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Conducting the Brahms Symphonies: From Brahms to Boult by Christopher Dyment

2018; Music Library Association; Volume: 74; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2018.0037

1534-150X

Michael Vaillancourt,

Musicians’ Health and Performance

Reviewed by: Conducting the Brahms Symphonies: From Brahms to Boult by Christopher Dyment Michael Vaillancourt Conducting the Brahms Symphonies: From Brahms to Boult. By Christopher Dyment. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2016. [xvi, 250 p. ISBN 9781783271009 (hardback), $35; ISBN 9781782046707 (e-book), $39.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. Christopher Dyment's last book inhabits a fast-growing subdiscipline of performance studies that focuses on [End Page 611] the critical assessment of early twentieth-century recordings and their complex relationship to cultural life. The book in large part comprises a response to several earlier works on the performance traditions of Brahms's symphonies, particularly those of Walter Frisch (Brahms: the Four Symphonies [New York: Schirmer, 1996] and "In Search of Brahms's First Symphony: Steinbach, the Meiningen tradition, and the Recordings of Hermann Abendroth," in Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, ed. Michael Mus grave and Bernard D. Sherman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 277–301). Frisch identified Fritz Steinbach (1855–1916) as a key figure in early Brahms interpretation and attempted to trace a line of authority from Steinbach to a later generation of conductors. Steinbach was Hans von Bülow's successor with the Meiningen orchestra; later he became director of the Gürzenich-Orchester of Cologne. During his Meiningen years, many contemporaries regarded his Brahms interpretations as the most authoritative of all. Reports of the composer's enthusiastic approval no doubt influenced this view. Because Steinbach left no recorded evidence of his interpretations, research has concentrated on a number of younger colleagues variously associated with him. Much of the earlier research has centered on Steinbach's successor at Cologne, Hermann Abendroth, who lived until 1956 and left many recordings of the symphonies over a thirty-year period. Frisch—along with Robert Pascall and Philip Weller ("Flexible Tempo and Nuancing in Orchestral Music: Understanding Brahms's View of Interpretation in His Second Piano Concerto and Fourth Symphony," Performing Brahms, 220–43)—has identified Abendroth, as well as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg, as the leading representatives of the Steinbach/Meiningen tradition. Dyment is vigorously opposed to this view. Although he too sees Steinbach as the pivotal figure in any reconstruction of a Brahmsian tradition, he advocates a different group of conductors as its heirs. The author's "attempt to recapture the authentic voice of Brahms the symphonist" (p. xiii) centers on Fritz Busch, Arturo Toscanini, and Adrian Boult, all of whom heard Steinbach conduct Brahms in the early years of the twentieth century and who "were explicit about Steinbach's influence upon them" (p. 3). Dyment finds what he terms the "Classical rectitude" (p. xii) of the three latter conductors to be more congruous with his own ideal of the tradition. He is disarmingly candid in admitting that personal preference plays as important a part in forming his views as any of the evidence. The book thus assumes the character of a willful polemic rather than an archival survey. The volume is divided into three main sections. In the first, "Brahms Conducts: the Composer and his Contemporaries," Dyment attempts to establish Brahms's performance preferences. Since there exist only a few descriptions of the composer conducting the symphonies, the historian must rely primarily on Brahms's comments on the efforts of his contemporaries, but Dyment also includes descriptions by third parties (usually other conductors) of the interpretations of several of Brahms's contemporaries. Here, it seems to me, the ground becomes somewhat treacherous. For example, did Felix Weingartner's negative reaction to Hans von Bülow's conducting reflect concern for an authentic performance tradition, or was it more likely the snubbing of a rival whose practices were very different from his own? In the second section, "The Documentary Evidence: Lines of Authority," [End Page 612] Dyment discusses a number of early twentieth-century conductors "who in a variety of ways provided (or are alleged to have provided) lines of authority traceable to the composer" (p. 28). Here the sources are mainly criticism by journalists, and commentary by other performers, extracted from published memoirs and both published and unpublished letters. At the end of this section, Dyment evaluates the much-discussed publication by Walter Blume that...