It is to-day, as always, the mission of the authoritative interpreter to amplify and throw new lights upon these traditions, and not be content to accept the general version which his less-gifted brethren have to subscribe to with reverent faith. Still, even for the great artist the fundamental principles must remain the same, and for him, as for the student, they will form the guiding line of his mental vision.
Of course, I know that there is a school of musical thought which practically condemns any effort at interpretation or emotion in music. They like to be given just the notes as they were written down, like so many words recited without a shadow of life or expression. Artists have often been much called to task by critics who hold such views because their interpretations of the masterpieces of music are based on the natural conviction that the greater the music, the more power of colour, fine feeling and poetry it ought to be able to express. It is difficult to understand the people who talk with arrogant authority about how exactly a musical work should be interpreted. They like to invest it with a sort of traditional dryness of expression which tends to render especially the older of the great classics a sort of trial of tediousness which many genuine music lovers submit to endure only as a kind of educational duty. It is, I am sure, a good deal a matter of temperament that controls these radical divergences of ideas about musical performance. It seems to me that to hold such views is not to get any further than mere arrangements of detail and narrow perspective, while the true majesty of the picture is missed. I have many times met truly musical people who found Bach and Beethoven dull, and were surprised at having been stirred by a great fugue or sonata which they had never appreciated before. And I am certain it was because they had never been allowed the opportunity of realizing the full glory of such music. For can one imagine a nobler or wider range in which to find every wealth of imagination, intellect and feeling than is to be found in the great sonatas of Beethoven.
The earliest pianoforte music we know of was written in the form of simple dance measures such as courantes, allemandes, pavanes, gigues and so forth. These were performed upon very primitive-keyed instruments, amongst the best known being the virginals, harpischords and spinets, and they were only suitable to the plainest methods of treatment.
Indeed, the story is told of Dr. Arne, the celebrated eighteenth century English composer, that he said about one of those instruments, ” It is the devil’s own instrument, my masters, like the scratch of a quill with a squeak at the end of it.”
Only since the variety and capacity of instruments have developed, and also since Bach created the complex and polyphonic harmonies which revolutionized pianoforte music, has the scope of harmonical expression become so greatly enlarged, and the problems which surround it so complicated. The discovery of the pedal, too, changed the whole complexion of interpretation on the piano, while in the light of modern technique it seems strange to think that before the advent of Bach the use of the thumb and also of the 5th finger was absolutely forbidden by the best teachers.
In those days the wrist was held high and the hand stiff; a high chair was no doubt also used for sitting at the instrument, and the whole attitude while playing must have been one of rigidity and precision. Any rendering of this primitive music was necessarily very quiet and limited in the means employed. All violent crescendo or diminuendo effects were impossible, and the rhythm was confined to the swaying but monotonous lilt of the gigues of that day, or to the more stately measures of the pavanes. Certainly it would seem, to say the least of it, indecorous to play a piece of the sixteenth century even on a modern pianoforte with the abandonment of a Liszt Rhapsody, or, vice versa, to render the passionate music of Chopin or Liszt with the demure coldness of the early masters. This is where a sense of style should come in, to help the artist in his conception of the different aspects of musical composition.