florida state university college of music performance practice

was skeptical of ideas of authentic performances and of Werktreue as illustrated in the
following quote:
The musical score is never identical with the work; devotion to the text means the
constant effort to grasp that which it hides…an interpretation which does not
bother about the music‟s meaning on the assumption that it will reveal itself of its
own accord will inevitably be false since it fails to see that the meaning is always
constituting itself anew. 117
Virtually unknown to many are the German authors Harald Heckmann and Wilhelm
Fischer who challenged the notion of one correct manner of performance and the
relationship of musicology and performance. 118 Commonly known is the 1957 collection
of English essays written in honor of Archibald Thompson Davison. Donald Grout,
commonly quoted by Richard Taruskin, concludes in his essay that “historical
authenticity in the performance of old music is unattainable.” 119 Aldrich is also clear in
his belief that “the whole quest for authenticity in musical revivals is a strictly twentieth –
century phenomenon.” 120
Dorottya Fabian has spent a great deal of time tracing the use of the term
authenticity and has come to the conclusion that musicians and scholars in continental
Europe came to regard “authenticity” as a futile utopian attempt fifteen years before
English speaking countries. 121 As demonstrated in quotes like Wanda Landowska‟s, “I
am sure that what I am doing in regard to sonority, registration etc., is very far from the
historical truth,” initial interest in early music had different views concerning authenticity
than practitioners and scholars in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 122 It is interesting to
note from the listed examples that there have always been opinions regarding authenticity
throughout the twentieth century that ran counter and independent from the accepted
consensus and the bandwagon du jour. Even the early music patriarch Nikolaus
Harnoncourt in 1978, during what could be viewed as approaching the height of rhetoric
117
Theodor Wesendunk Adorno, „Bach defended against his devotees‟ in Prisms trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press), 144.
118
Fabian, “The Meaning of Authenticity and the Early Music Movement,” 158.
119
Donald Jay Grout, “On historical authenticity,” Essays on music in honour of Archibald Thompson
Davison. (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 1957), 346.
120
P. Aldrich, “The „Authentic‟ Performance of Baroque Music,” Essays on music in honour of Archibald
Thompson Davison. (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 1957), 161.
121
Fabian, “The Meaning of Authenticity and the Early Music Movement,” 154.
122
Fabian, “The Meaning of Authenticity and the Early Music Movement,” 155.
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