Letting Mozart Be Mozart

By Michael Walsh

Authenticity is the original-instrument movement's goal And this is the famous Mona Lisa," said the tour guide at the Louvre.

She flipped a switch and Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece was suddenly projected, in garish colors, on a ten-foot television screen. "But I thought the Mona Lisa was a painting," objected one astonished tourist. "Not any more," responded the guide. "We feel that if videotape had been around in Leonardo's time, he would have used it." The tour moved on. "On the next screen we have the fabulous Winged Victory..."

Consider what happens when a modern symphony orchestra and soloist perform a Mozart piano concerto. The string section, often much larger than any Mozart had at his disposal, blasts out its parts on violins and cellos better suited to powerful Strauss tone poems. The wind instruments are louder and more penetrating than classical flutes, oboes and clarinets and more complex in their mechanisms. The piano, a huge concert grand with a booming bass, is worlds removed from its gentler 18th century forerunner. In this welter of sound, inner voices are lost, delicate balances are destroyed. Exciting as the performance might be, the result is as distorted a reproduction of an art work as the Mona Lisa on a Trinitron.

Now, though, a hardy band of revisionists is riding to the rescue. Performance practice, the study of how compositions were meant to be played on instruments of their period, has become a lively, avant-garde movement that promises re-examination of baroque, classical era and early romantic music. "The philosophy," declares Christopher Hogwood, director of England's Academy of Ancient Music, "is precisely the same as the one that leads museums to clean 18th century paintings and put them in the right frames. We like to see our pictures of music clean--without layers of 19th century varnish."

This is no dusty, scholarly discipline but the restorative obsession of passionate musicians. "When I heard Hogwood's cassette of Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony on original instruments the other day," says Albert Fuller, an enthusiastic participant in the movement, "it made me feel hot inside--drop-dead, roll-around, fall-over, lava hot." The sense of excitement is immediate and infectious, and the original-instruments movement is now beginning to have an effect on the way standard repertory is performed. "On instruments, one hears the composers almost for the first time," says John Eliot Gardiner, the leader of Monteverdi Choir and English Soloists. "Works are being revealed what they really were."

The English Baroque Soloists, has to its credit a high-spirited of Handel's Water Music, is just of a steadily growing number of instrument ensembles that have up in recent years. Britain, the movement's current center, also boasts wood's group, which has recorded a revelatory cycle of the complete symphonies, and Trevor Pinnock's English Concert, responsible for an illuminating set of Bach's Brandenburg Austrian Cellist Nikolaus and Dutch Harpsichordist Gustav modern godfathers, each lead important ensembles. In the U.S., Fuller's Aston Magna Foundation for Music, the Smithsonian Chamber Players and Ars Musica of Ann Arbor, Mich., are all fighting the battle for stylistic authenticity.

"The perfect instrument," says Harnoncourt, "is always that which corresponds to the time of the music." Originals, primarily strings, are unearthed in libraries, museums, private collections and even secondhand shops. (The historic Amati and Stradivari violins played by leading virtuosos today underwent major internal surgery in the 19th century in order to project lush romantic music, and so are not considered originals.) Acquiring one can be expensive: a 17th century violin made by Jacob Stainer, for example, is worth some $85,000 today. More affordable are the copies made by a growing cottage industry of craftsmen, but a good harpsichord still can cost about $13,500.

The differences between modern and period instruments can be pronounced.

Old violins are gut stringed and straight-necked, lacking a chin rest. They are less highly strung than their modern counterparts but are clearer in articulation. Early woodwinds look surprisingly simple: the baroque oboe, for example, with only two keys, is less nimble than a contemporary instrument, which has 16 to 20, but its tone is rounder and fuller. As for the flute, "it was soft, gentle, sensuous," notes Pinnock. "It couldn't rasp even if it wanted to. Trumpets and horns lack the valves of their decendents, which limits versatility, but they produce a lusty, primal sound. Because the older instruments can articulate more clearly than modern ones, tempos in performance tend to be faster. And because each instrumental family stands out rather than blending in, contrapuntal and melodic lines can be heard more distinctly. "By using instruments of the period, you get deeper into the sound pictures the composer had when he wrote the music," says Gardiner. "If you use modern instruments, it's like having a wonderful salad and pouring bechamel sauce over it. It gets soggy."

The origins of the movement extend back to Mendelssohn's historic revival of J.S. Bach in 1829. Even so, throughout the last century Bach was known primarily to the most sophisticated musicians, and only a handful of Mozart's myriad works were regularly performed. With composers like Schumann, Brahms and Wagner churning out masterwork after masterwork, there was little need to revive the past. But as the musical repertory gradually evolved into a monument to the 19th century, inquiring performers began to look backward. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), an English musician and instrumentmaker, rediscovered the nearly forgotten world of the viol, lute and clavichord, and Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska almost singlehanded shattered the romantic tradition of performing Bach on the piano. "You play Bach your way," she once told a colleague, "and I'll play him his way."

Today's original-instrument performers are Landowska's heirs. Once considered the last refuge of a poor musician, authentic instruments now attract performers of international caliber: Dutch Violinist Jaap Schroder, who collaborated with Hogwood on the Mozart symphony series, the English Concert's Pinnock, a top-notch harpsichordist whose reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations is perhaps the most convincing on discs; American Pianist Malcolm Bilson, one of the leading exponents of classical keyboard music, which he plays on the fortepiano, a predecessor of the modern instrument. "Everybody understands that there must be different sopranos for Mozart and Wagner," says Bilson, explaining the desirability of matching instrument to composer. "It has nothing to do with musicality."

Not everyone agrees that old instruments are the wave of the future. Indeed, orchestras are unlikely any time soon to trade in their modern instruments for softer-toned period pieces, which cannot project well in large concert halls. "Every great artist in the world plays on modern instruments. Name one who uses authentic instruments," challenges Gerard Schwarz, music adviser to New York's Mostly Mozart Festival, which uses conventional instruments. Neville Marriner, for years conductor of London's Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, also criticizes the authenticity movement. "Music played on the instruments composers would have known is very popular with the open-toed-sandals-and-brown-bread set," cracks Marriner. "But the sound is coarse and rarely fluid. Whenever I get into an argument with a supporter of authentic instruments, I like to quote a young musician of the Academy of St. Martin, of the time when we attempted to use | authentic instruments. 'If Bach lhad been offered modern plumbing,' he said, 'I'm certain he | would have used it.' "

Variations on the Bach's plumbing argument have been used to justify everything from touching up Beethoven's orchestration to rescoring Handel's Royal Fireworks Music. Yet there are times when even devotees will admit that old instruments have their drawbacks. High humidity can play havoc with gut strings, which break easily and absorb water from the atmosphere. Gardiner recalls an outdoor concert last year in France when the humidity was at the saturation point: "The strings were busting, breaking, squeaking. We were playing Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, but it sounded like a Chinese carnival."

Although Europe remains the leader in original-instrument scholarship, a growing number of American music schools are offering instruction on the old instruments, including the Oberlin College Conservatory and Indiana

University, which now has about 50 graduate students in its early-music program. Says Violinist Stanley Ritchie, who teaches at Indiana: "There was a time when you could say this was all a fad, but that time is past."

Indeed, the future looks bright. With the influx of talented young players, performing standards have steadily risen, and repertory is being expanded to include the early romantics. SchrOeder and Hogwood have issued an album of Schubert and Mendelssohn violin sonatas performed on a 1709 Stradivari and a forte-piano from around 1825, and the German-based Collegium Aureum has recorded Beethoven's Third and Seventh symphonies on period instruments.

Pianists such as Bilson and Malcolm Binns are discovering what Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata sounds like on a real hammerklavier.

The movement's lasting impact, though, is likely to be on the consciousness of contemporary musicians and audiences. "I don't want to burn all the modern violins," says Schroder. "My hope is that other musicians will be stimulated to have the music speak for itself, and not to interfere with it with modern techniques." As for listeners, they can now luxuriate in the choice of the "Jupiter" Symphony played by the Berlin Philharmonic or the Academy of Ancient Music. Original instruments do not, and should not, preclude more conventional musical forces.

I But they do offer a persuasive alternative. --By Michael Walsh.

Reported by Nancy Newman/New York

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.