Still, it is well to remember that thinking and reading about music are not quite the same as knowing it. We ought to try now and then to taste and savor the stuff directly, without passing it through the sieve of history. The Association for the Advancement of Anonymous Art will offer prizes next year for those who come closest to succeeding.
Anyway, the point I am making is that since I discovered that they were not by Beethoven, I have hardly played them. And why should this be? The music which I once enjoyed hasn't changed so why should my perception of it do so?
Today, I came across this article which really sums it up. I will now dig out my Naxos CD and play WoO17 .........................
MUSIC VIEW; LISTENERS ARE CAPTIVES OF MUSICAL HISTORY By DONAL HENAHAN
Published: April 13, 1986
The annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Anonymous Art will now come to order. The first order of business is your secretary's report on this season's concerts, many of which featured ''blind'' performances by musicians, both famous and unknown, seated behind screens. As specified in our bylaws, no work was identified beforehand either by composer or title and no program notes were provided. Listeners were left entirely on their own, without the crutches of appreciation provided at most concerts. Understandably, many of the randomly selected auditors at this season's concerts found the uncertainty unbearable and left in anger or agitation. Others stayed to the end but went away in apparent confusion, refusing to fill out the Association's brief questionnaire about the quality of the music and the proficiency of the players. Only a few eccentrics, stimulated by the idea of listening to music in a historical vacuum, dared to offer opinions. If there is no objection, their thoughts will be entered into the minutes. . . .
The foregoing paragraph, as shrewd readers will have guessed, is fanciful. To my knowledge, no one has incorporated anything like the A.A.A.A. in the state of New York or elsewhere, even though the idea of anonymous art is worth any listener's toying with now and then as an exercise in esthetics. Why, for instance, should we care who composed Mozart's Requiem? Or Verdi's? Or Faure's? Does it really make a work better or worse to know the name of its author? If we are moved by the mass that bears Mozart's name, should it make a difference that much of it was composed by Mozart's pupil, F. X. Sussmayr? For those of us who have been trained to believe it should, it does. Innocence has been lost and unless civilization is wiped away it is not going to be regained. We have reached the stage in Western culture where it would not be possible for music by an unknown composer to be accepted as great art. Wouldn't the fact that the master could not be identified disqualify it, ipso facto, from masterpiece status? We are prisoners of history who have lost the ability, if human listeners ever had it, to hear a new piece naively, for its musical impact alone.
Well then, what about the work whose pedigree is merely diluted or muddled? Sometimes, just often enough to keep one wondering if anonymous art may be possible after all, the public will take to its heart a work whose authenticity is partly questionable. Although purists may deplore their lack of discrimination, most listeners accept the Mozart Requiem in full, overlooking the sometimes clumsy completions by his student. Operagoers learned to love ''Boris Godunov,'' with its colorful Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrations, long before scholars succeeded in forcing impresarios to produce the work with Mussorgsky's own rugged scoring. On the other hand, in some works the retoucher's skills are simply not accepted as necessary by the public. None of the many completions of Schubert's ''Unfinished'' has taken the place of the world's most famous musical torso, and probably never will. It seems we would rather have the fragmentary Schubert, with all its Romantic resonances, than one more complete symphony, no matter how successfully the completion might work in theory.
For musicologists and other art historians, it can be embarrassing when hard-earned assumptions and preconceptions suddenly fall away. There was a time when something identified as Beethoven's ''Jena'' Symphony turned up now and then at concerts and was discussed seriously - or as seriously, anyway, as his ''Battle Symphony.'' At least half a dozen 78-rpm recordings of the ''Jena'' were issued, a couple of which survived into the LP era. When scholars finally persuaded themselves that the symphony was not by Beethoven, the piece simply disappeared from concert programs. Record catalogues now do not admit that it ever existed. And yet, the ''Jena'' is the same work now that it was before being proclaimed spurious Beethoven. A similar fate overtook Haydn's ''Toy'' Symphony after it was discovered to be by someone else, probably Leopold Mozart.
The sad litany could be extended almost indefinitely. Whatever happened to all those works by unknowns that unscrupulous publishers formerly attributed to Haydn? To the Wenzel Matiegka trio for flute, violin and guitar that used to be attributed to Schubert, who merely made it into a quartet by adding a cello part? To the ''Wiegenlied'' that Elisabeth Schumann and many other singers recorded in the belief that it was by Mozart but which vanished after it was found to be by Bernhard Flies? Most of the pieces that Bach copied into the ''Anna Magdalena Notebook'' for his wife have been traced to other composers, including the lovely ''Bist du bei mir,'' once a wedding staple. Even today, concert programs and record jackets occasionally neglect to attribute it to G.H. Stolzel.
Name brands command loyalty, usually for good reason, but they also may weaken our power to discriminate. If several piano sonatas and string quartets were to turn up tomorrow in Beethoven's hand, would the musical world be turned upside down? Of course. But what if it subsequently were learned that these works were by Georges Onslow, Beethoven's underappreciated contemporary? Would the furor quickly quiet down? Of course, even though the quality of the music itself would be the same as before.
Musicologists, because their fealty to the scientific method requires them to continually revise opinions when new evidence arises, find it hard to avoid such traps. A program annotator who fails to keep up with the latest research risks looking a little foolish, as one did recently, when he discerned ''autumnal mastery'' in Bach's Cantata No. 199, ''Mein Herze schwimmt in Blut.'' That high number might indeed indicate that it is the composer's last completed cantata. But, though it is still listed in reference books as No. 199, this cantata is one of Bach's early essays in the form. Or take Dufay's famous ''Caput'' Mass, which many Renaissance scholars now contend is not his work, but that of an unknown English composer. As Margaret Bent, the president of the American Musicological Society, pointed out recently in Musical Times, a great deal of Dufay scholarship that was based on this apparently faulty attribution must now be reassessed. Who knows how many doctoral theses have had to be hastily revised or perhaps even declared kaput because of the new evidence?
Caught as we all are in the historical web, it is easy to be trapped into looking in a piece of music for what its history suggests should be there. At Avery Fisher Hall the other evening the program notes, discussing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat (K. 595), asked rhetorically: ''. . . what can match the two great instrumental compositions of his last year, the Clarinet Concerto (K. 622) and this piano concerto?'' In hearing death-year thoughts in this concerto, the annotator stood in good company. Alfred Einstein, the scholar who revised the Kochel listings, wrote that the first theme of the concerto (which Mozart completed in January 1791, 11 months before his death) ''has the resigned cheerfulness that comes from the knowledge that this is the last spring.'' Putting aside the possibility that spring may have come remarkably early in Vienna that year, another quibble arises. As Miss Bent points out in the same Musical Times article, the musicologist Alan Tyson has turned up evidence that ''the essentials of that movement were already drafted in the summer of 1788, along with the three great symphonies.''
The dangers inherent in knowing as much as possible about a work of art and its maker are probably outweighed by the advantages. Historical awareness cannot, at any rate, be legislated out of existence. The time when music could be listened to innocently is long past, if there ever was such a time. In that regard, we are all lost souls, doomed to hear every piece of music as a piece of history and addicted to our reference books and program notes. Still, it is well to remember that thinking and reading about music are not quite the same as knowing it. We ought to try now and then to taste and savor the stuff directly, without passing it through the sieve of history. The Association for the Advancement of Anonymous Art will offer prizes next year for those who come closest to succeeding.
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