Cornell University
Anxieties over Bach: Nineteenth-Century Keyboards and "Authenticity"
The idea that a "regulative work concept" emerged around 1800 has become a scholarly commonplace (Lydia Goehr). According to this view, values of textual fidelity in performance, in deference to the composer's authority, shore up the idea of a coherent "work," an idea which unifies discrete musical utterances as replications of an authorial utterance inhering in a text. In short, the "regulative work concept" potentially allows any individual performance to grant immediate access to the author's (better: Artist's) inspired utterance. That this view emerged first around 1800 has been amply critiqued (Sisman, Weber, Strohm, Wegman, Kivy); equally its putative pervasiveness and stability in the nineteenth-century, especially in relation to the performance of old music, admits elaboration. In sympathy with Nicholas Cook's emphasis on the history and analysis of performance style (Beyond the Score, OUP 2013), this study undertakes a comparison of the reception and performance styles of nineteenth-century pianists and pedagogues with respect to Bach's Chromatic Fantasy. As A. B. Marx's 1848 essay on Bach performance pointed out, old music posed problems for immediacy in performance: aspects of changing notation, style, and organology had to be accommodated. Thus the performance of old music, especially that of Bach, whose stature as an Artist-Author mattered greatly to his nineteenth-century votaries, resulted in various configurations the idea of the "work." (Marx identifies "classicist" and "romantic" camps, a typology which by no means can be taken at face value.) The appropriateness and appeal of differing, often competing, work concepts for individual figures can be linked to their their contemporary keyboard art, and the organology of their keyboards.
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Matthew J. Hall is a PhD candidate at Cornell University. His interests include J.S. Bach, the fifteenth century, and counterpoint. He has published articles and reviews in Understanding Bach, Eighteenth-Century Music, and The Journal of the Alamire Foundation. He performs regularly on the harpsichord, organ, and fortepiano. In 2013 his recording of the C.P.E. Bach piano quartets with Sarah Darling (viola) and Sarah Paysnick (traverso) was released on the Ad Parnassum label.