I seem to have created an enormous bruhaha in the 'conductors' facebook group by posting about Norrington's pseudoscholarship. I don't know what I expected, but my point was to point out to other extreme Norrington skeptics that even Norrington had his strengths. Of course, that resulted in people taking the gravest possible exception to what I posted, which is, of course, one of the the ultimate signs of a cult....
I can tell you right now, for those of us who harbor resentments toward the Historically Informed Performance movement, an enormous part of our resentment is class-based. The sheer number of eminent musicians in HIP who come from the most extreme possible privilege is mindboggling. At least Harnoncourt, an Austrian Count, had to suffer through the privations and losses of the Hitler years, and at least Bruggen involved himself with the Dutch avant-garde figures like Andriessen and de Lieuw, but the British HIPsters, what have they ever experienced to justify the perception of them as having accumulated such enormous wisdom? Norrington was the son of an Oxford Chancellor, Gardiner the good friend of Prince Charles and the son of a DH Lawrence disciple who was barely less influential a Hitler supporter to England than Oswald Mosley. Christopher Hogwood and Raymond Leppard were both in the social circles influential English right-wingers. Leppard is well-documented, but one young and well-connected Young Republican I used to know who went to Peabody got a personal invitation by Hogwood to tour Scotland with him... Only David Munrow came from origins that were in any way humble. It was a movement soaked in political reactionaryism, and its founders held such august social connections that they could simply saunter into music, and newspaper editors who knew their parents would pointedly tell critics to pay attention to them.
I don't doubt they all worked hard, but most musicians work just as hard if not harder, and it's only luck that gets them noticed. Guys like Norrington never learned to properly conduct, and were put in front of the world's greatest orchestras because they gave a couple of provocative presentations.
The Historical Performance movement happened because the music world needed a movement like that which made us pay attention to the vast reservoir of great pre-Bach music, and got us away from the soporific pseudo-profundity of instrumental performance, which in the era of Karajan and Celibidache had grown increasingly humorless and bombastic, but large parts of it have become the sickness of which it was supposed to be the cure.
The HIP movement has a number of really wonderful achievements and I wouldn't dream of writing it off as a net loss, but it was a movement like any other in music history that has terrible weakensses alongside its great strengths. If the HIP world cannot come to terms with its worst features, its dogmas will be largely overthrown in exactly the same way as it overthrew the dogmas of the era preceding it.
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