Living Treasures:

Stanley Ritchie, Part 2

Reviews Editor Mary Nemet continues her interview with Australian Baroque specialist Stanley Ritchie.

MN: For the last 40 or so years, you have become known worldwide as a leading exponent of Baroque performance and teaching. What drew you to Baroque? What do you consider important to impart to your students as a legacy?

SR: When I graduated from the Con in 1956, we all had to take a written exam set by the Director, Eugene Goossens, and one of his questions was public knowledge: ‘What is meant by style in music?’ Knowing we’d have to answer this made us think about the difference, say, between the music of Mozart and Brahms and how one would make that difference. This sparked my curiosity about style, and the seed thereby planted would grow into a fullfledged career.

A few years later, I received a scholarship to the Yale University School of Music where I enrolled for study with Joseph Fuchs. There was one course that sounded interesting, so I signed up for it: ‘Performance Practice’.

There was a stigma attached to ‘early music’ at the time, which was derided by a large percentage of concertgoers and critics, one of whom I recall saying, ‘This, too, shall pass.’ The poor man has had to eat his words!

There’s so much more to music making than we learn in traditional 20th-century conservatory training. Just playing Baroque music using an instrument and bow with 17th- or 18th-century specifications is in itself educational, and demonstrates that certain aspects of our modern technique and interpretation are inappropriate. I try to give my students basic principles of Baroque performance practice, both technical and aesthetic. I encourage them to avoid predictability, and to be ready to try different interpretative ideas, even spontaneously.

MN: I hear many of the same Baroque works played differently by various performers, which suggests there is room for player-generated expressiveness beyond the score and beyond the rules set by Leopold Mozart and Geminiani. I am curious to know how much latitude we have within the principles.

SR: The treatises in which we find stylistic evidence fall into different categories: some, like those of Geminiani, Leopold Mozart and Quantz, record current performance practice and frequently contain criticisms of what they consider to be unacceptable. Geminiani relayed the Corelli method since he had been his pupil. Geminiani’s reaction to a particular French custom is often quoted: ‘That wretched rule of the down-bow’ that refers to the way Lully had his ballet orchestra accent every downbeat. They all had strong opinions and expressed them.

I believe that there can be many ‘right’ ways to play a piece while still adhering to principles of expression as spelled out in Geminiani and Mozart. Modern ways of playing Baroque music belong to later aesthetic norms, such as the bel canto style of constant legato, which has no place in pre-Romantic music. The use of constant vibrato which, because it is an ornament, makes no more sense than constant trilling.

Geminiani actually wrote a book, a set of solo and trio sonatas called A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Music. In his other book, The Art of Playing on the Violin, he lays out principles of expression, labelling bow strokes buono (good), cattivo (bad) and particolare (special). Within these rules, though, there are a range of possibilities.

One of the most important stylistic practices in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries is rubato, an essential antidote for predictable, inflexible performances. Another is the use of rhetorical principles in one’s interpretation. Music is, after all, just speech in a different language with musical figures, phrasing, articulation, dynamics, rubato, questions, exclamations, etc.

From the end of the 18th century, composers began to spell out most of this expression. Prescribing expression would have been insulting to the educated Baroque performer. Bach was rapped over the knuckles for the way he wrote the G minor Adagio and the A minor Grave in the solo sonatas, specifying the ornaments instead of merely providing a simple melodic line for performers to ornament. Some critics took Bach to task for this ‘infringement’ upon violinists’ artistic rights while others said, ‘Well, isn’t it time that someone showed them how to do it tastefully?’

Perhaps the best answer to your question about the differences between historical performers’ interpretations of the same piece is to draw a parallel between musicians and actors. Actors declaiming a Shakespearean monologue such as Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ would each bring to it their own individual persona and style and sense of the dramatic context, and this is precisely what should happen in music.

Whereas there can be many right ways of playing a piece, there are certainly wrong ways. I disapprove of Baroque or Classical music being played in a ‘Romantic’ way, which often has the effect of making it sound like second-rate Romantic music, and I have no time for those who are inflexibly mired in tradition, an amusing but cynical translation of which is ‘the perpetuation of one person’s mistakes’. One part of my doctrine is: ‘Be aware of historical concepts and apply them tastefully with the object of moving the listener’. Another is ‘Never consciously copy another’s interpretation’. And a third, very important one: ‘Be humble—when you approach a piece of music, always ask yourself what the composer is suggesting, and never impose yourself on the piece or use it for self-glorification’.

Whether my students play Baroque or Classical music, they should never use it to prove that they’re the greatest violinist in the world! Of course, if it’s a showpiece that’s another matter, but very few pre19th-century composers wrote them, and certainly not Johann Sebastian Bach!

MN: Stanley, thank you for your insightful and valuable comments from which we can all learn so much.

Volker Beilharz Violins

expert set-up and rehair new-making repair and restoration of all bowed strings by appointment in Hawthorn in Melbourne and Castlemaine in country Victoria www.volkerbeilharzviolins.com.au

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