NOTES I

[1]

Notes towards a theory of musical reproduction.

(NB herein lies dissolution of the natural, ‘organic’ aspect of music, which is a mere social appearance)

True reproduction is the x-ray image of the work. Its task is to render visible all the relations, all aspects of context, contrast, and construction that lie hidden beneath the surface of the perceptible sound – and this through the articulation of precisely that perceptible manifestation. The concealment of such relationships, such as the works' own meaning may on occasion demand, is itself but a part of that articulation. This demand relates in particular also to the smallest of units – themes and motives. While the majority of performers effect an articulation of the large-scale form in basic terms, that of the partial units eludes them. For example: a structuring of themes in large-scale – not strophic – forms in terms of antecedent and consequent. Or: that a theme which reappears as a consequent to another has an entirely different meaning, and must therefore be interpreted differently than upon its first appearance. It is the precision and focus with which this micrological work is carried out (the simplest example of this is distinguishing between primary and secondary voices in chamber music) that the sense of the forms – their translation into content – depends on (example 2nd theme from C sharp minor Scherzo by Chopin, or the A flat major theme of the F minor Fantasy). And the problem of interpretation that always returns is the creation of a dialectic between part and whole, one which neither sacrifices the whole for the detail nor entirely annuls the detail through the whole. In the tradition of great Western music, the unity of the basic tempo achieves this. Wherever the unity of the movement is endangered by tempo modifications, even differential ones, articulation must be achieved by other means: phrasing, agogics, dynamics, timbre.

[2]

Different dimensions of music-making substitutable. With more highly organized music-making, there are countless occasions upon which a diminuendo, but sometimes also a crescendo, takes the place of a ritardando. Tempo modifications are always the most comfortable, the mechanical device – almost without exception at the cost of unfaithfulness to the text.

Against the cliché that one should be faithful to the spirit, not the letter. (NB Toscanini is unfaithful to the letter. Expand)¹ NB Goeze and Lessing.²

Mimetic aspect of reproduction: the interpolation of details most readily comparable to that of the actor: interpreting means for one second playing the hero, the berserker, hope itself, and this is where the communication between the work and the performer lies.³ Only those who are able to imitate the work understand its sense, and only those who understand this sense are able to imitate. All languages apply the notion of playing to music.

Precise analysis as a self-evident precondition of interpretation. Its canon is the most advanced state of compositional-technical insight.

Development of the ideal of silent music-making, ultimately the reading of musical texts, in connection with falling silent (NB the utter destruction of the sensual phenomenon of music through mass reproduction). Playing from memory – ‘thinking the music to oneself’ – as a preliminary stage to this.

Begin with the question: what is a musical text. No set of performance instructions, no fixing of the imagined, but rather the notation of something objective, a notation that is necessarily fragmentary, incomplete, in need of interpretation to the point of ultimate convergence.

What is the relationship between musical notation and writing? One of the most central questions, inseparable from: what is the relationship between music and language?

[3]

Two fundamentally incorrect notions of the nature of musical interpretation need to be refuted: 1) that of the musical text as a set of performance instructions 2) that of the musical text as the fixing of the imagined. In a more profound sense, it is not the work that is the function of imagination, but rather vice versa (derive from the subject–object dialectic of the work. NB also the epistemological argument of the unknownness of the imagined – ‘thing-in-itself’. NB Schönberg's attitude to the text versus my own view. Yet it must be said that the ideal of the work incorporates the imagined and the performance instructions as extremes of the spectrum).

The concept of musical sense – as that which is to be represented – needs to be developed. Whereas the sense is not absorbed within the phenomenon, the possibility of its representation – as also of its self-representation – consists exclusively in the phenomena. But this means: within their context. Fulfilling the sense of music means nothing other than rendering all aspects of the context visible. This can be shown with reference to ‘senseless’ music-making, as the difference between what is living and what is dead. The dead elements are always those whose function in the musical context does not become evident. The concept of expression is itself to be understood in these terms (though not entirely: i.e. as an ideal; and in Beethoven's last works it is discarded.). This theory should be related both to the theory of music as a non-intentional text and the theory of x-ray images. Determining this relationship is the real concern of the study.

There will have to be an analysis of Toscanini's style of presentation. ‘Interpretation in the Age of Uninterpretability’.⁴

Motifs:

Separation of text (merely apparent faithfulness) and expression (context of effect).

‘Streamlining’: fetishism of smooth functioning without musical sense and construction. [Additional note in the left margin:] Functioning comes to replace function.

Relates to the compositions in the same manner that Zweig's biographies of writers relate to the writing.

[4]

Galvanization of the uninterpretable as ‘effect’: music becomes a form of consumption and an educational artefact at the same time.

Function of naïveté: infiltration of music by barbarism. Sibelius.⁵

The motifs of the conducting essay from Anbruch⁶ should be treated in this context.

The dignity of the musical text lies in its non-intentionality. It signifies the ideal of the sound, not its meaning. Compared to the visual phenomenon, which ‘is’, and the verbal text, which ‘signifies’, the musical text constitutes a third element. – To be derived as a memorial trace of the ephemeral sound, not as a fixing of its lasting meaning. – The ‘expression’ of music is not an intention, but rather mimic⁷-imitative. A ‘pathetic’ moment does not signify pathos etc., but rather comports itself pathetically. Mimetic root of all music. This root is captured by musical interpretation. Interpreting music is not referred to without reason as music-making – accomplishing imitative acts. Would interpretation then accordingly be the imitation of the text – its ‘image’? Perhaps this is the philosophical sense of the ‘x-ray image’ – to imitate all that is hidden. Actors and musicians.

Introduce the mere reading of music as a conceptual extreme. Perhaps – as a residue of unsublimated mimesis – the ‘making’ of music is already no less infantile than reading aloud (comes to the fore in choir). Silent reading as the legacy and conclusion of interpretation. It is this possibility – playing complex chamber music from memory, as inaugurated by Kolisch,⁸ and as asserting the absolute primacy of the text over its imitation – in comparison to which essentially all ‘music-making’ already sounds antiquated. – In the realm of composition, the works of Anton Webern are decidedly close to this idea. / Cf. Schumann⁹

[5]

Two statements made by Kolisch: ‘Even the virtuosic conducting arts of Bruno Walter were not able to incite the NBC orchestra to imprecision.’ – ‘The best thing about the cellist A.¹⁰ was his ugly tone.’ A critique of the ‘culinary’ element of musical interpretation should be carried out dialectically. It is not simply to be negated, but is only captured as something negated. The negation of the ‘beautiful tone’ is the true achievement of all musical mimesis – this is what ‘characteristic’ means.

The musical work undergoes similar change through being heard, renowned, exhausted, to the image under the scrutiny of the countless people who have pored over it. The work ‘in itself’ is an abstraction. The pure work-in-itself probably coincides with the uninterpretable. To be shown through the example of Schreker:¹¹ today it is already light music.

The mimetic characters in the works are historical ciphers, and they escape from them. What Nägeli¹² perceived in Mozart (analyse), and Hoffmann¹³ in Beethoven, is no longer within them. In Nägeli's day, Mozart was objectively ‘impure in style’, that is according to the state of the musical material. Today he no longer is. The historical change affecting the works as such always ensues in relation to the state of the material – one of the most important categories. This can also be expressed in the following terms: that every later commensurable work objectively alters every earlier one. Reproduction registers this alteration, and at the same time causes it. The relationship between it and the work is dialectical.

Not only do characters escape from the works; new ones also develop. The empire-classicist element in Beethoven that disappeared from Romanticism, which considered him one of its own, has today been translated into the very same constructive, economic, and integral properties that are central to true interpretation. This unfolding in time is true, more than of any other, of Bach.

[6]

Records of such famed and indeed authentic performers as Joachim,¹⁴ Sarasate,¹⁵ even Paderewski,¹⁶ have actually taken on the character of inadequacy. Joachim's quartet, which established the style of Beethoven interpretation, would today probably seem like a German provincial ensemble, and Liszt like the parody of a virtuoso. The dreadful streamline¹⁷ music-making of Toscanini, Wallenstein,¹⁸ Monteux,¹⁹ Horowitz,²⁰ Heifetz²¹ – certainly the decline of interpretation – proves a necessary decline[,] to the extent that everything else already seems sloppy, obsolete, clumsy, indeed provincial (and at the same time it is not – both! Formulate with the greatest care)

Writing and instrument, the poles of interpretation.

Singing. The thought that no Steinway grand would ever conceive of giving a concert on account of having so beautiful a tone – whereas a singer would. The elimination of the sensual pleasure at sound is the idiosyncrasy in which the death of interpretation asserts itself. – Though the comparison between grand piano and singer is not entirely true – but has become true through vocal fetishism. The parting of the sensual and intellectual aspects of music.

In what respects is the musician a ‘player’, and in which not. There is not one musical interpretation that lacks the aspect of ‘missing the mark’ – without any risks. Interpretative freedom inseparable from risk.

Rubato, ‘stealing time’ – what does that actually mean? All problems of interpretation rightfully centred on this.

To the extent that music is ‘interpreted’, it is always ‘rubato’.

[7]

Supply a historico-philosophical interpretation of the dominance of interpretation over the matter itself. Appearance versus true nature; means versus end; person versus matter as the ideological reflex of reification.

The fetishization of interpretation is an attempt to break free from reification – appearance of immediacy – which leads only to a deeper entanglement in reification.

The objectivity of reproduction presupposes depth of subjective perception, otherwise it is merely the frozen imprint of the surface. This is one of the primary theses.

Ad Dorian²²

Interpretation as a historical problem 23 The relationship between the performing and the creative artist, however, has changed profoundly in the history of music and continues to do so.

Zone of indeterminacy in notation (fermata²³ and meaning) 27 Logically, the objective interpreter of the Fifth will perform the opening measures according to metronomic and other objective determinations, as indicated by the score and not by his personal feelings. If we turn from the particular case of the Fifth Symphony to any classical score, in fact to a score of any period, the inevitable question arises as to whether the score should be interpreted literally or whether the performer should have carte blanche in general interpretation, on the ground that, besides the script of the score, its background must also be freely taken into consideration. […] In spite of this, it would still be conceivable to insure what we call authenticity of interpretation, namely, the objective realization of the author's wishes, if the score as such were explicit enough to protect the composer's intentions against any misrepresentations on the performer's part.

Inadequacy of writing (28) Of course, great composers have superbly transformed their ideas into scores, making the best possible use of musical notation. But it is this very notation that is imperfect and may remain so forever, notwithstanding remarkable contributions to its improvement. There are certain intangibles that cannot be expressed by our method of writing music – vital musical elements incapable of being fixed by the marks and symbols of notation. Consequently, score scripts are incomplete in representing the composers' intentions. No score, as written in manuscript and published in print, can offer complete information for its interpreter.

Objectivity = interpretation of the meaning through the writing (and conversely: interaction, where writing is the ‘given’ that categorially attains sublation 28) The farther we go back in the different periods of history, the more difficult it becomes to read and know the score, to understand its graphic marks and symbols, and to supplement its meagre directions, if any – all of which is necessary for the faithful performance of the work. Instructions of a type considered indispensable today, such as those for the main tempo of a composition, were frequently omitted in early scores. This means that, from the very start, the interpreter has to supplement the material of the score with his own good judgement. Consequently, even the interpreter of truly objective spirit is bound to find himself occasionally on subjective terrain, irrespective of his loyal inclinations.

Lack of indication = not yet reified (here centred on division of labour 29) Sketchy as the old score may seem to the modern performer, it fulfilled its function by offering the necessary information in its own day, when the composer and the interpreter were so often one and the same person. Palestrina conducted his own masses, Handel his own oratorios, Mozart his own operas, and Bach himself sat on the organ bench of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, playing his fugues and chorales. Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was rather the exception when the composer was not his own interpreter. Chopin dreamed his nocturnes at the piano; and Paganini displayed his demoniacal virtuosity in the rendition of his music on a priceless violin.

Tendency towards unambiguity in modern notation 29 Today, the interpreter of contemporary works frequently has little or no personal choice, as he is forced to follow the very strict directions of the composer.

Stravinsky's ‘Sergeant’ 30. Stravinsky does not hesitate to compare a good conductor with a sergeant whose duty it is to see that every order is obeyed by his player-soldiers.

Connect my argument against background (style) to 30f. As things are, performers can roughly be divided into two groups. They are, according to their attitude toward the score, either objective or subjective executants. And any interpretation, at its very beginning, has to be one or the other. Suppose an interpreter – as many of the best of our day have already done – decides in favour of objective interpretation. If his task is the rendition of a new score of the elaborated type he may secure sufficient clues for his goal of work-fidelity. If he interprets an old work with few or no instructions, then a most difficult task confronts him. He must, because of the elasticity of the old score, reconstruct the work in terms of its musical background. As every score is an integral part of the age in which it is created, every detail of its performance depends upon knowledge of the manners and customs of a particular period.

Difficulty of the ‘composer's intention’ 31 Nothing is more difficult than his task of rethinking the old works, on the basis of the original elastic score script, in terms of the great masters who wrote them. There are three paths that will lead the interpreter out of this labyrinth. First, he must learn how to read the script and to understand its language. Second, his fantasy must discover the musical essence, the inner language behind the written symbols. Finally, the interpreter should be fully acquainted with the background and the tradition of a work – with all the customs surrounding the score at the time of its creation.

Rigid division into subjective and objective. But: an objective interpretation of the sense requires a subjective experience of the context. Against naïve musical realism. Objectivity (31 cf. Hegel Phenomenology)²⁴

NB on the subjective side of interpretation, one must distinguish between intention and realization. Today, i.e. in the absence of a binding tradition, the latter takes priority. But realization has a dimension of its own: that of the relationship of the text to the instrument, or [to] the voice.

[8]

Relief (rationalization) through notation and increasing mindlessness of the performer 42. Things are made far more comfortable for the performer today. Unquestionably, there has been a downward trend as regards what the average musician must know. The general present-day level of his training is, in many respects, far lower than that set for his earlier colleague's ambition in his craft. (NB this is a total-historical tendency. Cf. fetish study)²⁵

The ascetic element in the beginning of modern music and ‘interpretation’: ‘tone language’: 44 Caccini's interpretation attacked whatever seemed opposed to genuine emotional expression. Now, with the humanistic attitude of respect toward the word, the new interpretative goal was to express clearly the true effect of the ‘tone language’, as music was significantly called. This permitted a performance of the new monodic compositions on the basis of a broad subjective treatment of the text as the performer's guide. Emphasis was exclusively on the dramatic meaning of the poem and not on beautiful tone rows.

Voce finta, esclamazione 45f. Caccini recognized only two registers: voce plena e naturale (full and natural voice) and voce finta (artificial voice). In his interpretation he wished to restrict male singers to the use of natural voice, rejecting their falsetto as ugly; but sopranos and altos, boys as well as women, were permitted to use both registers. The use of the female falsetto was even considered enjoyable for esclamazione, a singing device of the Renaissance that retained its importance for centuries. Originally the term designated the reinforcing of the voice at the moment when it was about to diminish – a crescendo at the end of the tone. Metaphorically, not only the final crescendo but the whole figure is called esclamazione. Its importance may be judged from the fact that a representative British account of the new style, written as early as 1655, quotes from the Le nuove musiche as follows: […] ‘Because Exclamation is the principal means to move the Affections; and Exclamation properly is no other thing, but in slacking of the Voice to reinforce it somewhat.’

Music as language at the start of the modern age and the central problem of interpretation. 46 The fact that all these references appear at the beginning of Caccini's Le nuove musiche shows how much importance was attached to these devices as a principal means of expression. First and foremost, Caccini expressed his main idea of interpretation in the watchword, una certa nobile sprezzatura di canto – a ‘certain noble subordination of the song.’ The singer's task was to speak musically, as it were.

Subjectivism and identification 49 STILO RAPPRESENTATIVO. The difference between the old and the new style of madrigal is demonstrated by Sachs: ‘The sixteenth-century composer dealt with love through the medium of a madrigal in several parts. No one found any fault in the basses playing the role of a young girl or the sopranos that of a wooer. The music did not try to achieve illusion. In the seventeenth century the singer was merged with the imaginary character to whom the poet's verses were ascribed. The singer had to identify himself with him whose joys and sorrows were depicted in the words. […] After the polyphonic style of the past, les jeunes, around 1600, aspired to a stilo recitativo or rappresentativo, imitating natural diction and expressing even the most delicate and secret emotions of the soul.’

Freedom as an instruction already 1614 Frescobaldi. 54–55 Girolamo Frescobaldi, in the preface to his Toccate published in Rome in 1614, gives a most comprehensive description of organ interpretation. A digest of his rules follows. ‘1. First, this kind of performance must not be subject to strict time – as in modern madrigals, which are sung, now languid, now lively, in accordance with the affections of the music or the meaning of the words.’ We learn, thus, that Italian madrigals were sung with liberty of tempo […]. Obviously, the vocal style influenced the instrumental music. A singing bel canto performance on the instrument was the ideal.

On the prehistory of mass culture and its connection to problems of interpretation 55 ‘2. In the Toccate, I have attempted not only to offer a variety of divisions and expressive ornaments, but also to plan the various sections so that they can be played independently of one another. The performer can stop wherever he wishes, and thus does not have to play them all.’ This almost dangerous admission on the part of Frescobaldi would seem to open up new vistas for subjective interpretation. […] ‘5. The cadences, though written as rapid, must be performed quite sustained; as the performer approaches the end of the passage of cadence, he must retard the tempo gradually.’ […] We see that rubato and phrasing, in interpretation, were not invented with the employment of signs designating these features […].

Main source for the subjectification of interpretation as a function of reification 56f. From these rules emerge main principles of interpretation for the seventeenth century that also were to prove basic for centuries to follow: (a) subjectivity of reading, as good taste and fine judgement become rules of performance; (b) the special differentiation of types, such as the dances, according to their characteristics; (c) a general necessity of individual decision, changing almost with every passage; (d) the impossibility of generalizations applicable in more than the broad aspects indicated in rules 1 to 9.

Written music and printing 61 The most sweeping change occurred in the sixteenth century, when it became possible to print scores.

Renaissance, functional division, quantification, functional unity, jazz 62f. From the system then adopted to the complicated scores now in use, the way is long and the process is one of logical development. Today it is taken for granted that the orchestra is a group of performers of which each one plays an individually prescribed part. In fact, the young musician who joins an orchestral group can hardly conceive that it could ever have been otherwise. In the early days of the orchestra, however, the employment and grouping of instruments followed no definite order whatsoever. Apparently the only principle was not to have a principle. In those bygone days, whoever happened to be present at a performance played any available instrument. The method was one of extempore and improvisation. […] The conductor in the early days acted simultaneously as his own arranger. His responsibility was not limited to rehearsing and directing performances. First of all, he had to adjust the res facta, that is, the composer's written score and its tone rows, to the vocal and instrumental forces at hand. How such a metamorphosis of an original score into a variety of versions was brought about, is demonstrated in Syntagma musicum, a treatise published in 1619 at Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and containing invaluable information in many respects. […] We observe here the method called variatio per choros, variations designed for two contrasting choirs.

Emancipation of the violin from the voice 66 Monteverdi also fully realized the potentialities of the violin as the leading melodic instrument of the orchestra. Augmenting its compass from the third to the fifth position, he progressed from the point where the vocal mind of Gabrieli stopped. In other words, he liberated the violin from its function as a substitute for the soprano, and made it an independent orchestral instrument with individual expression.

absolutist style of presentation: stamping 69 Here, in front of his musicians and visible to all, stood Maître Jean Baptiste [Lully], pounding the beat with a heavy, decorated stick – a musical commander with military manners, insisting upon instrumental discipline and utmost rhythmical precision. […] Generations later, Jean Jacques Rousseau protested against the noisy beating of conductors in the theater. Rationalist that this philosopher-musician was, he finally became resigned to the idea that without the noise the measure of the music could not be distinctly felt by the singers and orchestra players.

Reification of composition (NB Beethoven's shorthand)²⁶ 70 The nineteenth-century opera composer Halévy pictured Lully sitting in his studio inventing only melodies and basso continuo, while two favorite apprentices, Lalousette and Colasse, took one sheet after another from the hand of their master to finish the orchestration – the first assembly-line system in musical history.

Convention governs divergence from notation + execution 72f. In the following illustration Muffat clarifies the considerable contrast that existed between notation and performance.

We see how rhythm is altered in the performance; script and execution are strikingly inconsistent. Such discrepancies cannot be comprehended from the modern point of view, with its striving for utmost clarity in notation. Yet alteration of rhythm was a common trend in the old practice of music. Therefore, the present-day interpreter, eager to perform these old masterpieces correctly, must reorientate himself in the intricate notation of this music. If the composer wrote those rhythmic patterns as he did – differently from the way they were to sound – he depended on the performer's knowledge of tradition.

No Bach tradition 76f. There is clearly a void of one hundred years in which Bach's scores were rarely played, and consequently no tradition of Bach performance could be handed down from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

Ad Bach: problem of the exploitation of later resources for earlier music 81 At the same time, to obtain a completely authentic picture of the problems in performing Bach, we must not overlook the facts, first, that today's performances take place in large concert halls and not in the St. Thomas Church, and that therefore the acoustics are different; second, that the master himself might have welcomed an opportunity of increased equipment. The question remains, however, how far he might have gone had he had the facilities of today's conductors. Could he, in his wildest dreams, have imagined the vast orchestral forces that perform today?

NB double stand against wilfulness and historicism (derive from the internal history of the works)

The ‘functional ornament’ (good idea of Dorian's, with many further consequences. The function of all that is accidental.²⁷ The performance itself is accidental, after all, in a manner of speaking the ornamentation of the text that is entirely subsumed by the text, as it were. The reading of the ornament is the schema of all music's decoding. Ad 89) To put it paradoxically: ornaments are functional. In other words, they are neither mere embellishments nor musical tapestry.

[9]

On the key character of ornaments: ad figured bass. 91f. Bach's greatest son, with his Versuch [über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen], contributed to the musical world something of far more than academic and musicological importance. This volume, coming as it does directly from the workshop of the practical musician […] offers us in fact a veritable encyclopedia of the interpretative problems of its period. […] They contain a realization not only of the style and interpretation of the two great baroque masters, Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, but also of all preceding and contemporary instrumental styles as expressed in English, French and Italian scores. Thus, the eclectic quality of the treatise becomes obvious and proves to be one of the great advantages of the Versuch. For all these historical and practical reasons, it is convenient to use this treatise as a ground plan for our presentation of ornaments. In the following pages, the different types of graces will be taken up in accordance with Philipp Emanuel's nine chapters on Manieren.

Standardization of dance 107 In dance music, likewise, ambiguity surrounds the meaning of different type names, and to a surprisingly intensified degree – surprising because, naturally, the dance music accompanied specific step patterns that were inevitably standardized, as in the case of minuet.

Pulse and tempo 115 Not only in the ever changing minuet, but in all the other fluctuating dance forms, the first and principal question to be settled is: What is the correct tempo? […] It was the methodical mind of Quantz that solved this problem half a century before the advent of Maelzel's invention. In his Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversière zu spielen, Quantz presents a method based on the human pulse. He assumed that there are eighty beats to the minute. This figure, in turn, is analogous to eighty time units on the metronome. Taking full advantage of Quantz's scheme, we easily translate his pulsations into the standard units of Maelzel's metronome. By mutual adjustment, any tempo can be stated precisely, eliminating ambiguity.

Account of the accelerando in the Rococo (116f., ad new tempi) A cross section of rather confusing courante designations can be gleaned from the following: ‘swift corantos’ (Shakespeare); ‘largo’ (Bassani); ‘rather quickly’ (Kuhnau); ‘pompously’ (Quantz). The reason for the variety of modes is the fact that the old dance has practically nothing in common with the later types called by the same name. As the Rococo lightened everything up, so the stately court courante gradually developed a moderate and eventually a fast tempo.

Affektenlehre, the mimetic element of interpretation and the context of their effect 139 Modern renditions of eighteenth-century music, aspiring to recall the spirit of that old time, cannot ignore substantially the ramifications of the Affektenlehre. Today it must be remembered that its laws controlled the old interpretation and that every eighteenth-century performer was expected to obey its rules. Reviewing first the general statements of various authorities, we learn that the musical expression of human emotions emerges as the final goal of interpretation.

Recognition and imitation of the affect 140 Unequivocally, Quantz demands that the performer recognize the affections expressed in a piece, always keeping his rendition in conformity with them. Thus, only interpretations based on an appropriate scrutiny of the affections, and their suitable musical application, are sanctioned.

Interpretation as imitation 144 As Lohlein in his Supervision in Violin Playing, Sulzer in his General Theory, and others have concluded, it is only when the performer fully experiences the composer's feeling that he is capable of arousing the corresponding emotion in those who listen to his performance.

crescendo: unity of composition and interpretation 149 However, beginning with Jommelli, the choice of modulation to piano or forte, crescendo or decrescendo, no longer resided in the will of the performer, but had to be sought in the instructions of the composer himself.

crescendo as a speciality (division of labour) 151 The difference between the earlier interpretations and those of Mannheim, as Rosamond Harding, G. Schünemann, and others show, is that an already recognized type of dynamic performance achieved a new tone-poetic effect and finally became a speciality, celebrated through the splendour of the Mannheim orchestral renditions.

End of figured bass and end of interpretative freedom 157 The comparison of the classical score with its predecessor reveals a further departure: the basso continuo has vanished from the script. In the orchestral and vocal scores of preclassical times, we see the figured bass part as an inevitable characteristic of concerted rendition. Thus, the keyboard part was executed ad libitum, interpreted in an improvisatory way. But improvisation, as the art of making music extemporaneously, ceases to be a factor in classical interpretation.

Dorian's undialectical view of subject and object [157] If interpretation as a subjective art could not become fully entrenched in music prior to the Renaissance and the awakening of individualized expression, then objective interpretation found its logical inception in the classical score. It is only since the latter part of the eighteenth century that sufficient clues had been made available, by the new classical script, to provide all the information necessary for a performance of work-fidelity.

Phrasing 159 (NB phrasing one of the core problems of ‘sense’). Phrasing is a feature common to both speech and music: it serves the same purpose in the language of words as in the language of tones. What may be called articulation in music is equivalent to diction in speech. Thus it is clear that phrasing occurs everywhere: in the tune of the torch singer and in the aria of Caruso; in the speech of the idiot and in that of Shakespeare. While phrasing is universal and ageless, in the sense that it has been exercised since Adam and Eve and the archbeginnings of musical utterance, the applied discipline of phrasing in the performance of music is young.

Sulzer's warning about the strong beats 162 (on the aging of modernity) In Sulzer's encyclopedia, General Theory of the Fine Arts, the following explanation is provided: ‘After the first note of each measure, the other strong beats should be less marked. The first note of a bar within a phrase must not be overaccentuated. Failure to heed this may spoil the whole performance. The caesuras are the commas of the song, which, as in speech, must be made manifest by a moment of relaxation.’

Connection between dynamics and phrasing: unity of elements (NB this unity is musical sense. This is one of the central theses). 162f. In 1834, Pierre Baillot (with Beethoven's friend Kreutzer, a leading exponent of the French violin school) states in L'art du violon: ‘Slight separations, such as rests of short duration, are not always indicated by the composer. The player must therefore provide them, when he sees that it is necessary, by letting the last note of the phrase die away. Indeed, in certain cases he must even let it end shortly before the completion of its normal duration.’

Good passage against false objectivity 163. Today there are many interpreters who, in a conscientious attempt to be objective, believe that the omission of bowings in the manuscript forces them to make the same omission in their playing.

Concept of musical sense and phrasing (central: 164) It suffices to quote Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique (1775), which contributes the following on the topic ‘phrase’: ‘A singer who feels his phrases and their accent is a man of good taste. But one who renders only notes, keys, scales, and intervals, without comprehending the meaning of the phrases – even if he be precise otherwise – is nothing but a “note-gobbler” ’ (n'est qu'un Croque-sol).

Strength and dissonance (ad Wagner study.²⁸ 168) Further clues to dynamic distinction are provided by the harmony as such. Philipp Emanuel Bach points out that every tone foreign to the key can very well stand a forte, regardless of whether it occurs in dissonance or consonance. This is very convincing: the dissonance had been the enlivening element of all music since the era of medieval counterpoint.

‘Theme’ and dynamics: connection between form and dynamics 168 He [Quantz] also explains that the theme of the composition calls for dynamic emphasis.

Haydn and progress 177 However ‘Papa’ certainly has no place as a clue to Haydn interpretation today, in an attempt to produce an old fashioned gemütlich atmosphere of music-making, whereas in reality Haydn's scores represent the spirit of progress, depth, and artistic courage.

Dorian's rule of tempo (the musicological tempo) 180 The life-work of Mozart and Haydn falls into a time before the invention of the metronome, and so the difficult task of determining the right tempo in classical and earlier scores can be based only on the musical material in the script, in conjunction with musicological facts.

historical relativity of the text 181 (ad new tempi) In other words, notes that look long to the modern eye meant something quite different in their day: the brevis c1-fig-5043 , the semibrevis c1-fig-5044 , and the minim c1-fig-5045 are laden with connotations of slowness only in the minds of certain modern interpreters.

Acceleration through repetition (ad historicity of tempo 185f.) Hence Quantz's precept: ‘When a composition (especially a fast one) is repeated (for instance, an allegro of a concerto or a symphony), it must be somewhat quicker the second time, in order not to put the listener to sleep. […]’ On the contrary, it is almost a criterion of acceptable classical performance that the tempo primo be resumed at every recapitulation.

NB the abstractness of the term espressivo must be retrieved. It relates not to the expression of something determinate, but rather to the speech-character of music.

Mozart's rubato 189 (criticize) [Dorian (p. 188) cites from a letter by Mozart of 24 October 1777:] ‘No one seems to understand the tempo rubato in an adagio, where the left hand does not know anything about it.’ First, it now becomes clear that Mozart himself played rubato – a discovery of great importance, since the majority of acclaimed performers strictly avoid the rubato as absurd in Mozart, which in turn is in keeping with the point of view of the dictionary on this very problem. Second, an insight is gained into the specific rubato technique of Mozart, according to his own description. The master himself discloses the secret – ‘the left hand does not know anything about it’. This, as will become apparent later, is the foundation of any rubato playing. Moreover, if one substitutes melody for the right hand and accompaniment for the left hand, it becomes a general prescription for performing music rubato.

Rubato as expression 190 The purpose of his [Pier Francesco Tosi's] technique of ‘robbed’ time was expression. Rubato was thus used where a particular phrase required special expressive emphasis.

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NB The problem of interpretation lies in the dialectic of expression and construction

Beethoven's ambivalence towards the metronome 198 On the manuscript of his song Nord oder Süd, Beethoven wrote the notation, ‘100 according to Maelzel. But this must be applicable only to the first measures, for feeling also has its tempo and this cannot be entirely expressed in this figure’. NB Dual nature of reification. Protest of ‘life’. Cf. later Debussy-Bergson 300).

espressivo as ritardando 207 We can find nowhere in Beethoven a specifically prescribed rubato. As we shall see in a later section, the literal instruction, tempo rubato, was introduced by Chopin. Yet there are evidently passages where the aggregate of Beethoven's markings amounts to what the rubato instruction represents in later periods: a variation of time with gradual modification. For example, in the opening movement of Opus 111, the original instruction, allegro con brio ed appassionato, dissolves completely upon the very first appearance of the second theme. Here, meno allegro appears in the second half of the measure, followed by two measures marked ritardando.

Element of imagination and fidelity 220 In striking contrast to the attitude of wilfulness toward the score, there also prevails, during the nineteenth century, the contrasting thought of allegiance to the score.

The original manuscript 224 One of the most characteristic features in modern interpretation is the increasing tendency to turn to the original manuscripts of great composers as the dependable basis for proper rendition. Studying the composer's manuscript, rather than the printed edition, is the ideal way of approaching a master's score. Schumann's critique 224f. Nevertheless, while Schumann stresses the objective approach by insisting upon reference to the manuscript, he at the same time warns the interpreter against blind acceptance of every detail of the manuscript and against an exaggeration of the conception of objectivity.

Character through musical content 227 central (NB find passage in Schumann) In the composer's own view, then, the Schumann interpreter must, first of all, grasp the character of his scores from the musical content – from the very structure of the score. […] If we trace Schumann's ideology further, we see how he stamps himself as an aesthete of the Affektenlehre, with the following viewpoint on tempo: ‘You know how I dislike quarrelling about tempo, and how for me only the inner measure of the movement is conclusive. Thus, an allegro of one who is cold by nature always sounds lazier than a slow tempo by one of sanguine temperament. With the orchestra, however, the proportions are decisive. Stronger and denser masses are capable of bringing out the detail as well as the whole with more emphasis and importance; whereas, with smaller and finer units, one must compensate for the lack of resonance by pushing forward in the tempo.’

Wagner's supple tempi (ad vitalism)

functional rubato 239 Another observer of Chopin's time variation is Ignaz Moscheles, who explains Chopin's rubato as a specified means of gliding over harsh modulations in a fairy-like way with delicate fingers. Thus, rubato was applied in a purely functional way, so unlike the abuse of it by many modern executants with whom it degenerates from slight variation into a disregard of time – a vulgarized licence of meter and confusion of rhythm smuggled into the Chopin performance in the guise of so-called tradition.

‘objective’ interpretation precisely of subjectivist music 246f. In spite of the obvious emphasis on the composer's subjective experience, there is, in his expressed views, an insistence on objectivity in interpretation. It is strictly demanded that the interpreter regard himself as nothing more than the loyal medium of the composer.

Tempo as a central problem 280 Taking literally Beethoven's word ‘tempo is the body of performance’, Wagner demonstrates how the technique of correct interpretation centers around the setting of the right tempo […].

extreme adagio + allegro. ‘Tempo variation’ in Wagner 281f. The true adagio can hardly be played too slowly; the naïve allegro is usually a quick alla breve. […] After considering the problem of tempo primo, Wagner approaches that of tempo modification, bitterly complaining that the technique of time variation was utterly unknown to performers. But to his mind this very factor was the vital principle of all music-making.

Meistersinger prelude 282 For the modern interpreter, the composer's own illustration of the proper rendering of his Meistersinger prelude, in a flexible four-four time, is most important. Here modifications serve the purpose of exposing discriminately the diverse themes as interwoven in the polyphonic web.

Wagner in favour of tempo modifications 283 Wagner demands tempo changes in the course of the opening movement; yet this was generally treated by conductors as a single unit.

The subjective element of objective interpretation (against Dorian 284) Summing up, we realize that Wagner's interpretative ideology is that of his age. All the traits of Romanticism are embodied in this one great mind: extreme subjectivity seeks the strange company of a passionate striving for extreme loyalty.

Dorian's undialectical view 285f. The fact is, Verdi went even farther in emphasizing radical objectivity of rendition than did Wagner. Not torn like the latter between antagonistic ideologies (of work-fidelity on the one hand, and the claim to the interpreter's right to re-create on the other), Verdi was most tyrannical in demanding unconditional obedience to his scores.

Against the opposition ‘theatrical/historical’ 293 Bülow believed, however, in a third power also, namely, in himself. And so he sails in completely subjective waters, recklessly changing eternal words, such as Bach's Chromatic Fantasy, and showing, in his editing of Scarlatti or Beethoven, his own theatrical showmanship rather than a true historical approach.

Virtuoso and circus (control over nature) 299 The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very much like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always hope that something dangerous may happen. M. Ysaye may play the violin with conductor Colonne on his shoulders, or M. Pugno may conclude his piece by lifting the piano with his teeth. [Claude Debussy, La Revue blanche, 1 May 1901]

Debussy's anti-mechanism 300 In La revue blanche [of 15 May 1913], we read his [Debussy's] comment: ‘At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes, like the automatic weighing machines. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disk at his will? Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible?’

Satie, Dada, jazz 304f. If one reads the list of instruments intended to be used for background noises in the performance of Satie's ballet Parade – sirens, typewriters, airplanes, dynamos – it becomes clear that our machine age has fully entered the realm of performance.

historical correctness: severing of the dialectical relationship 311 The principle of historical correctness, one of the most significant trends in modern interpretation, had its beginning long before the dawn of the twentieth century: we have only to recall the work-fidelity of the romantic era to realize that the objective approach is not an achievement of our age. […] Supported by great scores, important ideologies, undreamed-of technical accomplishments, the trend to correctness in musical rendition is now an established principle.

NB	Objectivity is not historical correctness. Today, this latter is mostly decorative, candle light – subjective in the bad sense, i.e. in contradiction of the terms of the objective spirit.

No pre-stabilized harmony between composition and the historically available means of interpretation (against historicism 312) With such a general turning to the past world of music, emphasis on a legitimate old style of performance is but the logical consequence. If baroque scores are to be played with historical correctness, then the historical instruments actually used in readings by their composers, and not our modern ones, must be employed.

Schönberg's Bach²⁹ 312f. Not only the need for the return to the old sound ideal, but simultaneously the absurdity of certain modern arrangements is indicated: it is historically incorrect to substitute the modern orchestra palette for the old one […].

Discuss problem 318 Probably the best-known example [of Beethoven's use of the horn] is found in the opening movement of the Fifth Symphony. In the fifty-ninth measure, the theme is given to the horns; the analogous passage of the recapitulation, however, is given only to the bassoons. Why Beethoven resorted in the second version to bassoons is obvious: since he could not use the stepped notes of the E flat horn for the expressive power of this phrase in C major, the only alternative available was to substitute bassoons for horns. With the advanced technique of the instrument today, conductors do what Beethoven could not have done in 1805, and use the horn in both cases, relieving the bassoons from a task for which they are not well suited.

Stravinsky's positivism³⁰ 329 For the schooling of the young interpreter, Stravinsky's suggestion is noteworthy that it would be wiser to start the education of the young musician by first giving him a knowledge of what is, and only then tracing backward, step by step, to what has been.

Schönberg's ideal of insight 333 The romantic method necessarily consists of a heightening of the surface luster, rather than what Schönberg demands – balance and symmetry of presentation, where true insight into the construction governs the outline as well as all the details of the interpretation.

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Elimination of the interpreter as ‘middleman’ (342) We have only to think of the possibility of an apparatus that will permit the composer to transmit his music directly into a recording medium without the help of the middleman interpreter.

Standardization of performance through the gramophone record 342f. One of the direct consequences of recordings is the means they provide for improving the average interpretative standards. With the renditions of the great musicians available on disks, the mediocre performer has a priceless opportunity to orientate himself by model performances. […] But there is another side of the picture: such a second-hand interpretation, accomplished through imitation, is bound to lack the conviction of a personalized conception. The student, before the convenient availability of the gramophone, was forced to acquire his knowledge of a masterwork by direct study of the score, playing it on the piano, or just reading it. This approach sharpened his ear and imagination.

On the end of musical interpretation 343–44

the works' process of becoming uninterpretable³¹
the ‘writing’ of the sound
the standardization of interpretation
no interaction between performer + listener Such interaction of artist and audience does not exist in the case of the electric rendition. Neither is the interpreter before the microphone stimulated by an audience, nor can the listener to a record or a broadcast performance be influenced beyond the aural sensation.

On Richard Wagner's ‘Über das Dirigieren’ [On Conducting] (G.S. 8, p. 261ff)³²

Ad style.:	the malignant growth
	intimacies³⁸

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Concerning the historical character of interpretation, the most recent experiences should be returned to. In the Germany of Furtwängler and the Busch Quartet,³⁹ we had to advocate polemically an ideal of music-making that was, in a certain sense, ‘positivistic’ (albeit always in the strongest opposition to the ‘new functionalists’); in Toscanini's America one that was ‘expressive’; and not only at the theoretical level, but in all nuances of actual reproduction. From this perhaps: true interpretation is always polemical (very clear in Wagner's case).

Title of the study: True Interpretation (??)

[15]

Among the arguments against musical historicism, the one stating that in older – ‘pre-classical’ – music timbre was in no way a constitutive element is by no means the least.⁴⁰ The ‘colouring’ of the Bachian organ and the Bachian orchestra is incomparably more external than in Wagner or Schönberg, and therefore ‘authenticity’ here has a far less objective meaning – it is a matter of style, not of musical sense. One need not disregard the fact that this music too was bound to its sonic material, not least in the delicate sphere of the clavichord, in order to still accept the sacrifice. (All interpretation involves a sacrifice. Wagner knew this only too well. He demanded valve instruments even for music written for natural brass, and in this sense retouched Beethoven,⁴¹ while in the foreword to the Tristan score he concedes the loss of true horn character through the chromatic mechanism).⁴² In addition, the deciding pre-classical instruments performing the continuo are by their nature so mechanical (namely organ and harpsichord) as to exclude any structural, more than stylistic relationship to the musical content; in fact, they even contradict its highly developed differentiation. The authentic reproduction of Bachian construction therefore demands the dissolution of the authentic Bachian sound.⁴³ Something of these matters also concerns – as Wagner showed – Beehoven and all music prior to the emancipation of the orchestra.

The critique of historicism must be carried out with a very close eye on Wagner's treatise on the delivery of the 9th Symphony (G.S., 9, p 231 ff.),⁴⁴ whose proximity to the musical material probably makes it the most significant among Wagner's theoretical writings. On this:

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The dialectic of retouching. The change to the B major solo quartet passage from the finale of the 9th Symphony. The demand for a clarification of the composition here leads to a decisive infringement upon it. If true interpretation is the work's retrieval, then it is at once also its dissolution. The realization of Wagner's demand for a performance corresponding purely to the music's sense destroys the work – and unconditionally every work – because the insight serving as the ideal of interpretation by necessity offers, at the same time, the evidence for the fragility of this sense (NB in Beethoven's last works the fragility of sense is itself an element of this sense. The tenor's ‘confusing’ bar before it takes up the thread imitatively, highly characteristic of the very late Beethoven, should be retrieved!). It is a deciding factor here that there is no boundary between legitimate intervention and abuse. Its establishment is nothing other than the middle course of conformism. With inalienable consistency, rather, Wagner's reason, measured according to the ideal of the work, heads inexorably towards an alteration of the work. The work changes and disintegrates before the ideal of its own truth – this is the secret of its inner historicity.

Interpretation concerns the presentation of the dialectical image of the composition. The reflection upon Der Freischütz.⁴⁸ In 1820 people did not ‘believe’ in ghosts any more, indeed presumably less, than today. Nonetheless, the illusionary reproduction of the wolf's glen [Wolfsschlucht], which even children would laugh at today, was possible at that time. And not only because of the death of fantasy, which was then still able to conceive the spirit world without any empirical reality, while today it would only be tolerable as a ‘fact’. But rather: in fate tragedy [Schicksalsdrama] and the Romanticism of ‘dark forces’ one in fact finds an expression of the enervation of the world's demystification. Romanticism feeds off the fright of the Enlightenment, and the fact that this fright – Hugo's nouveau frisson about Baudelaire and Poe⁴⁹ describes the boundary – died away is the reason for the ‘laughable’ nature of the magical opera. The object of interpretation is the arousal of the fright inherent in each work. If it has disappeared, then the work is uninterpretable – yet at the same time requires interpretation. But this fright is the aura of the historical images unfolding objectively from the works.

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The proof that works become uninterpretable should be developed with reference to opera direction, which is particularly sensitive in this respect. The wolf's glen of Der Freischütz and the swan of Lohengrin.⁵⁰ The wild hunt and the swan, presented in sensory terms, are impossible – their apologia transforms the works into illustrated magazines. If one abandons them and changes them, for example, into natural symbols, or signs such as the swan as a cone of light, the works are evened out to that generalized human level which means the death of all art. Even Wagner's operatic allegory of an extremely ahistorical philosophy clung tightly to the drastic theatrical illusion, and King Ludwig, who saw nothing in Lohengrin but the swan, understood more than the most spiritual interpretation. For the content – which by no means coincides with the supposed philosophy – is the historical image: its transience alone is the ‘eternity’ of the work that contains history. The dialectical images reveal themselves through the props. But this also applies to the music, whose gestural characters – as the virtuoso imitates them – are the equivalent of the props. The ciphers of passion in the Appassionata – d'Albert humming along.⁵¹ Today, these gestures can only be invoked – Furtwängler – and go against the construction. But if this latter alone remains, devoid of mimesis – if the work is interpreted ‘in itself’ to a degree, then its content, which consists in its gesture for others, its historical aspect, sinks out of sight. The work that can be interpreted in itself is at the same time – by closing itself to the subject – objectively uninterpretable

L.A. 16 June 1946

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On the critique of historicism: the fact that the pre-subjective, the ontological inherent being [Ansich] of music which the historically objective ideal strives for, is relished precisely as a stimulus in the most extreme case, just as Stravinsky emerged from the archaic sphere of stimuli in Debussy and Ravel. So, the form of reaction to historicism denies historicism's own content – its objectivity is a mere mask for subjectivity, whereas true objectivity traverses that very subjectivity. – Usually, to be sure, the present objectivism is merely a manifestation of regression, the musical reflex of an anthropology that liquidates the subject because – and by the fact that – there is no society. Therefore, historico-philosophically, the aspect of resentment in objectivism. It reflects the untruth of the collective. The schema of the youth movement.⁵²

In music, the expressionless is expression.⁵³

The dialectic of retouching to be developed with reference to Wagner's study on the 9th Symphony is complicated by the fact that it presupposes, in the coherence that is to be created by interpretation (and which thus dissolves the work), the concept of the integral work. First of all, however, this is native only to the German tradition, and even here not unconditionally so; Schubert or Bruckner make a mockery of this notion (and not only out of insufficiency, but owing to the content. What is bad in both cases is not the element of dissociation per se, but rather their pseudomorphosis to integral music – the ‘false’ Beethoven); great composers such as Mussorgsky or Janáček are entirely exterritorial to this. I must therefore:

either restrict the category of disintegration to integral works, to the tradition of the musical ‘system’ (which strikes me as arbitrary and external)

or introduce a deeper notion of the ideality and consistency of the work as that of unity within the diversity of motivic-thematic construction. I have had this latter in mind for a long time, but it distances itself from the ‘condition’ of music's material quality so that it can hardly be grasped in genuinely musical categories any longer. [In the left margin, across the text:] NB so Beethoven would only be treated as an extreme model for the dialectic of the integral

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Perhaps the solution lies in the fact that the works' decline, which is after all immanent to them, makes up a part of their intention, so that unity in Schubert therefore consists precisely in the disintegration of unity (NB here the deciding importance of the contrast overlooked in Wagner – the unmediated in Schubert. Classical totality is, like Hegel's philosophy, universal mediation), so that a true interpretation of Schubert would consist in a representation of disintegration as something arising from the totality – epic totality is that which ‘grows tired’ of itself,⁵⁴ falls asleep, dissociates itself. Admittedly this presupposes Beethoven's theory, in particular that of epic character and late style.

Reproduction is a form (place at the start)

I.e. the work requires it without it following from the work.

Concerning the older material

Three conductors Anbruch 8, 7: p. 315ff.⁵⁵

Retrieval as invocation (only Furtwängler essay)

Ad Nachtmusik.⁵⁶

The works live on in their disintegration. Light music⁵⁷

(NB the problem of 2 musical spheres should be addressed by the theory of reproduction)

p. 2 formula about freedom, insight, objectivity.⁵⁸

The thesis of the works' disintegration per se, their objective historical dynamics,⁵⁹ should not be conjured up, but rather justified.

Concerning mechanization both things must be mentioned: immanent necessity and objective – ‘technical’ – inauthenticity.

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[22]

As long as so little is known about Greek music, statements on the origin of musical notation remain unproven suppositions. But a critique of the seemingly natural, reasonable attitude that musical notation arose as an aid to memory – to prevent living music, song and dance, from being forgotten – is philosophically justified. (sources) The thesis is rationalistic, a projection of later needs onto the archaic. Aids to memory become necessary when the memory – in the face of the universal mediation of experience that severs the connection between subject and object, which leaves the powerful trace in the memory – becomes problematic: by being burdened with countless distant, not ‘experienced’ information, and ultimately by a weakening of the memory, the organ for that which has been, through a complete adaptation to whatever is the case. Children require no aid to memory; it is not remembering through language that they find difficult, but rather its ‘supporting’ concretion, namely writing. It cannot have been any different among primitive peoples. Whenever music is made in the traditional manner, without being bound to a fixed text, the memory proves strong: the rhythmic models retained by primitive peoples are so complex that no civilized person, other than the most highly trained musician, could hope to achieve the same (still something of this in jazz). And the modifications in primitive and traditional music-making (the former being the rudiment of the latter) are a function of the memory, not of its failure: what has passed is still so present that it does not become an estranged sediment, but lives on: its change testifies to its presence – it is held onto identically and reified precisely as something forgotten, so it is easy enough to present notation as the enemy of remembering, of the memory itself, and as its reconstitution through destruction. Musical notation therefore cannot have come about as a mere aide-memoire, as the harmless preservation of an elusive substance. It rather points to precisely the disturbance of that organic state in which the memory is at home, and where the distinction between now and before is not firmly established. That means: to power. Musical notation is an element of discipline. It dispossesses the memory by supporting it. The cultic dances and songs are withdrawn from the unity of remembering and change. They are intended to be forgotten in order to fix themselves, to change into that identical repetition which defines the music of barbaric cultures. The tribe is supposed to divest itself of any spontaneity of expression; it is to obey, not to understand, and not to interfere. The origin of the musical text is identical to how it presents itself once more in the late maturity of art music: taboo. The first units of musical writing are the rigidly even drumbeats of the barbarians, and perhaps musical writing per se is originally an imitation of those rhythmic-disciplinary systems which themselves already spatialize temporal relations in music through the ‘atemporal’ regularity of their divisions. Every written note is the image of a beat: the objectification of music, the conversion of the temporal flow into a spatial one, is not only formally a spatialization, but according to its original content, namely the spatialization of experience for the purpose of controlling it. ‘All reification is a forgetting’⁶⁰ – making available what has passed at once makes it irretrievable. Therein lies the desperate utopia of all musical reproduction: to retrieve the irretrievable through availability. All music-making is a recherche du temps perdu. (NB notation thus belongs to the geometric-musical category, it is anti-mimetic and anti-expressive already in its origin, and later develops in this state of being). But this entails no less than the dialectic of all music up to the point of its liquidation. It only became possible for music to develop through graphic mediation, reification, and availability – musical writing is the organon of musical control over nature, and it was precisely here that musical subjectivity came about as a separation from the unconscious collective. The reification and independence of the musical text is the precondition for aesthetic freedom. At the same time, however, musical writing also contains the opposite to the musical – to its own content. Rationalization, the condition for all autonomous art, is at once its enemy. Notation always also regulates, inhibits, and suppresses whatever it notates and develops – and all musical reproduction labours at this. Formulated more precisely: the difference is constitutive to the very act of writing music down. The spatialization of the temporal is necessary, not simply empirically inadequate. Autonomy and fetishism are two sides of the same truth. Fidelity to the work is the obedience that ultimately destroys the work. It is only the social obedience of that fidelity that enabled music to oppose the existing society. It ultimately draws music into society's system (NB relate everything much more specifically to writing – interpretation)

20 June 1946

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Playing the exact text from memory as a reconstruction of music's immanent aspect of memory. Already advocated by Schumann⁶¹ (find!). Introduced into chamber music by Kolisch. Strict performance from memory is true freedom.

Engagement with the relativism of musical interpretation, most likely according to ‘changes undergone by the works’. Relativism is always specific to the approach that transcends the matter itself, and dissolves as soon as its immanent laws are uncovered. This should be understood in the sense not of dogmatic absolutism (the complement to relativism), however, but rather of conceptual and terminological work. Develop more concretely. All musical work presupposes the possibility of distinguishing right and wrong, both for the composer and for the performer: the apperception of any musical sense consists precisely in this distinction, and with reference to this there is no difference for the musical experience between the ‘elementary’ distinctions of right and wrong notes (which after all are not physical distinctions, but rather contain the whole categorial apparatus of music) and the assessment of the correct or incorrect rendition of an entire complex piece. Compared to that necessity of musical experience which determines itself, relativism is wholly abstract and external. Things could perhaps be different in terms of formal logic, but not in terms of the experience itself, as every step deeper into the matter is at once a step into the necessity of its presentation. The work's essence is in direct agreement with this necessity. Philosophically speaking, relativism presupposes, in the coincidental nature of interpretation, the thing-like separation of the object from the subject, which can ‘view’ the former in different ways, where this separation is to be understood as something produced, and it is precisely its dialectic that defines reproduction. Whoever has a view of the work is estranged from it; whoever spontaneously understands it recognizes⁶² it.

[24]

Relativism is at least truthful in one respect: our access to objectivity remains coincidental. The insight from working with musicians that the most important thing is to say something at all. The monadological organization of the work of art enables every door to lead to the centre, every aspect to its laws. Even indeterminate or incorrect exposition, if it enters the discipline of the work, is a moment of true interpretation. Cf. Kolisch: ‘something is always wrong’.⁶³

If one were to confront the leader of a string quartet during work with the relativity of his demands, he would not understand, rather falling back on technical casuistry, and this narrow-mindedness is – precisely in a philosophical sense – the higher level of insight.

A conductor presents a work in senseless, mechanical symmetry. Consciousness recognizes the contradiction to the work and demands a representation of the sense. This representation in turn contradicts the text and unity. So: it relativizes. But in determinate negation. Furtwängler advocates the truth against Wendel.⁶⁴ Though the former may slip into untruth, the latter does not become any truer as a result. Critique is the objective unfolding of the dialectic sealed within the work. Musical interpretation is essentially always critique. Relativity is not the equality of different ‘views’, but rather the instrument of their abolition. True interpretation is a strictly predefined idea, but one that, for the sake of art music's fundamental antinomy, must remain essentially unrealizable.

Playing from memory Schumann I, pp. 147–148. Very important.

[25]

The most rigorous interpretation still contains an element of freedom: not the insufficiency of writing, namely the cavity that is left for the performer in ‘objective’ music, but rather a gestural element that is fundamentally beyond the sphere of notation – its idiomatic component. Kreisler⁶⁵ and Kolisch do not speak their language despite but rather through rigour, and this is the legitimate place for the performer's subjectivity. Categories such as violin tone, attack etc., in general the idea of speaking the instrument's language. Also Caruso.⁶⁶ No great interpretation without this component. It shows the element of truth in virtuosity. If this element that exceeds mere reproduction, this independent aspect of vocal or instrumental language, is present in the performer, then it is precisely the work's objectivity, which remains contingent on the subject as something it is unable to subsume, that cannot be realized. This is one of the most profound starting-points for a dialectic of interpretation. It is precisely this component that is destroyed by positivistic performers, and this very aspect is misconstrued as fidelity. – That idiomatic component is the sole condition for concretion. Justify the impossibility of subsumption in particular.

In order to justify this non-subsumption, the problem work – material must be returned to. In the idiom, the performer presents the work's material against the work itself – one could almost say the music against the composition. The idiom, the absolutely particular, is – precisely in relation to the work – the general. – Perhaps one can speak of the character of the interpreting subject.

Why is the change undergone by the works objective?

the naïve-realistic work in itself is unrecognizable cf.
it does not exist but rather only ever as a Benjamin
relationship to the material S.X⁶⁷
each work as a relationship to the material
the work as a social relationship
the work cannot be ‘reconstructed’; reconstruction in particular has its arbitrary component.
recognizing the work as the opposite to its naïve being-in-itself dissolves precisely this latter.
the change of interpretation is not free, but rather subject to Right and Wrong.
the change adheres to laws.

The subjective component is contained in this, but not as something that can be separated from the matter itself, something contingent; rather something that coincides with it. Interpretation is no matter of taste. Where the question of taste is still the decisive one, the problem of interpretation has not yet been posed seriously.

Ad ancient musical notation. Riemann I, 1. 238ff:⁶⁸

Part II⁷²

83:	Coussemaker's⁷³ theory of the origin of neumes in accent-markings (prosody). Also O. Fleischer⁷⁴ Ed. de Coussemaker was the first, in his ‘Histoire de l'harmonie au moyen âge’ (1852, p. 158), to suggest explicitly that neumes had developed from Greek accent-markings (prosodies) of the alexandrine grammarians, and this notion has not been abandoned since. It was taken up at particular length by Oskar Fleischer in his ‘Neumenstudien’ (parts 1–2, 1895–97), though the accumulation of all manner of obscure historical detail (he even brings in the Chinese and the Indians) seems to have been used there to conceal the lack of a genuine, rigorous proof.
84:	imitation of hand-movements⁷⁵
85:	Central passage. […] until finally, at the start of the 8th century, the Anglo-Saxon (‘Neumenstudien’ II. 8) or Irishman (ibid. p. 68) Ceolfried made the first attempt to develop melodic symbols – to be written above the texts – from the beating-indications of cheironomy, thus becoming the inventor of neumic notation.
85:	– Below: systems of accentuation Fleischer also goes on to develop, on the basis of an Irish treatise from the 16th(!) century and an (unspecified) ‘old druid work’ of Franco-Gallic provenance, the theory that the Irish had their own ancient system of accentuation, which differed from that assigned by Fleischer to the Greeks and the Orient – with oscillations in seconds around a pitch-centre – in the use of thirds instead of seconds for the customary vocal inflections.

NB if notation mimics music, then performance must mimic the written music.

The clarification of musical notation is transformed mimesis.
It is non-intentional.
It is both rhythmic and melodic at once (ad unity of elements).
It is authoritarian: the air of the conductor.
Even today, the conductor's hand still traces the line.

Riemann considers the question of the neumes' origin a secondary one (criticize) Therefore the question of the ultimate roots of neumic notation is of secondary significance for us. We are interested not primarily in the nature and meaning of the musical symbols, but rather in the nature of the songs to which they are supposed to refer, and we have found sufficient cause to suppose that the songs had a wealth of melodic shaping already in the first centuries of Christendom to which the primitive stages of musical notation assumed by Coussemaker or Fleischer could in no sense do full justice.

My hypothesis: in musical notation, the cheironomic (mimetic) element has been joined by a second, significative element, and only through this latter could ambiguity be eliminated. See:

92	Neumic notation was therefore not a genuine musical notation at all before it was connected to letter-notation (via the stave).
92	(NB the same twofold root of Greek writing??)
95	direct vividness⁷⁶ of our musical notation. We then recognize with awe and wonder that the aspect of direct vividness, which lifts our musical notation of today to such celestial heights above all other forms of notation, is inherited from neumic notation, that our notation is simply a form thereof that has been developed consistently throughout the centuries. The first precondition for a just assessment of the value of neumes without lines is the assumption of a limited number of melodies passed on through direct transmission by singing and imitating; their purpose lies not in fixing these melodies in a notation that determines every individual pitch, but rather in the particular manner of their adaptation to each respective text. […] If, as has been reliably recorded, the choral directors indicated the melodic contours through hand-movements, then they will doubtless have relied on fixed graphic schemes for this. It goes without saying, on the other hand, that not every singer in the chorus will also have owned a book with such notations, simply because of the costliness of the songbooks. The chorus learned the melodies in singing-school, and also had to know the many texts from memory; but, for each performance, the cheironomic choral director saw to it that the setting of the text was carried out in the manner appropriate to that particular case. For this purpose, however, a limited number of symbols would have been sufficient.
	(extremely important page)
	[27]
	the use of neumes presupposed direct transmission.
	purpose of neumic notation: not a fixing of the melodies, but rather adaptation to the text (cultic discipline). Main passage.
	Gestural presentation of the melody. (NB so not simply the rhythm but also the melos was gestural: but that means non-intentional).
96	the symbol in musical notation as an accent-marking. For, in fact, the number of actual elements in neumic notation was only small; first of all, there are those for single notes, for which it has been argued, no doubt correctly, that they derive from the accents used by the alexandrine grammarians, or at least that they correspond to those in their idea.⁷⁷
106f.	addition of Latin letter-notation. It is beyond doubt that, in the 10th century, it became common practice for any instrumental notation (for organ, rotta etc.) to use the first letters of the alphabet; this began north of the Alps. The original meaning of the note-letters was ABCDEFGA=cdefgabc′ […].
	(NB My view: neumic notation is not an unambiguous significative indication, but rather a regulative of tradition. The difficulties of deciphering, because one searches rationalistically for the wrong thing: unambiguity.)
	(NB all problems of neumic notation are contained in modern notation)
169	Guido's reform as the synthesis of neumes and letter-notation. Guido himself thus saw the new pitch-notation he had developed on the one hand as a more convenient use of letter-notation, but on the other hand also as a continuation of neumic notation.
188	mensural notation as an expression of the duration of the notes = the separation of music from text rhythm. Rather, the practice of connecting different texts appears only at the same time as the complete emancipation of melody from the rhythm of the text, which allows quite different possibilities aside from connecting texts, for example the rendition of the same text in free temporal variation, or the juxtaposition of texts with entirely different structures. This emancipation became possible through a new reform in musical notation that expressed the duration of the individual notes through the shape of the symbols, i.e. by introducing into the notation an element that had been almost entirely foreign to it until then. It is entirely unclear what actually led to this complete revolution in compositional technique.
199	Influence of mensural notation on composing. One cannot simply say that the emancipation of musical rhythm from the immanent rhythm of the text through the introduction of duration-values into the notation immediately constituted a form of artistic progress. But it is beyond doubt that it paved the way for it; indeed, one will have to assume that the men who carried out this reform were clearly aware of opening up completely new possibilities for art. The reform was probably stimulated by the needs of instrumental music, which for lack of any textual rhythm required some means of fixing its rhythms if it hoped ever to move beyond free improvisation, or a retention of the few conventional rhythmic types required for the dances, to a greater freedom of shaping.

True interpretation is the perfect imitation of musical writing.

Ritter's theory etc. Origin of German Tragic Drama 212ff.⁷⁸

Two elements of musical notation Riemann I, 1, 61. I already remarked, in my Studies on the History of Musical Notation (1878), upon the fact that the symbols in instrumental notation refer to two elements, which merged in earlier times. The symbols in the lower octave clearly refer to a diatonic scale with the first letters of the alphabet Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ = g f e d c H A G,⁷⁹ whereas those in the middle register classify the pitches with the initials of the names of the strings on the cithara: Nete, Paranete, Trite etc. It would seem logical to view the former notation as that of the aulos-players, and the latter as that of the citharists.

NB the mimic nature of music can be divided into expression (which enters pseudomorphosis with language intention materiality) and construction that holds onto the gestural aspect in its pure state, but as such, without expression, holds on without subjectivity, as it were, and objectifies. Music as art is an attempt to reconcile these elements, and this reconciliation is the purpose of reproduction, which transforms expression into construction and construction into expression.

[28]

Concerning intentionality in music and language

Every character in a word is like a grille through which meaning shines forth by breaking free of its sensual trace, its phonetic echo. Every note is the unconscious imprint of a sound, and gains a share in its meaning only through configuration.

deduce changes

the rigidity of the symbol misses the music's gestural character
the score's ‘appearance’ misses the construction (careful towards⁸⁰? the end of the previous chapter)

The written notes have an independent existence that is in motion: this is the subjective side, which music, because it is not unambiguous in itself, but reified only through the force of signification, continues to go against reification.⁸¹

The arbitrariness of the relationship between notation & music makes each fluctuate in relation to the other.

The immanent character of the music is always the present, precisely not eternal, i.e. the old musical symbols also apply to the now, which thus falls into them.

The image does not directly reach the construction, for the latter only unfolds from the former.

One must transform the symbols into imitation, and the image into insight. Neither is given per se in the writing, but rather deduced from it. The writing thus carries its dynamics within itself.

The independent existence of the written notes: the fact that their morphological context changes.

The configurations differ. The pure note in itself is a physical limit-concept.

What is writing and what is image changes. Proof: note-head and ligature. Ever more images become symbols, which in turn combine to form ever more new images.

Time intervenes in the immanent sense of the works. (proof, the Schubert passages).

[29]

A theory of musical listening must be incorporated. In the production of music, listening is not the primary aspect. The sound is a reflex. Hearing it is the first stage of internalization, of spiritualization – in ‘listening to’ the sound, listening is already posited as imagination, as the means of fixing it, of identifying it. Listening as abstract objectification. To clarify music means to transfer it to the level of inner meaning. Listening as the opposite of the mimetic, the true mediatory category of gesture and sense, sensory spiritualization. The complement to writing: the more writing there is, the more necessary listening becomes. Limit-concept of pure imagination. – All musical listening is a listening after the event, as with an echo, and every musical experience also contains, in addition to the heard, also the unheard, the gesture. This listening after the event forms part of interpretation, which takes the imagined as its point of departure and retroverts this into the gesture, which is in turn measured against that originally imagined. Even composing is not absolutely a matter of listening, not even in the sense of the inner, non-sensual listening function. Haydn or Stravinsky who write at the piano, Berg's poor ear. Composing as listening back to something. In interpretation, listening is the rational, the measure by which to check.

There is such a thing as genuine textual polyvalence, i.e. several objectively immanent interpretations, but even the polyvalence is determinate, and historically it is in a state of disappearance.

[30]

It must transpire as one of the fundamental philosophical motifs in our work that objectivity of insight – and representation – does not demand a decrease in subjectivity, an abandonment thereof, but rather an increase in subjectivity. Imitation means that the subject gains all the more understanding of the object by adding to it. This is the central argument against positivism. But this adding occurs within the text, not as something independent from it – and this is the threshold to Romanticism. The subjective component of objectivity is interpretation.

August 1949

Deal with Benjamin's theory of language.⁸²

Dependence of individual representational characters upon the formal totality. It makes a crucial difference, for example, whether the same melodic unit is played and posited as a theme, whether it appears to have been drawn into the flow of a development, or whether it ultimately re-enters as the result of a development. This largely means: interpreting.

Interpretation reveals consequences. For example, sforzati often demand to be prepared through minimal accents or shifts of accent.

Playing dissonances. History plays within them. They withdraw under the dominance of tonality. Teleologically, they – the accidentals⁸³ – have revealed themselves as the driving force, whereas prescribed, overused tonality requires no further affirmation. Interpretation must bring dissonance to light. – Something very similar applies to the weak beats.

[31]

Desiderata

it is vital to establish the most unambiguous connection between the theory of musical notation and the theory of reproduction, in such a way that the principles of the latter can be derived from the former.
the significative and pictorial components must be joined by that of sonic language, in the sense developed in the letter to Ingolf Dahl,⁸⁴ as a third, equally valid element. (This has nothing to do with the view of music and language criticized in the text.) This component is the real medium of history in the work.
an extensively developed positive doctrine of reproduction must be given in the form required today. The notes on the previous page are rhapsodic examples of such a doctrine.

I would like to define the terminology as follows: the musical text contains 3 elements

the mensural (described until now as significative, the epitome of all that is unambiguously given through symbols)
neumic (until now: referred to as mimic, mimetic or gestural, the structural element to be interpolated from the symbols)
the idiomatic (until now: the music-lingual element, i.e. that which must be reached through the musical language given in each case, and which encompasses the work. This must still be developed very precisely. Perhaps exemplify this with reference to Vienna. Berg's indication ‘wienerisch’).

The theme of the study is really the dialectic between these elements. What is still missing is the transition from the theory of notation to the theory of reproduction, and the refinement of the doctrine of notation through modern research.

[32]

The task of musical interpretation is to transform the idiomatic element into the neumic by means of the mensural. ‘The origin is the goal’.⁸⁵ Thesis of my book.

The idiomatic element is the epitome of all conventions within which a text appears. It is not simply external to the neumic, however, but rather contains the neumic within itself in impure form, while, conversely, it is unproblematic – i.e. unrelated to the work's downfall – that the neumic only exists to the extent that the idiomatic applies. Mahler's statement ‘tradition is sloppiness’⁸⁶ refers exactly to the situation repeated each time, in which the neumic and idiomatic elements separate.

The impression of a fetishism of the musical text must be avoided. The task of interpretation is not, of course, fidelity to the text in itself, but rather the representation of ‘the work’, i.e. the music for which the text stands. Reflection upon text, notation, elements of the text etc. is only necessary because this ‘music’ is neither self-evident as such nor immediately given nor unambiguous. This is the method's lever, and that is what must become apparent.

Idiomatic and neumic elements. ‘Neumes presuppose direct transmission’. Cf. p. 27 of these notes. NB is this not precisely also true of the idiomatic?

There is an analogy in interpretation to the relationship between ontogenesis and phylogenesis. For as with the objective history of the work, the experience of each individual performer always leads from the idiomatic element through the mensural to the neumic, and to stop at the idiomatic or the mensural is equally undesirable.

[33]

A definition of the term ‘musical’ (against Busoni)⁸⁷ must ensue as a by-product of the study. It is the generic term for all those things beyond the mensural that true interpretation demands. Primarily it is the subjectively present idiomatic element (musical and unmusical bad composers: the music of Rachmaninov or Gershwin is within the idiomatic medium; that of Sibelius is not), and in a higher sense it is the (mediated) awareness of the neumic. One can say that the task of true interpretation is to efface and restore the ‘musical’. Concerning this perhaps a discussion of the case of Schnabel.⁸⁸

The idiomatic element varies between different composers and ‘schools’. It is very strong in Schubert, in an entirely different sense in Wagner, in Mahler, and the ‘national’ schools make the idiomatic element their guiding principle (also jazz, for example) – much of their weakness stems from this. Conversely, it recedes entirely in Bach, Beethoven or Schönberg, and in Haydn and Mozart it is largely sublimated. The classicist impulse of great music is for the most part that of a – transcendental-subjective – mastering of the idiomatic element. Minstreldom is the primacy of the idiomatic element in interpretation.

Lake Tahoe, 8 September 1949

The concept of the idiomatic points to that of language. But it is the thesis of the book that music is not a language. Accordingly, the two categories are not simply opposed, rather having a common component that unfolds differently in each, and the success of the study seems to depend upon its explication. The closest thing to it is probably dialect. Music is no language, but it has dialects, and their essence is embodied by the concept of the idiomatic. But what is dialect without language? Or rather: is dialect not the speechless element of language?

[34]

True reproduction is not simply a realization of the results of analysis (incidentally, these results should not be thought of as conclusive). It rather contains the idiomatic element sublated within itself. And it thus necessarily encompasses the performer's subjectivity, which presents the idiomatic element in relation to every work (key to the subject–object theory). So it is neither an irrational (idiomatic) nor a chemically pure, analytical reproduction, but rather the reinstatement of the mimic element achieved by passing through the analytical. The neumic as its idea (? Or is it not itself only one of the elements that enters a dialectical configuration with the others? Central)

Score-reading and musical system of reference. Fast reading ahead during playing, guessing what follows etc. presupposes the tonal system (and generally the idiomatic element; cf. Schumann's definition of who is musical).⁸⁹ Infinitely more difficult otherwise, though not impossible, even in non-tonal music, whose objective tendency creates certain expectations. – The study must offer a theory of sight-reading. – In general, while looking over and absorbing the score, I can already assess a piece of music before I can imagine it precisely. A significant aspect of the neumic.

‘Tempo giusto’ – this is the expression of the notation's faith in the idiomatic element.

Interpretation is by its very nature a dialectical process.

[35]

The idea voiced in the Philosophy of Modern Music, that the great music of tradition, in particular Beethoven, brings the general and the particular into a paradoxical state of unity,⁹⁰ should be applied to the theory of reproduction. There is a close connection between the idiomatic and the general on the one hand, and the particular and the neumic on the other, and, in a certain sense, interpretation is the imitation of that process which takes place in the composition itself – and therefore dialectical.

1953

The study must end in such ‘rules’ as: timbre, instrumental tone is a means of characterizing musical shapes, of articulation, never an ‘end in itself’, but rather a function of the representation of musical sense, and above all of differentiation. If, for example, a violinist has a beautiful, sweetly sobbing and at the same time aggressive tone, and plays the Mendelssohn concerto, he should not play the slow movement with this tone, but instead realize the character of the dreamlike, the not-quite-present through the modification of his tone. All differences of character, even the most subtle, should be translated into sonic equivalents. This applies in particular to the voice.

Or: the harmonic determinacy of the melos in later tonal music roughly since Mozart should be brought to light by reproduction by allowing the tone of the principal voice to feel the harmony, as it were to mirror it (e.g. change of colour with a change in the harmonic function of a note).

The analysis of the correct presentation of works must lead to a body of such rules.

[36]

Concerning a theory of phrasing: phrasing must not only subdivide and articulate, but also represent the proportion of the formal units; that is, it must distinguish during the act of separation according to the weight of the units it separates (as a result of the established idiom, one always finds too little phrasing being carried out). Essentially phrasing extends to the level of each individual note, or at least the smallest meaningful group. (Example Chopin E major Etude [op. 10, no. 3].) – One can bring out the energy of an entire form through phrasing; for example, by increasingly shortening the caesuras, as they have already established themselves (Revellers),⁹¹ or, in parts where the form comes together, by forming larger units after initially very clear phrasing (Chopin, e.g. A flat major Etude).

In Romanticism, not least in Schumann and Chopin, one finds ‘spleen’, idées fixes and obsessions. Here one must understand the ‘spirit’ of such music. But one can say in precise musical terms how one presents this: for example through an accentuation of the first note of such a group as something irrefutably announcing itself, e.g. in the Moscheles Etude⁹² by Chopin:

[Along the left edge of the example:] i.e. the neumic element and the idiomatic

In Beethoven, semiquaver figures are barely ever passages of runs: when playing them, one must allow the resistance to emerge.

[37]

In some music, it forms a part of the sense not to make the structure transparent – but this is then itself a part of the structure that analysis must lead us to. – Analytical result: obscuring of analysis. – In analysis one must forget everything idiomatic, and then in presentation forget the analysis once more. – Being musical is the power to master analysis despite the idiomatic element, and to master the neumic despite analysis. In general, the power to hold on to the musical moments in their antithesis (this is the real definition). – The idiomatic is the precondition for any interpretation, and is consumed by it. The mensural is the medium in which the idiomatic turns into the neumic; notation as a means of analysis. – NB the connection to the fragment on language and music⁹³ must be established.

Accompanying parts must not only recede; they must not even be played as melodies. As they are not melodies, they thus make false claims and sound ridiculous (NB musical stupidity).⁹⁴ E.g. the piano accompaniment in the slow movement in Beethoven's E flat major Concerto should not be ‘played out’.

[38]

Rosé once said to me about a quartet: they can't play themes.⁹⁵ Something very true. Interpretation must allow positional characteristics (and its difference to these) to emerge. As an example of this Beethoven's indication ‘mit Nachdruck’ [with emphasis] for the rondo theme of the E flat major Concerto. – All such characteristics must be translated into presentation. But how: that is the problem.

If there is any truth in Riemann's idea of the dead interval,⁹⁶ then this would imply a deadly critique of the works, or of interpretation, or of the listener. It is unlikely that there would be any dead intervals in true interpretation. But this takes us to an aspect that I have so far neglected entirely in my draft:⁹⁷ interpretation as a correction of the works, an attempt to bestow sense upon the senseless. Whoever has undertaken a serious interpretation of works knows that all analysis is critique (– for there is no way of understanding works of art that does not imply a critique), that it encounters weak or false aspects, and that the genuine problems of interpretation are inseparable from the attempt to justify what is false through presentation. Interpretation is apologetic, and in this sense related to commentary; I have experienced this particularly in the case of Eduard [Steuermann].⁹⁸ But this too has its dialectic, for the more strictly interpretation bases itself on the logic of the work, and the more intensely it focuses upon it, the more it uncovers at the same time the shadows of its fallibility. – There is the most profound relationship between this problem and the creation of musical sense; for wherever this latter has crystallized the least, the text is at its most ambiguous and interpretation at its most difficult.

[39]

Even in recent times, works that belong to a firm tradition in which the idiomatic element dominates have an entirely different relationship to notation than genuinely autonomous ones. In the Barber of Seville, the text of the score hardly appears as such, but rather almost like a loose aid to memory. Whoever does not know how it is to be played can hardly garner this information from the written music, even though the manner of composition is by no means clichéd.

Insufficiency of musical notation: very often, for example, in the case of small modifying crescendi, one does not know how far they should extend, or how strong sf is supposed to be; with both crescendo and accelerando, it is unclear whether the change should be constant or in geometric proportion. All this can only be understood through the context. But generally binding (e.g. relativity of the sf to the dynamic level of the respective element – though this has its exceptions, for example in Beethoven).

The theory of phrasing must be highly differentiated. Phrasing relative to such compositional categories as transition and contrast. Examples of phrasing that represent contrasts are naturally stronger than those articulating continuous textures. There are probably different types of phrasing, such as the functional and representative; the punctuating; the immediate and mimic. How there is no mechanical identity whatsoever in the means of interpretation for the whole and the particular, but rather – as these categories vary qualitatively – qualitatively different and at once identical ones; identity in non-identity. Extremely important.

[40]

This has much wider, more fundamental validity for all elements of presentation indicated by symbols. For they all have a ‘neumic’ meaning separate from their ‘mensural’ meaning, i.e. they must be distinguished according to their function. A crescendo in a phrase can thus be significant in a formal-dynamic or an agogic sense. The sound of a passage can thus apply to its character and its relation to the whole (it must always do both). At the same time, however, all musical symbols always also have a meaning in themselves, and it is one of the postulates of true interpretation to balance this with the functional meaning.

The doctrine of interpretation must not be content with a separation of musical elements and their reflection in the system of signs (notation + accidental determinates) as a division of labour, but must rather determine these relations at the same time by holding on to the differences. A crescendo can replace a tempo modification (e.g. an incorrect ritardando), or an accent on a dissonant note can fulfil the harmonic sense. All this of course lies within the composition, which is its measure. Fundamentally, every musical element can represent all others. [Along the left margin:] Rule: ‘play dissonances’.

[41]

From the perspective of the subcutaneous (see the long Schönberg essay 1952–53),⁹⁹ a series of rules arises, such as: drop the upbeats, there are no automatically strong beats, stress the first note in figures; show latent thematic relationships, let what is schematically obvious recede, etc. (to a large extent, these rules are the phenomenology of incorrect interpretation, which does not pass the idiomatic level: the critique of the minstrel).¹⁰⁰ But this too should not be taken mechanically, for the subcutaneous does not exist in itself, but only as a negation of the other, and this dialectic, this relation, must be shown. This does not mean: playing the weak beat and dropping the strong, but rather clarifying the process that connects the two.

The basic rule today can be taken for granted: to realize what has been recognized and imagined, and not to be driven by the idiom or the sound, whether instrumental or vocal. But even here we must differentiate. For there are many connections between the musical sense, i.e. the neumic element, and instrumental technique. Beethoven's music is already often conceived objectively in piano fingerings; it would conflict with the sense in most cases if one were to play against the hand (e.g. in the last sonatas, esp. op. 111).

[42]

Concerning the presentation of new music: alongside the clarification of the ‘running thread’, it is probably most important that identical elements are recognizable as such. I heard a performance of Berg's op. 3, for example (now, April 1953 in L.A.), in which, shortly before the climax of the development section in the 1st movement, the 1/32 following the dotted quaver in bar 91f. was unrecognizable on account of the acceleration. This, however, obscured the fact that the theme is identical to the cello figure in bars 51–52 – and thus obscured the sense of the development, and really that of the entire movement. The disappearance of a single note can jeopardize a formal totality, and the customary presentation of new music consists only of such omissions. It is therefore rightly incomprehensible. The tempo relations in Webern's op. 5 have often been distorted to such a degree that the formal ones vanished; e.g. in the 1st movement bars 14–16 already much too fast. Equally the a tempo bar 51 out of all proportion in its speed – At the start of III, the col legno semiquaver was lost, and with it everything afterwards. In V it was unclear that the pizzicato chord in bar 9 is identical to the preceding arco.

The first movement of Beethoven's 5th very quick – any attempt to monumentalize it turns it into something leisurely. The effect of the first bars by no means through a reduced tempo, rather at full speed, but at the heel and with a heavy counter-accent on the first note – falling on the weak beat:

assuming one does not prefer simply to read it.

[43]

Concerning the B flat major Trio by Beethoven,¹⁰¹ performance by Heifetz–Feuermann–Arthur Rubinstein. – ‘Too beautiful’. Here that means: the sensual euphony of the sound eclipses the realization of the construction. Everything is smoothed out. E.g. the transitional model towards the end of the 1st movement, immediately before the second subject, loses the quality of distance, of not quite being there, of aura, that is characteristic of the entire movement (as with the Ferne Geliebte).¹⁰² The 2nd subject distinguishes itself too little as a character. In the Trio of the Scherzo (which already enters too beautifully, too mildly), the element of eruption – and thus the contrast to its consequent – is lost, and with it the formal sense. Impossible to leave out the repeat of the Trio and the renewed one of the Scherzo, which here, as in the 7th Symphony, has an architectural function. – In the slow movement, the theme is rightly played fluently, not sacredly. But this means a responsibility – then one cannot get much slower in a variation in order to play the semiquavers more comfortably (Eduard [Steuermann] says in such cases that one cannot have one's cake and eat it). Such ‘responsibilities’ – analogous to the composition's own – are one of the central problems of interpretation. The last movement too quick, too fluid, without the element of disturbance, resistance, the ‘Flemish’ (Rubinstein misses a number of the theme's off-beat accents). But this is not a matter of ‘taste’. Rather: the sense of the long coda lies precisely in the dissolution of the element of resistance in motion. If that resistance is missing, the motion cannot ensue: so there is an interaction between character and musical context. – Through similar cases, such as the ‘absent’ transitional bars or the missing thematic character, one can recognize that interpretative imagination is the precondition for a realization of the objective guise. This latter is the opposite of the ‘residue’.

It is not too difficult to find the correct characters, or to find the correct tempi. But both at once – this is almost impossible, and it points to a necessary contradiction in the matter.

[44]

In a good interpretation of a highly organized piece, one will barely find any two crotchets that are chronometrically identical. But nor will there be any two which do not palpably relate to a latent, identical beat.

Concerning the correct delivery of a theme:

it is absolutely vital that the characteristic elements of a theme come to the fore. I heard the second subject of the Melusine overture¹⁰³ in such a way that, instead of

The whole thing thus became incomprehensible.
The second subject in the 1st movement of the Pastoral Symphony has an entirely unassuming bass, which subsequently enters, however, in double counterpoint, and then moves into a stretto etc. – the trick of this whole passage is that an essentially homophonic formation is interpreted polyphonically and thus, despite its unassuming nature, becomes dynamic. The mode of presentation must take this into account, however, by ‘positing’ the bass thematically, yet without being overtaxed by the delivery, that is:

And one must hear the subsequent flute entry.

[45]

The indication espressivo tells us: with expression, but it does not tell us what is being expressed, and rightly so. But not because a general, abstract form of expression could enclose the determinate and specific like a frame, but rather because musical expression is not the expression of a fixed intentional object. It flares up, as it were, only to disappear again. What espressivo demands of the presentation, however, is that it should take a part in this quality located within the music. Playing espressivo means: imitating the music's immanent consummation; not letting it be-in-itself, but rather appropriating it through the subject, and therefore always means, in a certain sense: exaggerating the music – in the way one exaggerates when imitating a face or a voice. The moments of espressivo or those in which the neumic comes into conflict with the mensural, where this conflict is resolved to the advantage of the neumic – and where this victory is taken up into the notation of the composition itself as a performance instruction. Therefore the espressivo always has an air of rubato about it, and Beethoven showed exactly the right instinct in the Prestissimo of op. 109, where he wrote ‘a tempo’ after espressivo. Compared to this, such efforts as those of Schnabel to fix the respective content of each expression are mere frolics.

[46]

It is amazing how impoverished the range of most performers is. On the whole they often know only two characters: the brilliant (allegro) and the lyrical cantabile (adagio); and they more or less reduce everything to these, and whatever cannot be reduced in this manner is treated as a mere ‘transition’; e.g. Herr Bruno Walter, who is also a theoretical exponent of such an approach.¹⁰⁴ The nonsense can be shown in detail with reference to his Mahler recordings. – Or: instrumentalists know only: melody, accents (outer pitches), ‘runs’ that run, but are dropped again; they do not know that one can also play quick semiquavers melodically (technically speaking: not neglecting them in favour of the accented notes, remaining sceptical towards the strong beats throughout).

Concerning the dialectic of interpretation: if, for the sake of lyrical expression, one plays song-like themes e.g. in Chopin too slowly, they fall apart in such a way that they lose their expression, which must always take on a clear form.

One can also ‘present’ or ‘celebrate’ music excessively, or ‘take it too seriously’, displaying it with the air of ‘look at this’ without any relation to its substance. Often with Schnabel, e.g. the slow movement of Beethoven's B flat major Concerto. The intensity and immersion must be in proportion to the musical content; otherwise the music becomes overexposed, and thus destroyed. – Schnabel's standard otherwise very high, e.g. in the long A major Sonata by Schubert. Only sometimes the sense of savouring the taste, this element of self-relish. But how difficult to grasp this in technical categories.

[47]

In the slow movement of the 5th Symphony (incidentally, is that movement really so good?), Karajan not only takes the forte entry consisting of demisemiquavers in the cellos and basses ff instead of f, but also non legato, despite the notated slur. As this element is slurred everywhere else, it can hardly have been corrected. Rather, the principal voice would barely be audible otherwise on account of the orchestration; the accompaniment is indeed overly dominant. But: through Karajan's trick, the character is distorted, and the sound is used to posit a contrast that remains unfulfilled by the composition. A change of orchestration, such as doubling the cellos with violas and bassoons, would be less unfaithful than a presentation that clings to the letter (naturally the entire accompaniment would have to be altered, but this should be possible without sacrificing a single note). – Incidentally, no great joy with the entire very virtuosic performance. The brass melodies perhaps too melodic and balanced, contradicting the idea of Beethoven's orchestra; the monumental or ‘characteristic’ elements in the 3rd & 4th movements at the expense of the tempo; everything too present, too little flaring up and disappearing – this excellent conductor failed to understand the Hegel in Beethoven; one could say: representing the spirit of Beethoven's music does its spiritual element an injustice. But how can one make this clear, and to whom?

Presentation and music must always be in proportion, e.g. also in the sense that it is laughable to play very simple music that offers no resistance, such as the two sonatinas by Beethoven, too quickly. (NB: also the reverse: something unspoilt must not be ‘flogged to death’!)

[48]

If one takes the claim that music requires interpretation strictly, then it seems logical to assume that the latter must come to the former's aid. Indeed, one knows from opera productions how the conductor pushes the tempo in passages where the tension lets up, and such things. This tendency becomes stronger wherever the concern for effect is the central one. But this is precisely what makes us doubt the principle. An interpretation that ‘helps’ always conceals at the same time, and thus always does its object an injustice. The higher music is, the deeper its imperfections and errors are enmeshed with its best aspects – how often the best thing is precisely that contradiction which is both moulded and breaks all moulds. Schnabel ‘helps’ the slow movement of the posthumous A major Sonata by Schubert,¹⁰⁵ whose middle section is certainly a failure by conventional standards. He plays it improvisando, rushing through all the cloudy and fragile passages. Through this, however, he forces the sense of a complete, dynamic totality upon it and subsequently fails to live up to it, thus only making matters worse. Is not precisely the fragmentary, the discontinuous, even that which remains sketched and unfulfilled – in opposition to Beethoven – the idea of this music? Is it not fundamental to a highly meaningful movement that it should crumble[?] I recall that in my youth, before I went to Vienna, I had a tendency, in Schubert sonatas like the great A minor, to devote myself entirely to the individual shapes at the expense of the tempo, and I think this was more correct than Schnabel's intention. Interpretation retrieves the music by uncovering it in its fallibility – and the sense thereof – and forgiving it. Music requires interpretation: as a critique that bestows upon it the honour of absolute truth.

[49]

I heard gramophone records of the old Mascagni conducting the Cavalleria. It was all much too slow, to the point of grotesque, and therefore completely ineffective. He liked it so much; he was so proud; he could not part with even a single bar. And in this way he destroyed his chef d'œuvre. True interpretation requires an element of anger at the music that is sacrificed to the musical idea in all its manifestations. ‘I just hate music.’¹⁰⁶

The false form of presentation, namely that which aims for sensual detail, euphony, and beautiful melodies, is not content to remain at the atomistic level. It has, as a necessary complement, a false consciousness of totality. Namely brio, energy – frequently associated with it (Toscanini, Walter). Instead of attaining a flow through the work, through the impulses of individual elements, these are rather disabled, but then dunked, so to speak, into an external, predefined flow – that of the ‘temperament’ of presentation. This is one of the principal phenomena of everyday music-making, and one of the main tasks will be to classify it concretely. It normally consists in an abstract priority of tempo over characters that is as wrong as it would be for the characters to gain independence undialectically –

[50]

The rule of going against all things schematic in music-making, of bringing out the subcutaneous, playing weak beats and dissonances etc. must not be understood in a mechanical and undialectical manner. For the schematic was not only external to traditional music, and the greater the music, the less external. It was rather constitutive, and also showed the opposing forces themselves. But this means: it was a tension field (the fact that there is no radically nominalist music, that even radical new music, however concealed, contains the rudiments of traditional forms, is another side of the same matter). Interpretation must renew this force field. That is, not only playing the dissonances and dropping the consonances, but also realizing the tension between the two according to the compositional sense. One must feel one's way through the consonances, the strong beats, the basic beats – the other lives only in relation to these. What would the 3/2 bars arising in the last movement of Schumann's Piano Concerto in the second subject be if one were not to think of them as a form of paradox in relation to the main 3/4 beat? But this means: this beat, as a background, must also be realized. Such considerations apply above all to Beethovenian syncopation, and to construction in Brahms.

[51]

(based on an older note)¹⁰⁷ Perhaps (!) one can say more generally: true reproduction is not simply a realization of the analytical results. This would give rise to an insufferable rationalism, and would tend towards an instatement of musicology as the authority on musical presentation. It must rather contain the idiomatic element as sublated within itself. To the extent that musical notation is not simply a sign system, but rather a model for imitation, analysis must uncover the intended object of imitation, as yet locked within the text; but imitating it still remains the task of reproduction, and demands the element of spontaneity. I must know what I am seeking to imitate, but cannot do so without the requisite musicality. One might consider Schnabel, for example: his knowledge about the object of imitation was extraordinary, but at the same time disturbed his ability to imitate. A pianist such as Heinz Hirschland¹⁰⁸ was a textbook example; the danger in my reproduction theory is not unlike that of psychoanalysis. True interpretation is neither the irrational-idiomatic (critique of the minstrel) nor the analytically pure kind, but rather that restoration of the mimetic element which passes through analysis. The neumic is really the instruction for this. – Kolisch exemplifies my idea.

Score-reading and musical system of reference. Fast reading ahead during playing, guessing what follows, which Schumann actually considers a criterion for musicality,¹⁰⁹ presupposes tonality (incidentally, it is perhaps one of Bruckner's most curious traits that he does not meet this criterion, yet without ‘surprising’ the listener. This is what I mean by composing against the grain. An incredible field of dissolution in the main theme of the 7th¹¹⁰ where, after a moment of the most unheard-of epiphany that is not repeated in the reprise, a whispering follows instead of the ‘consequences’. Why – this must be shown by true reproduction). In a certain sense, new music disables the traditional – idiomatic – notion of musicality; as with many things, its enemies see this better than its friends; true reproduction must take this into account, and subsequently defamiliarize traditional music. And, through this process, reproduction must enable the birth of a higher notion of musicality. Incidentally: even in non-tonal music, the experience of the ‘natural life of sounds’¹¹¹ permits a certain degree of anticipation.

[52]

Sensitivity to noise is the musicality of the unmusical. Conclusion from this: no fear of dynamic extremes, even a triple fortissimo. The zones in which music becomes inaudible or unbearable are those in which it terminates all consensus. Nothing is more harmful than mf as the measure of all things.

In the orchestral works of Viennese classicism, the brass pose the main problem: for when they play forte, they step forwards as melody instruments, which they are usually not, however, but simply a harmonic reinforcement. The resulting impression of senselessness. I do not know what to do. On the one hand, I feel that interpretation should not ‘help’; on the other hand, one can hardly tolerate distortions of the structure. One can at least advocate retouches in the orchestration, I believe. For here, the retouching is not an attempt to conceal a compositional weakness (cf. p. 48), but rather clarifies it. But where is the limit? To what extent does that same ‘senselessly’ reinforcing brass in Beethoven not form a part of the music's sense? And as soon as one starts retouching, does one not end up with Hollywood adaptations and Herr Korngold?¹¹² Here one encounters the controversy surrounding historicism.

Agathe¹¹³ often said about certain dishonest voices: she sings like a singer. About Toscanini, Midsummer Night's Dream overture: the Apennine goats have eaten up the German forest. – About a Bruckner movement she hated: Ganghofer's funeral with stuffed stags.

Bowl 14 July 53¹¹⁴

[53]

Phrasing must also be developed from the musical sense. For example, when a bar is repeated three times in succession in the slow movement of the Pastoral Symphony – a completely exterritorial work in Beethoven's œuvre – this creates a form of congestion, a sense of being unable to break loose, so to speak, in the most deliberate way (form as a medium of expression). So the interpretation should not ‘flow’ either. In other words, the phrases that are repeated literally must be separated, even if only by the most minimal of breaths, like repeated attempts. Bruno Walter perversely seeks to maintain their ‘flow’, and has the bassoons play without any phrasing at all, just as he generally tends to slur phrases. His approach to making music is defined by the fear that the listener could feel ‘left out’, not by the music's own demands. Either he gets lost in details, trying to ensure they are ‘just so’ (what Karl Kraus says about love is just as true for music – separation from the ‘table’),¹¹⁵ or pushes ahead when he fears boredom. He plays piano upon the orchestra quite admirably, but the orchestra is not a piano i.e. the manner of modification and the material must be in proportion – an orchestra cannot play with the same freedom as a quartet or a piano, as the improvisatory quality will become a mere appearance otherwise; the deviations must be much finer in the orchestra. Walter does not know this – something vulgar about his sensibility, a sophistication that strikes the music with a club. Lyrical theatre conductor; no feeling for the antithetical, the rupture. In Beethoven, for example, in the final movement of the Pastoral Symphony, the entry of the continuing character

is so little marcato that the element of driving ahead through the intervention of the subject, so central in Beethoven, is lost completely. In the Egmont overture he sweeps the dissonances under the carpet; in the modulation in the second subject, where he should let the orchestra play out to give a sense of perspective, he rushes on in fear of a rhythmic standstill. – The only admirable thing is his defence against the mechanical (with Walter everything is defence). The way he rid the birdcalls in the Pastoral Symphony of their ridiculous quality through a minimal, Mahlerian element of irregularity to the entries, for example, is hard to match. Some outstanding individual tempi with a certain slowed-down, also calm quality (1st and 3rd movements); only he cannot keep it up for long – something always has to happen.

[54]

Walter is quite right to perform the Siegfried Idyll orchestrally, rather than soloistically, for: 1) the perspectival, ‘auratic’ quality demands the endlessness of the orchestral string tone, not the finite, discrete nature of solo strings. 2) the al fresco character of the composition does not permit the distinctness, the process by which individual elements become thematic, in the sense intended by a too close, too ‘clear’ soloistic chamber music performance. Opposite of a chamber symphony. So: questions of orchestral forces and sound in relation to musical sense.

The important requirement that successive melody notes should always be clear in their relation to one another. E.g. in the slow movement of the Pastoral Symphony (p. 37):

This is particularly difficult, both because of the change of register in the clarinet and because of the fp on the f. One can succeed: 1) by performing a crescendo on the g, so that the accent on the f does not tear the line apart; 2) by playing the critical interval, the g–f ninth, legato, under no circumstances inserting the slightest breath between the two (as Bruno Walter does). – Analogous problems on an extended scale of gradations in contrapuntal music where the principal voice leaps from one part to another. Not only must it always come to the fore, but above all the connection between each principal voice and the next must become clear, either phrased or uninterrupted, but never left to chance. The supposed incomprehensibility of new music is largely owing to breaches of this rule. The successive – not only the simultaneous – relationships between parts must be realized.

[55]

‘Tradition is sloppiness’ – Mahler's statement expresses perfectly the dying-out of the idiomatic element, which makes way for the mensural and the neumic.

[56]

The requirement of clarity of the musical context must supersede all others (although it cannot be separated from that of meaningfulness, indeed it ultimately converges with it). E.g. in the recording of the 7th by Beethoven, Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic, in the introduction, small score p. 3 [bar 15f.], there is one case where the cantus firmus in the 2nd violins, unfortunately placed, lies between an ff chord in the wind and the ff semiquaver motif in the basses. Under Furtwängler, the 2nd violins could not be heard, and this caused a thematic hole that, if one did not know it by heart, would have rendered the entire introduction meaningless. One would naturally have to let the wind chord (and the violas) enter with a heavy sff, but with an immediate diminuendo so that the primary element can come through. Furtwängler sticks to what is written (there is no diminuendo in the score), and destroys the context. The entire introduction is almost prohibitively difficult – in particular the move from the initial minims to the semiquaver motion, which one naturally relates to crotchets (Beethoven did not write alla breve). In bar 2 of the 2nd page [bar 9], at the modulation, the music almost always becomes muddled. I think it is best to play this bar with a ritardando (which results automatically from the diminuendo), far enough to reach the semiquavers on the dominant almost a tempo. I am not completely sure (similar problems in the long prelude in E flat from the 1st vol. of the Well-Tempered Clavier). Incidentally, the (semi-thematic) flute entry in bar 6 was already inaudible on Furtwängler's recording. – After the crescendo in the 4th bar [bar 66] of the movement proper, immediately before the p entry of the main theme, one can unfortunately not take the slightest breath on account of the semiquaver upbeat in the strings. So the dynamic, the p subito, must take the place of phrasing, must take over its function. – In the final group on p. 31 [bars 52–5], the main rhythm in the basses cannot be ascertained, it is once again incomprehensible. – Against modifications that have no reason, e.g. the tendency to play homophonic passages more quickly than polyphonic ones. Furtwängler takes the slightly tangled developmental episode on p. 42f. [bars 220–35] carefully, slowing down imperceptibly. One can still grant him this. But then he loses his nerve (fundamental danger of all interpretation) and from p. 44 [bar 236] becomes much too fast much too suddenly without the slightest compositional reason (the harmonic tension in the culmination requires much more a holding back of the tempo). – The Allegretto much too slow, like all the others, but still rather beautiful; Furtwängler would be the greatest living conductor if he happened to be able to conduct. Only the trio not played out enough, clarinet entry p. 88 [bar 117] too weak, p. 89 [bar 128] not yielded enough. Furtwängler managed to render the dissonances in the final movement on p. 173 [bar 66] & 199 [bar 277] with incomparable beauty. Every note is meaningful; but complete dominance of the neumic over the mensural.

[57]

The question of becoming uninterpretable should be open to concretion with reference to technical facts. E.g. Beethoven's 7th Symphony, finale, the imitative string entries beginning in the last bar of p. 169 [bar 36]. On p. 170 [bars 37–8 & 41–2], the setting and the inconvenient register most likely prevent the clear audibility of 2nd violins and violas. If one were to retouch the passage, for example doubling with clarinets and bassoons, which are even free at that point, it would introduce a sound entirely foreign to Beethoven; the driving quality of the strings would be diluted, and above all the unmixed, ‘pure’ character of Beethoven's colours (his refus and the heroic-ascetic are an integral element of composition). If one leaves the passage as it is, it becomes – in the strictest sense – incomprehensible. So it is truly uninterpretable. Has it always been so? I do not really think so – probably because one used to play everything more quietly, less monumentally, and thus ‘covered up’ less; but this too would be impossible today, and would sound as if one were placing a wig upon Beethoven's head. – I can think of one solution: if in this passage, and only in this and other analogous passages, one reinforced the strings with additional strings. Then the colouring would be retained, and the entries would come through. But no conductor would agree to it, and one must admit that there would be something ridiculous and amateurish about those violins and violas simply lingering about except in a handful of bars (the piccolo in Schönberg's op. 26 is already somewhat funny). It is difficult to separate such visual matters from the sense of the music, as external as they might seem.

1954 Frankfurt

[58]

The text must contain at its centre a theory of improvisation, for what characterizes interpretation in its concise sense, its ‘problem’, is always related to the improvisatory. It is both: archaist, ‘minstrel-like’, a false withdrawal behind the objectivity of the text through the as if of immediacy i.e. the fact that what is notated appears as the product of the player's spontaneity (‘kommt a Walzer heraus’)¹¹⁶ – and at the same time the undoing of reification through the musical sense that suspends the text, the breaking of the myth of music as it is present: the philological, mensural element. The dialectic of improvisation is located between these poles, and it will need to be developed. All truth and most untruth in interpretation is improvisatory: there is a fluid scale leading from every meaningful rendition to complete interpretation. – My earlier observation that ‘colla parte’, ‘freely’ etc. became components of the text. The improvisatory element is incorporated as a safeguard against shrinking, and it is precisely this that is impossible, and only furthers the supremacy of the text's objectification, its estrangement. The problem of improvisation reveals something of the impossibility of music itself. – Improvisation bordering on the comical, close connection to musical stupidity. One can tell how Beethoven improvised from the Fantasy for solo piano, evidently a favourite improvisation written down for a friend: the form of sectional composition in ‘intonations’¹¹⁷ (as also in Mozart's fantasies): without repetitions. – The foremost rule in the interpretation of the improvisatory: nothing that is improvised may be repeated. – The irreversible dying-out of art is a primary argument for my thesis of the dying-out of interpretation in general.

28 March 1954

There are a few quite central arguments that can still be added to my view of interpreting Bach as expounded in the long Bach essay.¹¹⁸ In particular: if one is to emphasize the vocal origin of Bach's polyphony, the sung character of the parts, then it is nonsense to elevate, in its presentation, precisely that aspect to a position of exclusivity which song, as the song of subjects, fundamentally lacks: objectivity through the union of subjects, not through their elimination (NB close connection to my critique of the residual theory of truth).¹¹⁹ – Then: aside from organ and harpsichord, Bach did not write purely for the clavichord, but for strings, i.e. a medium in itself opposed to mechanical instruments. So how could one elevate those to the canon for interpretation?

[59]

My thesis that the differentiation in the conceptual means for understanding music is far less developed than the music itself applies equally to interpretation. There are many critical categories that touch on something true without truly entering the material itself, and these would have to be ‘translated’ by an adequate theory. I shall take some of the most questionable and journalistic sounding ones, such as the ‘fluidic’, or, as famous from the joke about Nikisch, ‘fascination’.¹²⁰ That does exist. But neither is it something musically inexplicable, perhaps merely psychological (the psychological, i.e. suggestion or power of projection, is a mere vehicle; incidentally: what does it mean? Must have a great deal to do with the neumic-mimetic element), nor can, as Rudi [Kolisch] once thought, simple technical correlates be given for it (as is still possible e.g. in a category like Schwung,¹²¹ as the unity of relatively separate shapes to be achieved through certain means of connection like phrasing and dynamics in presentation: bridging both external and deeper caesuras); but they must be taken up into a doctrine of interpretation elevated to a state of self-awareness, a self-reflexive technique. The fluid is probably musical sense, to the extent that it appears through interpretation as immediate, as part of a musical language; therein lies both the positive and the negative of this category. Pursue further. Under no circumstances must the theory ever let itself be fobbed off with such categories as personality etc.

[60]

Songs are almost always presented at much too slow a tempo, because singers want to display their voices and give expression, often at the music's expense (my experience with Karl Erb¹²² in Reutenen). Paradox: the voice, as a medium of the human, i.e. of the end, and at the same time the means, the instrument, and this causes it great difficulty for the sake of its corporeal, vital quality. It must be made an instrument and preserved in this. If it becomes purely an instrument, entirely alienated from itself, then it leads to the phenomenon referred to by Agathe as ‘singing like a singer’. – Songs are often already given too slow a marking by the composer, e.g. Mainacht by Brahms, which should naturally be taken in minims, not in crotchets. – A very characteristic distortion for singers at the start of Brahms's Auf dem Kirchhof. They sing:

which turns the music into nonsense. One could write an entire treatise on the presentation of this song. – What I say about Bruno Walter applies above all also to pianists: they have only 2 characters at their disposal, the ‘beautiful attack’ and the ‘brilliant’. This is how Karolyi,¹²³ for example, completely disfigured the Chopin Berceuse. From the demisemiquavers onwards flourishes, not – fast – melody; the context of the whole, the quasi-variation form thus incomprehensible, no mediation. In general: the character of mediation.

Berg, Chamber Concerto, before my lecture in Stuttgart ‘Das Altern der neuen Musik’ [The Aging of New Music].¹²⁴ Incredibly careful performance, no one dared to play out a melody, not even the pianist in the 1st variation, and through so much caution without any daring it became inarticulate, muddled, just as laymen imagine modern music to be. Humility and restraint are dubious, dangerous virtues in music, just as, if one avoids extreme decisions in life and risks nothing, one can lose everything. In this peculiar sense, music-making is indeed playing.¹²⁵ – My lecture was much more successful than my Alban's music. I could have crept away for shame. This too, the fact that people would rather hear someone talk about music than hear the music itself, should be included in a historical philosophy of interpretation.

[61]

Against primitive, dishonest means of presentation, e.g. when one presents a resounding piano in Chopin by only playing the accompaniment p or pp, but the melody at least mf. Play realistically. Very important modern criterion.

In many movements that are difficult in terms of the required treatment of tempo, one finds a single bar or a passage through which the entire tempo becomes clear. In the first movement of the C minor Sonata op. 10, no. 1 by Beethoven (which is generally very difficult to present for rudimentary reasons of immaturity), I was uncertain whether to take it in crotchets or whole bars. But with the modulating group (after the general pause), it becomes clear that the movement can only be thought of in whole bars, despite the immense difficulties thus arising for one of the main elements. – Incidentally, with interpretational difficulties of this kind, there is usually something amiss in the composition.

very important

My theory that all musical ‘form’ is sedimented content¹²⁶ must bear fruit for the theory of reproduction. But the most obvious thing: it would be much too crude to say that reproduction must ‘awaken’ the sedimented content. For one thing, the substance of music is not that content, but far more the process of its sedimentation; and then it would not even be in control of that content. So reproduction, as a form of consummation, would rather have to gain a hold upon the immanent historicity of the composition – which is itself codified consummation; here indeed lies one of the central problems of interpretation in general. In connection with this the thought of the intentions that flare up and are negated at the same time – is this not in fact the law of interpretation as such, as the tension between expression and the ‘whole’? – At any rate, the fragment on music and language must be incorporated in the theory of reproduction.

[62]

One can learn from poor orchestral performances (my old Palmengarten!):¹²⁷ how every orchestral work is analytical, i.e. how it timbrally deconstructs the whole into its formal elements. It is the task of reproduction to join once more what the composition has split apart, and it is precisely this that fails: the elements remain unconnected. But what shows itself here in such palpable and material terms is, in a higher, more spiritual sense, the problem of all interpretation. It is by necessity a process of taking apart and reassembling.

Naturally there are several layers of incorrect interpretation; one of these is the material layer of not bringing things together (starting with wrong notes etc., rough tone etc.), the other is that of untruthful interpretation, i.e. of missing what was composed. But the two are more mutually dependent than the layman who merely distinguishes between rigid ‘levels’ realizes. The rough sound of a military orchestra is partly the result of incorrect accents; and the intellectual inadequacy of Toscanini leads to materially incorrect tempi. Everything intellectual in music has its representatives at the level of the sound material; one needs only to distinguish between the two to remove the difference.

Notes taken after the Darmstadt lecture together with Kolisch, August 1954¹²⁸

The idea that there is no fundamental difference between old and new music must be related to the concept of the subcutaneous, my Schönberg essay and the radio lecture for his 80th birthday.¹²⁹ I.e. the idea of uncovering the subcutaneous layer in traditional music through interpretation corresponds to the same act of turning inside-out that new music itself accomplished. But here one must emphasize that it is not a matter of representing a skeleton, but rather of the process of stepping from the inside to the outside. In other words, the process between tonality (in the widest sense) and composition.

[63]

The theory should be negatively defined with reference to that fact that all official interpretation of traditional music that aims for the façade not only misses what lies beneath, but also forms a part of the culture industry, and is thus even mensurally incorrect (Toscanini). Interpret old music from the perspective of new music. What can one learn from Schönberg about Beethoven? – The critique of the sonic façade corresponds to the functionalist critique of the ornament.¹³⁰

Every interpretation is fundamentally confronted with insoluble problems. There is an absolutely correct interpretation, or at least a limited selection of correct interpretations, but it is an idea: it cannot even be recognized in its pure state, let alone realized. The measure of interpretation is the height of its failure. – Therefore: fortuity of the performer's efforts in his work, as something is always wrong. An infinite number of paths lead into a work of art, but there is only one centre. If I am analysing a Beethoven quartet such as op. 59, 2 it makes no difference whether I start with the rhythm c1-fig-5022 or with the interval of the fifth¹³¹ – the interpretations must converge.

Even if true interpretation is unknown and unrealizable – the incorrect kind can always be sensed concretely.

[64]

This is true above all of the concept of musical sense as one of determinate negation par excellence. It eludes definition, can only be determined in a highly mediated fashion (cf. on this the essay On the Current Relationship Between Philosophy and Music).¹³² As for what is senseless: this can be stated conclusively at any moment during composition or interpretation. – The idea of interpretation would be: the integral representation of musical sense, of what has been composed. – Or beginning with details: a presentation in which there is no dead note, no dead interval, no dead rest. Criticize Riemann's concept of the dead interval. It belongs fundamentally to the abstract schema, not to the concrete composition.

The theory of the historical change undergone by works and their true – i.e. not historicist – interpretation is mediated by the fact that the process as which interpretation must present the composition is precisely the historical one: the older therefore to be developed from the most advanced. The force field as which interpretation must determine music each time is at the same time always the historical – the dialectic of the particular and the general. I consider this the deciding thought.

Concerning the problematic issue of the ‘author's will’ as an auxiliary construction, the ‘will of the legislator’ should be dwelt on

Against

he is usually unknown and untraceable.
the music – mediated through the text – has a prerogative of its own against the author. Schönberg yielded to this.¹³³ How little of a work, as the unity of material and an objective semantic context, really belongs to its author. Mostly no more than the spontaneous act of synthesis. This may be a deciding factor – but to be deduced through the text, not outside of it
the works change: this also means: against the author's will.

Regarding the concept of the mensural element:

[65]

this alone does not produce music. The perfect realization of the mensural would be meaningless on its own. Against the idea of a chemically pure language of music. It would be precisely that same language which plays down the inner element of historicity, comparable to the calculation of logic in relation to language. Regarding this also: there is an idiom of the performer, of Kreisler, d'Albert or Kolisch, and this has a right to seep into the presentation within the mensural thresholds, indeed it has a great deal to do with that subjective element through which the objectivity of sense constitutes itself. The performer often glimpses the sense of the mensural through the medium of his idiom, which then admittedly misses a representation of the sense – it decreases, so to speak.
the mensural is imprecise, i.e. does not reach the music's level. Musical notation is an aide-memoire. It does not carry the whole, it is much, much too undifferentiated, and this is something fundamental that still remains – and possibly even increases – the more refined one's notation becomes (example: the late Webern!). But this imprecision is precisely the measure of the difference between notation and sense.
notation is not purely mensural, but at once less and more. Less: see (1) and (2). More: it has neumic rudiments. This is the reason for consulting not only original texts, but also autographs, in which the neumic element usually imprints itself upon the mensural.

With the concept of the mensural, return fundamentally to the difference between signum and mimesis from the Dialectic of Enlightenment.¹³⁴

[66]

Regarding the concept of the neumic. This, as the true element of immediacy, has become the object of mediation through the victory of the mensural, and this defines the precise sense of interpretation as an act of deduction from the perspective of the text. But this must not be understood in too primitive a sense owing to the fact that the writing not only still contains neumic elements (e.g. the beams of joined note-groups), but it has also developed substitute functions for the vanished neumic element. A very good example: phrase marks. For they are not mensural lines – otherwise they would indicate legato, which they do not – but rather units of structure, of sense. The interpolation of sense in the text always has that text's neumic elements as tools.

The term ‘key’¹³⁵ (in all languages) is very interesting, because it identifies precisely the transition from the neumic to the mensural. It means: the musical image should mean exactly this or that. And one could say that the path of interpretation is the reverse of encoding. The key tells us: the image is a symbol for this; interpretation tells us: the symbol is an image of that.

[67]

The modern organ movement and all objectivism of interpretation must not simply be criticized, as I have done so far,¹³⁶ but also deduced. It is based upon the experience of the dying-out of the idiomatic element. This experience converts itself into a sensitivity to elements of musical language per se. Above all to expression, which is perceived as archaic, rather like the caftan worn by old Jews. But in this experience, we find a combination of a legitimate idea and a misguided one. The legitimate idea: to drift no longer along in the stream of music, of an ingrained and declining language. The misguided idea: idiosyncrasy against sense as such, which reminds us of what is suppressed, and is the real mimetic element. Its reconstruction and mediation are replaced by a restriction to the mensural, as if this were the music. Liquidation of the neumic is confused with an emancipation from the idiom. But what has been suppressed returns in a false guise. One finds examples of this in the frequently garish and bizarre uses of registration, which one presumes to be neutral towards the mensural. Or more generally, ‘socio-psychologically’: in the sectarian, paranoid occupation of the objectivist sphere, with sacred cows, witch-hunts and purity. Suppression of the affective only serves to attract all that is affective. This also applies, to a certain extent, to Stravinsky. – The full subjective innervation is required in order to dissolve in the object. Against the residual theory of truth. Played purely mensurally, Bach is in the strictest sense meaningless, i.e. incorrect, unmusical.

[68]

The relationship to the idiomatic element is equally not simply negative, but dialectical. One must have it in order to negate it. True interpretation must make music against the grain, i.e. assert the rights of the composition against the hierarchy of musical language. But, for this, the hierarchy of musical language must also be fulfilled. The mistake made by those like Walcha¹³⁷ is simply to ignore it. Here something will have to be said about Schnabel. He – probably as a reaction to a very strong idiomatic element in his own musicality, to a great deal of ‘dialect’ – showed a particular aversion to it, but did not get any further than an abstract negation, i.e. did not incorporate it in his presentation as a mediation of the neumic. This is the reason for his violence; e.g. the belief that it is sufficient to render audible a secondary voice or an accent that would otherwise have been ignored, and in doing so fail to play the principal voice as such.

[69]

For the concept of reconstructing the neumic from the mensural, a genuine interpretation in the sense of decoding, the most important category of mediation is that of analysis as a necessary condition for interpretation. But its idea must be protected from rationalist misunderstandings. First of all, analysis nearly – not quite – means the opposite of what is commonly understood by the term. That is, not the reduction to the traditional formal parts, but rather to the specific elements and forces unique to the individual work, and above all their relationship to the whole: though admittedly the dialectic between these elements and the ‘official’ formal ones constitutes a substantial issue, especially in Beethoven, who ‘constructs’ tonality together with the composition, creating the general anew from the particular¹³⁸ (general form and tonality are correlative notions). – Then: interpretation is not simply the representation of an analytical result, or rather only of one very radically understood, which incorporates shapes and contexts as well as those elements. How much of the thematic-motivic content as such is to become apparent, for example, always depends on the elements' functions – which must also be revealed by analysis – although one can probably expect the realization of the specific thematic content normally to mean a great deal in relation to the lingual hierarchy. But there is a very significant process between analysis and presentation that still remains to be developed theoretically. The statement that in order to attain true interpretation one must first analyse, then forget the analysis, is presumably quite close to the facts. And the dissolution of the subject, of the intention in the matter itself, is precisely that phase (and also corresponds to an aspect of composition, cf. the fragment on music and language).

There is always the possibility of negative representation. One can, for example, give a theme the emphasis demanded by the structure not only by making it stand out, but also through an extreme pianissimo, and this too is specified by the structure. The possibility of negative representation applies to all musical dimensions.

The concept of imagination as the analytical-reconstructive aspect must be determined objectively as precisely that spontaneity which is required in order to uncover the subcutaneous. It does not invent but rather breaks through the surface; the envisaging of a hidden musical sense. For example the reading by Eduard [Steuermann] of two bars from Webern's Variations.¹³⁹ Refer to Benjamin's definition of imagination.¹⁴⁰ – Rudi [Kolisch] and I had attacked the separation of emotion and intellect in music during the course. Michael Mann¹⁴¹ defined imagination very elegantly as the zone of indifference between the two. Part of the theory of ‘analysis’.

[70]

Argue against the separation of emotion and intellect in presentation based on the matter itself. Highly organized music always means the presence of the non-present, i.e. recollecting and glancing ahead, and for the performer this is always a mental and categorial function. Only one who does not simply feel music, but also thinks it, can feel it properly. – At the same time, from the work's perspective – leaving aside the critique of mass culture – this is the argument against culinary listening and playing, ‘easy listening’, and against any passive attitude. Whoever simply surrenders themselves falls short of whatever they are surrendering to.

The task of analysis is the reconstruction of the neumic from the text. Conventional interpretation, which – for the sake of aiding the mensural – cannot entirely avoid this task, carries it out incorrectly by introducing the external factor of style rather than an immanent decoding, believing that it guarantees meaning. Only the concrete work, however, not the general notion of the same, can be subjected to reconstruction; style is external to the sense, it is merely its surrogate. True interpretation liquidates style. This can be shown particularly well with Mozart. Cf. on this Schönberg, Style and Idea.¹⁴² Also my definition of style as the speech-like.¹⁴³

The notion of interpretation dying out must be derived from the idea of true interpretation and the fundamental impossibility of its realization.

[71]

Making music against tonal hierarchies: that means first of all realizing the musical intention. And this stands in contrast not only to the generalized aspects of the composition, but equally to those arising from instrumental (and vocal) playing techniques. Kolisch insists that true interpretation should not accept the dictates of any voice or instrument. But this must be qualified somewhat. Until Beethoven, there was barely a musical intention that was realized in composition independently of playing techniques; his remark about the wretched violin¹⁴⁴ probably marks a boundary. When playing his music, on the other hand, one can still hardly go against the piano fingerings, which were rather subjected to an implicit rule of presentation. It was only with Schönberg that an approach to piano writing developed that was derived entirely from the imagined piano sound, but not from any pianistic realization – especially from op. 23 onwards. And since Wagner's emancipation of timbre, instrumental techniques have themselves become a source of compositional productivity, for the French, for Stravinsky, above all for Hindemith, where they take priority (‘Critique of the Minstrel’).¹⁴⁵ It would therefore not be sufficient simply to go against or neglect playing techniques in the presentation of music; analysis must rather determine the value of playing techniques in a given musical context, and the rendition must then take shape accordingly.

[72]

In relation to any convention, reconstructive reproduction must first of all achieve what Brecht terms Verfremdung [alienation]; without this element, the task of interpretation has not even been recognized. But this alienation, like the principal thesis that the traditional can only be represented from the perspective of new music, must be set polemically against the concept of the modernistic. It cannot be a matter of polishing up traditional music like streamline¹⁴⁶ furniture; the alienation must rather take effect, observing the canon of the musical context, in opposition to the sonic surface. – The absurdity of something put to me by a student in Darmstadt. A young composer from Munich had supposedly declared – evidently citing me as a reference – that the dissonances in Beethoven have meanwhile grown so stale that they can no longer satisfy the function assigned to them. That in order to bring Beethoven up to date one would have to add new, more spicy harmonies. And asked me whether I shared this opinion. But this not only misses the mensural element and violates the fundamental requirement of objective realization, it also naïvely isolates a historico-philosophical experience – one that is in itself correct – from its context. For Beethoven's dissonances are not simply for themselves, but exist in relation to the consonances, and are only of value in opposition to these. Indeed, their inner structure is always and without exception formed from within tonality; as soon as this relation disappears, the whole becomes meaningless. Interpreting from the perspective of new music does not mean Piscator or Hamlet in coat-tails.

[73]

Concerning the question of equal temperament. Textbook example of performing traditional music from the perspective of the new, against the original playing technique. It is obvious enough that new music turns into gibberish if one does not play enharmonic pitches identically. But this also applies to traditional music as soon as one realizes the context. Example: Beethoven op. 59, 2 first movement, bar 72f. The individual chords would perhaps still remain comprehensible if one made the D flat lower than the subsequent C sharp. But the sense of the passage is that of identity within non-identity, i.e. the harmonic difference between the two chord-sequences is only felt in contrast to the connecting note, as that which is the same in both. And the fluctuation between distant dominant and subdominant regions from the end of the closing note-group in the exposition onwards at once determines the formal sense of the whole; only when the extremes of E flat minor and B minor have become clear is the A flat major reached in bar 82 felt as a provisional equilibrium, and with it the entire further course of the movement's functional harmonic dimension. In other words, if one follows the playing technique, which does not aim for enharmonic identity, the entire musical context becomes senseless. – It follows from this, furthermore, that the critical deviation between the notes F and D / E and C sharp must be played particularly clearly.

Concerning the problem of the culinary, the beautiful tone. The point is not to strive for the opposite of sound, but simply that sound is a means of representing sense, a means of shaping, and one that becomes all the more important with the increasing avoidance of more superficial means of articulation such as tempo modifications etc. The model for the treatment of sound is the art of instrumentation manifest in the composition. Really, every musical element should sound different according to its respective sense and semantic context. What is therefore being opposed here is every sound or tone that is presented in its own right and stands apart from the composition (and this implicitly means most musical tuition, especially vocal tuition). In interpretation, it necessarily corresponds to an atomistic form of music-making. – Then: if the objection of relativism – which is often forgotten precisely here – is applicable anywhere, then in the case of the beautiful tone and all that is sensually pleasing. The gypsy violinist's tone that delights the little girl is abhorrent to me. There is no such thing as tone in itself – precisely the ‘immediate’ is mediated; the gypsy violinist's tone smacks of daylight robbery, the whole entertainment industry is sedimented in it (and still in the crack¹⁴⁷ violinists). In this sense, the verdict on the sensual quality is indeed not wilful and arbitrary, but rather a determinate negation. Tone ‘in itself’, the ‘beautiful voice’, is music's enemy. This is the background to the statement made by Rudi [Kolisch].¹⁴⁸ – Naturally this does not mean that a bad instrumentalist is preferable, as someone in Darmstadt suggested. But the good instrumentalist must have free control of all sonic means according to the measure of the composition.

[74]

Concerning the term ‘clarity’. It has two meanings. Firstly in the sonic, material sense that one can hear everything that is written, that the separate voices are set apart clearly from one another, and that no haze of sound ensues, except where this corresponds to the compositional intention. Here in turn the idea of clear instrumentation is the canon: one should play in such a way as to make the instrumentation clear, for example in Mahler. This goes without saying as a musical requirement, but is usually neglected, above all in favour of the mediocre, balanced sound ideal. – But there is also a higher, constructive form of clarity based upon analysis. One could formulate it in the following terms: the musical sense of any phrase within the whole must be made clear – which by no means always corresponds to clarity of sound material. Nothing should be played arbitrarily, simply because it is written, without a precise understanding and fulfilment of its function (this failing is one of the reasons for the incomprehensibility of many performances of new music). Illustrate this using op. 59, 2, first movement, bar 82, the extension (the phrase is 2½ bars long, instead of the regular 2). Reasons: 1) this marks the first (provisional) moment of balance between the divergent tonal regions, and thus a point of repose. 2) This is where we reach the first real part of the development section, which – as often in Beethoven – forms a contrast to the second through its relaxed, dreamlike character. Interpretation must achieve this by offering very clear markers, that is:

quasi fermata, ‘freely’, sustained very clearly (but this relates more to the character, hardly to the mensural: it must be brought about through a nuance, not like a true fermata).
accent on the c as the goal, but then withdraw immediately.
[75]
transparent, unreal ppp sound that differs clearly from the ‘thematic’, real sound heard previously. Cf. regarding this the A flat–E flat fifth played by the 2nd violin in bar 83. The reason for this is to fill the position of the bass note, and to leave the cello free for the principal motive; but, as in all good music, the composition here produces the right sound through the nature of its construction.

It should be noted, and put into practice, that the consequence of this passage transpires in the coda, where it corresponds to bar 215f., marked f and diminuendo. This should be prepared in bar 82 in such a way that the identity can be perceived.

The culinary single sound corresponds in the whole to the tendency to smooth over, to even out, to avoid extremes, to mediate. This always occurs at the expense of the characters – of clarity in the higher sense.

Making music thematically by no means suggests always underlining the themes, playing ‘mit Nachdruck’ [with emphasis], as Beethoven once demanded, but rather playing characteristically, that is, in such a way that the theme sets itself apart as a theme, e.g. in op. 59, 2 through its fast gliding quality.

[76]

The treatment of the presentation of individual musical elements must be prefaced much more emphatically by the fact that their separation is a reification stemming not from the compositions, but from musical schools. Not only can they be substituted for one another (e.g. dynamics instead of tempo modifications), but they are also all functionally dependent upon one another, e.g. sound on phrasing (as its medium); dynamics on thematic elements, tempo on form. This will certainly have to be supported, but perhaps also developed in all its details from the idea of the semantic context in music. – But the correlate of the false separation of elements is their contamination, e.g. of accentuation and rhythm. Here too one must distinguish in order to unify.

[77]

Basic rule for tempo: the tempo consistently represents the total, even in its generic idea, against the individual element, the detail, just as this latter is represented by the sound and characterization against the whole in the dialectic of interpretation. The tempo, as the unity of a movement, must be sustained as far as possible without violating the musical sense (Schnabel's tempo modifications in the Beethoven edition¹⁴⁹ are too blatant a means of articulation. But regarding this, mention important restriction by Rudi [Kolisch]: the main tempo that must be sustained is an idea, that is to say: in the whole movement, not a single temporal unit has to correspond to the metronome, and yet this latter can still transpire as the result. – My own thesis goes very far: in a meaningful presentation of a work of thematic music, no 2 beats will even be chronometrically equal. – The identity of the tempo is limited by musical sense, i.e. the meaning of individual elements. It is easy to maintain the tempo in abstracto, but almost prohibitively difficult to differentiate at a constant, let alone constantly fast tempo. – The necessity of fast tempi is essentially connected to the unity. The faster the tempo is, the sooner a movement can be perceived as whole, as a unity. But precisely therein lies once more the danger of the mechanical, especially as this demand has been taken up in the wrong manner by positivistic musicians. Fundamentally advocate it, but as ‘gently’ as Wagner advocated the slow extreme.¹⁵⁰ – Regarding the theory of tempo of the whole, the symphonic idea of the introduction of time.¹⁵¹ Tempo is the thing that serves this idea best. Though this could even be the chronometrically slower tempo, namely when those shapes whose proportion brings about the ‘moment’ then become clearer.

[78]

We were discussing Rudi's [Kolisch] theory of Beethoven's tempi.¹⁵² According to this, there is a limited variety of basic types, basic characters, each of which is assigned an identical tempo. I do not wish to dispute this; this is one of the ‘mechanical’, staged elements in Beethoven corroborated by his written abbreviations, or the statement about natural genius and the diminished seventh chord.¹⁵³ But leaving aside the question – which must be treated in the book – of whether and to what extent true interpretation has to come to the aid of the work in its helplessness (and every real performer tries to do this; finding the right solution cannot be separated from the search for the lesser evil, the thing that agrees best – relatively speaking – with the composition), one should distinguish within the identity discovered by Rudi. I named the slow movement from op. 59, 2 and the Lydian one from op. 132; Rudi also added the one from the 9th Symphony. Unquestionably all three belong to the category of the slow alla breve, with very slow minims as the unit; Rudi would take the crotchets at = 60 throughout. But the minims in the E major Adagio and that of the Ninth are melody minims, whereas those in op. 132 are chorale minims, which are much harder to perceive as a melody. I would therefore – to make the theme at all recognizable – play this movement the most quickly of the three, thus in the strongest opposition to tradition. Only thus can one prevent the movement from doing nothing more than radiating a solemn atmosphere based on its incomprehensibility, on something false. Then there are considerations of form and proportion. If one does not allow the minims in op. 132 to flow, then the tempo of the 3/8 section is too far away, and one can no longer perceive any unity. Only the movement from the 9th has the grand Abgesang, whose semiquaver sextuplets impose an upper limit upon the minims of the theme. Concerning the proportions, one must also consider that here the middle section is in 3/4, and its unit thus in fact slower than in the Lydian movement, whose middle section, for harmonic reasons, I always think of in whole bars. But above all the emotional characters of the three movements – the subjective-lyrical from op. 59, the choral variations and the symphonic adagio – are so fundamentally different that it strikes me as positivistic to lump them all together in terms of tempo owing to the relatively abstract category of ‘adagio minims’.

The fundamental insolubility of the tempo problem – the fact that there is not really a correct tempo for any piece – is an expression of compositional antagonism, of the irreconcilability of the whole and its parts in thematic music.

One's idea of a movement's tempo is always tied to its overall character, which then modifies itself according to the individual characters – but only minimally in the tempo.

Treatment of the tempo as a function of the musical content. Example: Berg Sonata.¹⁵⁴ Everything interwoven, mediated, also the opposing characters. Danger of congestion. Therefore the treatment of the tempo must here achieve the opposite of what is normally required: to differentiate while retaining the transitions, already with the new element in the main theme. But all this within the range of the main tempo, which is uniform, but thought of as a form of ‘leeway’. Something seemingly external, like the tempo modifications written in small letters, has a precise function in this sense.

First requirement of tempo treatment: finding the unit and its measure. E.g. Beethoven, C minor Concerto, assuming that it has not already been notated. Allegro con brio does not refer to the alla breve minims, as the c1-fig-5023 says the same thing again. So not: c1-fig-5024 = 138, but rather such quick c1-fig-5025 that one thinks in c1-fig-5026 , so roughly c1-fig-5027 = 80.

[79]

The fact that tempo is dependent on musical content means that in thematic music it must fundamentally be more flexible – within the mensural limits – than in monothematic music

Music must be allowed to linger, – but not to listen to itself.

The tempo must trace the music's image ‘neumically’ (conductors know this, but their fear of boredom turns into fear of the listeners). So in the Eroica small score on p. 12, for example, after the general pause,¹⁵⁵ do not drag, ‘onward’ (it is almost impossible to resolve the question of whether one is realizing or rather assisting the sense of the composition with this – the two converge). – ‘Keeping a movement flowing’ from the perspective of its sense; at times the sense calls for the theme's intervention, e.g. op. 59, 2, 1st movement, bars 55–56, where the second-inversion chord really marks the arrival of the cadence. But the music interpolates, and this interpolation becomes palpable as a formal force because there is no repose, because the music moves on. It is entirely wrong, on the other hand, to accelerate the subsequent homophonic syncopated element, as here one can only feel the congestion in so far as one is aware of the strong beats, and, as one is not allowed to supply any internal emphases, one must strictly adhere to the beats. Place strong emphasis on the last quaver in bar 64 (but without ritardando), so that 2 accents follow one another – the reinstatement of the hierarchy, which is compositionally intended here, must be brought out. With the syncopations, distinguish clearly between c1-fig-5028 in bar 68 and the subsequent c1-fig-5029 ! Everything else purely through dynamics, the crescendo replaces a stringendo, the più crescendo replaces a ritardando. – On ‘letting the music move on’ cf. also Eroica, small score p. 16.¹⁵⁶

The quicker and more uniform the tempo becomes, the more the constructive function of other means of presentation increases – in particular accents – especially those of timbral differentiation and dynamics.

[80]

The fundamental task of tempo treatment: ascertaining the main unit or the tempo range. It is by its nature a paradoxical task. – The quicker the tempo, the more important the phrasing – but also true of extreme slowness.

Concerning dynamics: against mf as the norm (Rudi [Kolisch] says that Beethoven knows no mezzo-forte). If there is a standard level, then it would be the one lacking all force, namely p. The basic mf stems from the misguided culinary notion of the full, rich sound. But probably the very idea of a standard level is wrong in itself. – From the perspective of new music, which composes itself from extremes, against range. This is particularly important as a means of articulating and liberating the subcutaneous. Not varying a medium sound, but rather drawing strength from the characters and their proportion. – The requirement of much greater dynamic differentiation: it must extend as far as the differentiation manifest in the composition. Where it is not notated, it can very often be derived from the characters.

The concept of dynamics is not only a quantitative but also a qualitative term, i.e. substantially connected to the sound-characters. There is, for example, a p that exists, a real p, and a non-present p – this is perhaps what is meant by misterioso. NB the study should perhaps contain a phenomenology of all such classifications, converting them into categories of musical sense and faithfully implementing their precise musical meaning. Or at least the idea of such a phenomenology, with various practical models. [Along the left margin:] very important

[81]

The requirement of dynamic characteristics incorporates the requirement of dynamic economy. For the characteristics to be possible, one must not exhaust the degrees of emphasis. Above all, the greatest care with forte passages. Often enough, where in common practice the sustained volume of an entire phrase is considered necessary, a single accent is sufficient; with sf draw back immediately instead of ‘holding’ the accent (this should be introduced in orchestral practice). – This desideratum is connected to one of those most important in the presentation of polyphony: giving the voices space to breathe. Dynamic clarity means not only bringing out particular voices, but beyond this also allowing the others to withdraw, above all absolutely everything that has no melodic sense. Chordally conceived passages, e.g. in the first movement of the C major Symphony by Schubert, must be played chordally (a great deal of musical nonsense stems from playing things melodically that are not melodic!). So: not connecting, but rather separating (minimally); the upper voices no stronger than the others; only those pitches critical to the harmony should be made clear.

[82]

The Schönbergian distinction between Hauptstimme, Nebenstimme¹⁵⁷ and unclassified (i.e. completely background) voices must essentially be applied to the entire traditional repertoire, at least the thematic variety; with polyphonic music in the strictest sense, the situation is somewhat different, as Schönberg has rightly pointed out.¹⁵⁸ – In this sense, the conventional presentation of chamber music in particular is much too primitive; as a rule, it contents itself with the ‘running thread’. I gave an example from Beethoven's E minor Quartet, bars 13 and 21, which are written in triple counterpoint. In both cases, the upper voice is the principal one; in both cases, the sustained bass must recede at all costs. The inner voices are the problem. But one can only understand the upper voice from bar 21f. as the principal voice if one recognizes it as identical to the viola part in bar 13f. So this latter is the Nebenstimme and must be clear, while the 2nd violin recedes entirely (one normally finds the reverse). One can thus extrapolate the dynamic conditions of crossing strictly from the musical sense. Incidentally, the rhythm c1-fig-5030 , which is constitutive for the entire movement, requires particular dynamic care. E.g. in bar 21 the semiquaver upbeat in the 2nd violin must be emphasized, i.e. not allowed to drop, and this throughout (emphasizing the semiquavers from the field of resolution in groups of four follows from this). Correspondingly no gaps in bar 156f.; the differentiation must be achieved only through the timbre.

Crescendi and decrescendi must arise from the musical sense with much greater differentiation. Example: bars 48–49 in the first movement of op. 59, 2. Bar 49 interrupts ‘subito’ as a new element, rather like the figure with the semiquavers in the 1st movement of the Eroica.¹⁵⁹ So the crescendo from bar 48 must not lead smoothly into bar 49, but on the other hand no breathing space either, as the subito would be lost otherwise (one would be prepared for the surprise, as with dashes in bad prose). So the only solution is to skip one dynamic level, so to speak. This is precisely the point of the sf model, to show how dynamics should be developed from the musical sense. (NB excursus on the Beethovenian crescendi leading to a p.¹⁶⁰ They always have a formal sense. Here the ‘negative’ representation is already in the composition.

Dynamics and the relationship between elements. Op. 59, 2, bar 34. No ritardando viola and cello diminuendo, but cello not leading continuously into p and phrasing before the p entry of the second subject's model (minimal breathing space). By contrast maintain continuity through steady diminuendo in the viola, which connects the two critical bars legato, without any phrasing. NB in the cello bar 35 the G should be maintained at all costs, so that the identity of the motive with its continuation bar 39 becomes entirely clear. For this, it should not be culinarily over-melodicized, but rather kept in strict motion; no delay whatsoever. This is a model for the central category of thematic music-making.

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Characteristic Nebenstimme in the adagio of Beethoven op. 59, 1, the 1st violin's counterpoint bar 9f. (p. 34).¹⁶¹

Example of how dynamics can replace tempo Eroica small score p. 7.¹⁶²

In the critique of the standard level and the standard tone, it should be pointed out that music is in no sense a standard condition, and should therefore under no circumstances be presented as such. Music as a standard condition: thus one smuggles it into the positivistic world as contraband, e.g. Hindemith, minstrel (cf. the hypothesis of the de-artification of art in ‘timeless fashion’).¹⁶³ It is precisely this appearance that must be counteracted by true interpretation. One need only interpret correctly, and it will automatically be defamiliarized. Music's purpose is not absorption by the industry (through functioning), or to be obscured (through smoothness, harmonization, culinary matters), but rather a determinate resistance through its immanent consistency. This is the real connection between the reproduction theory and my philosophy.

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Making music thematically: that means representing the history of a theme,¹⁶⁴ and not simply: clarifying the themes. Such clarification can (e.g. in the course of Bach's fugues) be precisely the wrong thing. There is such a thing as a clarity of a higher order, rather like higher critique in historical science, namely that of the thematic history, and it takes priority over the positivistic clarity of each thematic situation. – One can understand the 1st movement of op. 59, 2 as a sequence in which something exterritorial – the perfect fifth E–B in the first bar – becomes drawn in, then immanent, and ultimately thematic. This is the yardstick for the exceptionally difficult interpretation of the main theme complex. E.g. in the first bar, the upper voice must be clear enough to be perceptible as a substrate of the history, but not yet so clearly as to pre-empt the result, the process of thematicization; and the difficulty lies in transferring this material logic of the music into the mensural domain. Or in bar 3 the connection between

must be palpable, but not underlined (so presumably: the 1st beat unaccented, the 4th with an accent that is in fact composed (the doubling by the 2nd violin and the extension). – But one must also understand the step of a sixth, as it is necessary for an understanding of bar 18, which is in turn necessary for bar 48 and thus for an understanding of the entire movement (NB the rhythm of bar 48 is once more the link to the stabilizing motive bar 55 viola). But all this must still not underline – it must be known and then forgotten once more, as it were. And this leads to the heart of the reproduction theory, to the point where it begins to sublate itself. For one could ask very seriously: the fact that these relations are subcutaneous is itself an aspect of their sense: to expose them would go against their sense, i.e. would turn into pedantry. But this would be undialectical, and the logic of music is dialectical. The entire, infinitely subtle, but decisive difference is: whether the subcutaneous shines through the ‘skin’ (which in Beethoven's case is also composed) or whether, as a phenomenon, it is hypostatized. The whole task lies in translating this idea into the language of music. ‘Returning’ to the skin. A manifestation that is known as a manifestation is objectively different to one that is unreflected; the same and yet not the same, and in this sense the representation of music is dialectical. Interpreting means fulfilling the identity of the non-identical and the non-identity of the identical in its manifestation. [Along the left margin:] this is the central problem of the entire theory

[85]

[86]

Ad phrasing: most problems of sense and senselessness in the details are problems of phrasing, especially in new music. The phenomenon of the incomprehensible sentence. They consist above all of two aspects: that of detached notes, ‘punctuation’ (submensural pauses that could mostly also be written mensurally), and of accentuation (which strictly speaking belongs to the realm of dynamics). – The unity of the phrase is that of the musical shape in its independence and its dependence. Strong beats, in fact barlines in general, normally form an aspect of it, though their relationship is not necessarily identical to that of phrasing. The phrases rather have melodic points of emphasis that often coincide with harmonic ones, though not always. The categories of phrasing are: attacking, continuing, dying away, resuming once more, Abgesang. Supply precise phrasing analyses of Schönberg, the main theme from op. 23, 1, and the clarinet melody of the song op. 22, 1, possibly also the main theme of op. 16, 1. – With emancipated melodies, the significance of high- and low-points. – Meaningful delivery of themes perhaps to be shown using the main theme of Schönberg's Violin Concerto, contrast this with an incorrect i.e. inarticulate presentation. The senseless is the inarticulate; this is why expression always has, at the same time, a constructive sense. – Correct phrasing must serve precisely the same purpose that rubato serves in bad interpretations. – Phrasing means never articulating a shape alone, but always also the relationship between the shapes. One must sense ahead, phrase towards something, phrase beyond something; phrasing is never static, it lives through the relationships between musical forces. One must feel precisely this: ‘something like … is coming’: this makes it happen. In phrasing, music's speech-like aspect is sublated positively; it is only through phrasing that music speaks. – There is also retrospective phrasing. – Every phrase must know what it wants, must be determinate, and where it wants several things (crossing!) this plurality must also become clear. There is no such thing as vague phrasing, except where the wearing out of phrases itself serves an intention of the construction, e.g. when towards the end of a symphonic composition the music floods the dams, which can be felt as such. In general, one can gauge the temporal dynamic of the music by its phrasing: the course of time tends to overcome the ends of phrases. Punctuation much clearer than usual: one can observe a similar development to that in language during the decline of the great epochs. Play colons and semicolons in particular. – Phrasing of parentheses (very important!) – interjections, evasions. Problem of phrasing in the absence of external formal divisions (Schönberg, op. 23, 4). – The totality of phrasing coincides with the musical form. Therefore each individual phrasing must be judged according to the formal totality. – Basic rule of emphasizing ‘critical’ notes. Fundamentally no internal emphases on tied notes. Differentiation of accents see Schönberg's indications.

Postscript to op. 59, 2. Bar 67 2nd violin only sf, then withdraws immediately (example of a ‘breathing space’). – Bars 78–79 play middle voice thematically. – Bar 107, at the turn in the development, the dreamlike character must disappear, very strictly. Viola + cello here fully thematic for the first time. – In the 2nd movement in the 2nd strophe of the theme from upbeat to bar 9, the first violin – and precisely not the chorale – is the principal voice.

Locarno, 1 September 1954

Rather nice statement by Rudi [Kolisch] in Kranichstein: with the small notes, it is like in monopoly capitalism. Not only are they small in themselves – the large ones also make them even smaller, rob them of time and strength. Dropping shorter notes is probably the main offence of incorrect presentation.

[87]

One must be clearly aware of the study's strategy. It is directed against 2 fronts. On the one hand official musical life, which – as is particularly evident in its most celebrated exponents – became part of the culture industry long ago: galvanized, spirited and culinary, all at the same time. Cultivated and barbaric music-making converge. On the other hand the front of abstract negation, the escape to the mensural realm. In the former case a false subjectivism, in the latter the residual theory of truth, the extermination of the subject (all forms of objectivism, from Stockhausen to Walcha, really amount to the same thing. The so-called young people protested against the ‘exaggerated expressivity’ in Eduard's [Steuermann] Schönberg interpretation).¹⁶⁵ – Students of Bloch from East Germany came to me full of enthusiasm: they had never heard anything like it.

[88]

In Kranichstein there were a number of questions that the theory will have to answer. A student wanted to know, for example, whether the logical conclusion from our critique of the conventional ideal of music-making would be to prefer bad instrumentalists etc. to good ones. This is nonsense, of course. The choice of sounds, playing techniques etc. according to the needs of the composition must stem from freedom, from being in control of the possibilities, not from the neediness of those supposedly musical singers who sing Schönberg because they lack the voice for Madam Butterfly. Whether this control can be gained relatively independently, or only through the compositions, is a pedagogical question. To attain freedom, a development of technique in its own right is probably inevitable, if we are to avoid semi-dilettantes à la Bobi;¹⁶⁶ as soon as this independence of means has been reached, however, artistes automatically gravitate towards the culture industry, efficiency, ‘service’. So here one is also confronted by an antinomy. One can at least make one concession to that student: sociologically young, not yet established artistes are more suited to correct interpretation than the celebrities, none of whom are open to discussion. – Another student then suggested that our theory demanded a ban on any personal characteristics, any idiom on the performer's part. Rudi [Kolisch] and I answered in unison in the negative: against ‘chemically pure’ tone. This too would be a residual theory of truth in musical terms. In true interpretation, this element is retained: this is precisely what ‘delivery’ means, and its category still remains to be developed. Here too, radical does not mean fanatical.

Harmonic relationships must be represented through the form. Harmonic shifts, for example, as opposed to modulations, through abruptness, unexpectedness, so a minimal breathing space. Development section of the Pastoral Symphony.

The representation of musical sense: that essentially means articulation. Regarding this, formosus as beautiful: rich in forms, divided into forms. But is not the articulation in any work of art – in anything beautiful – its speech-likeness? Is that not the nature of the relationship between true interpretation and language?

[89]

From a conversation with Rudi [Kolisch] on 2 October 1954: he thought that the mediation between new music and the presentation of traditional music was something initially very concrete, and that, in the case of the former, a greater differentiation in the matter itself and consequently in its presentation had been learned, which the latter – the traditional – had profited from, but which is at the same time one of its own requirements. – That one should separate the concept of the subcutaneous from the notion of a hidden musical world. That the subcutaneous is also a part of the phenomenon, of the sonic reality, only one that is ignored in conventional interpretation. This is an important argument against the misconception of intellectualism.

The theory must be guarded against the progressive education-misunderstanding that true interpretation can be developed purely and immediately from the work, without the performer making any intellectual or technical contributions himself. (Cf. on this the note on p. 87) The independence of the instrumental, as an element of labour-division, rationalization, cannot simply be retracted in favour of an unmediated relationship to the matter itself. Especially as the increasing complexity of the works themselves makes increasing demands of the performers' own abilities. On this point, the theory must set itself clearly apart from the youth movement in musical pedagogy. This reduces the works in order to overcome the gap between reified technique and the matter itself, and leads to regression in both areas. But what is important is to cancel out this separation through its own consequences, through its extreme. Just as composition in fact increases its demands on interpretation the more it grows apart from it, so also will the performer, the more perfect and differentiated his performance becomes, and the better he controls his natural material, become increasingly able to do justice to the composition. The deciding factor is simply the conscious application of all this to the performance, the self-reflection of interpretation as something that exists for itself – ‘Critique of the Minstrel’. – It is probably only simpler in singing, where vocal fetishism ensures that the larger part of a singer's ‘ability’ only stands in the way of the music. But even here one must differentiate: only all ‘voice training’ is bad; it is quite a different matter with singing as an instrumental technique, namely coloratura.

[90]

Perhaps one must go even further. For the time being, interpretation still encompasses legitimate and necessary elements which cannot be purely subsumed by the matter itself, and which come from the performer. Thus all genuine presentation has a certain sense of hewing the sound out of the piano, of playing corporeally, as it were, inside the piano. This is what defines a pianist, and this is precisely what I lack. But whoever cannot play in this fashion cannot represent a Beethoven sonata correctly either, even though it contains this physical sound only in a very mediated form, if at all. It only turns into something undesirable if it becomes undisciplined, an end in itself. – And what are we really to think of Caruso's voice? Does the vocal fetish there not in fact turn into the matter itself? Such extremes must be considered and incorporated if the theory is not to turn out rigidly academic.

Higher questions of interpretation must at least be pointed out. I note the very difficult passage where the Chopin C minor Etude modulates to B flat major before the middle section.¹⁶⁷ The problem is that the highest points in the two hands do not always coincide; the right-hand melody, in longer note-values, reaches its F before the G in the left-hand semiquavers. This G, which reaches beyond the final pitch, in a certain sense exceeds, transgresses the preceding F; at the same time it is absolutely beneath it. If one plays the whole with a view to this, then the right-hand line, already very difficult to unify, becomes lame and senseless; and one must certainly not let it fall. Only conclusion: complete independence of delivery in the two hands; play on two levels. (Classify precisely)

[91]

[92]

Concerning the theory of the conductor. The conductor has two quite distinct, initially unrelated tasks to master. First of all that of co-ordinating the players (and singers), which can no longer be achieved by the individuals above a certain number; i.e. the controlling function, from a primitive holding-together to higher technical duties such as not allowing them to drag, giving the different parts their space and such like. But then also the task of music-making: of moving through the imagination of the individual subject to realize the work as a unity within the diversity of the orchestra. Now, the second task is beset by extraordinary difficulties. There are only a few musicians with such imagination; most replace it with an immediate, mimic relationship to their instrument. That is impossible with the orchestra; one cannot play it like a piano, as it posits a layer of mediation in relation to the mimetic immediacy, and whoever does so nonetheless does it badly, like play-acting, by denying that layer of mediation (Bruno Walter). Beyond this, the independent and estranged medium, physically separate from the one imagining it, obstructs the realization of that which has been imagined like a resilient mass, probably most of all with choirs, because singing is itself a form of immediacy that fundamentally eludes the process of mediation (this is the reason for that particular breed, the choral conductor, who adapts to this special circumstance in a form of resignation. Incidentally, what is generally referred to as conducting talent consists in the ability to break down those elements of resistance through a psychological mechanism of projection and identification, indeed to place their energy in the service of the performance – this is where the long-projected socio-psychological analysis of the orchestral musician should be added).¹⁶⁸ The consequence of this difficulty is that the solution to the first problem is always passed off as the second; that the controlling function and all that belongs to it, such as precision of beat, not letting up, allocation of dynamics (of the orchestra, not the composition), appears as if it were already the second; and the fraud lies in the fact that the conductor knows subjectively how to present the ability to achieve such things as the ability to shape, while objectively, through well-worn tradition, as long as there is no distortion, it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish between the two, and the genuinely musical effect, which is entirely missing, is replaced by a continuation of the psychological effect, thus allowing the audience to overcome the resistance offered by the orchestra.

Frankfurt, 22 March 1955

The way reproduction is calculated in advance in some compositions. There are pieces or passages by Chopin, such as the presto Etude in F minor or the demisemiquaver passage in the F sharp major Impromptu, which – understood in a very sublime, spiritualized sense – already show in the piano writing the expectation that the strength of the fingers can hardly ever be entirely uniform, so that single notes will stand out involuntarily and randomly, much as reflections shimmer upon the water in the sunlight. The compositional element of contingency, which forms a central part of Romanticism, fulfils itself through the inalienable fallibility of performance.

[93]

Nothing in musical reproduction is more feeble than when a rubato appears with the character of something arbitrary, intentional or artificial – just as my mother¹⁶⁹ was able to imitate, with overpowering comedy, the way a pseudo-Italian singer performed a passage in a soprano aria from La forza del destino (Pace, pace) with an accelerando

[On the right beside the musical example:] NB. concerning the theory of musical stupidity as one that is crucial to interpretation.

As, however, the problem with all reproduction lies in the relationship between freedom and the musical text – should one not be able to find here a canon for reproduction itself?

Concerning the theory of the conductor: in more difficult works, the requirement to hold things together usually amounts to concentrating all one's attention to precision on the vertical level, which of course corresponds to the beat. But for the representation of the musical context, the horizontal level is much more important. Everything depends on the ‘running thread’: first of all the melody skipping from one principal voice to the next, then the syntactical articulation of the separate lines in themselves. The fact that this is neglected in favour of an entirely external ideal of precision is the main reason for the incomprehensibility of new music. – Great conductors are rarely the most ‘precise’.

Construction (in the work) and clarity (in its reproduction) are equivalents. This is the Mahlerian element in Schönberg. In fact the two categories are interchangeable; one must compose clearly and construct through reproduction. This layer is that of the non-difference between the work and the performance: it is this layer that determines their relationship.

January 1956.

[94]

Such expressions as ‘virtuosically’, ‘con bravura’ (in Chopin) and so on point to a substantial aspect of musical reproduction: a ritual of mastering nature. The performer is always at the same time – out of objective necessity, through the tension between the work and its performance – a sort of harnesser, a tamer, most of all as a conductor or pianist, but also as a coloratura singer. This is the reason contained in the matter itself for the affinity of reproduction to the circus and gypsies, and at the same time also for the special sociological status of the reproducer: the privilege of the outcast who is tolerated as an institution; and here lie, at the same time, substantial forces and decisive obstacles to true reproduction (refer to Eisler book and develop the two aspects).¹⁷⁰ But this is based on the presupposition that the music being represented is ‘nature’ – certainly also the raw materials of reproduction, such as piano, orchestra, or voice – and presumably nature for the most part. The fact that the reproduction comprises a twofold material: namely the sound material, which is used to shape, and the work, which is shaped, is probably the objective reason that reproduction becomes independent. – In a certain sense the work is, it becomes nature again and again in relation to its interpretation; this is its right and its necessity. At the same time, however, this nature is itself mediated, and to this extent untrue; this lends interpretation its illusory character, endangers it through absurdity, and works towards its abolition. The element referred to here is the most fragile and delicate aspect of reproduction, but one of its most particular ones. Very important; pursue further.

[95]

Good example of the relationship between the tempo to be chosen and the composition: the first Prelude by Chopin, in C major, with the indication agitato. The idea of this ingenious piece is the relationship between the strong beat and the fast movement following it, which spreads out to affect the strong beat as if unable to restrain itself. At the same time this is also the idea of the expressive content, the moment of overflowing, passionate enthusiasm. After reaching this moment, the two elements – the notes on the beat and those after the beat – play together, just as a successful fulfilment, and nothing else, makes it possible to play with failure. But it all depends on whether this idea and its extremely differentiated unfolding become clear. The almost insoluble problem of presentation – any authentic presentation leads to aporias and antinomies, no music can be represented purely – is therefore to combine the passionate momentum of the overall character with that clarity. But this means not being seduced by the semiquavers and by that momentum, but rather moderating the tempo sufficiently for the rests on the downbeat to be so clear that one can truly feel them being overcome. This also involves careful pedalling, so above all lift the pedal before the downbeat and not, in typical pianistic manner, only after it. I have never yet heard the piece properly, not even when I have played it myself.

Search systematically for similar examples in the repertoire; also Schönberg. This still remains to be done.

[96]

It will have to be shown in detail that, in musical reproduction, objectivity of approach can come about only through the efforts of the subjective fantasy. In the Chopin F sharp minor Nocturne op. 48, no. 2, the first strophe of the main section is followed, after a complete cadence in G sharp major, by a consequent, the main theme, which turns this G sharp major into the secondary dominant of the home key. This consequent enters mf and then diminishes to pp. But it is an inauthentic mezzo-forte, i.e. the absolute volume is not meant corporeally, but rather unreally, as if located at a different level and altered in its colour; the real mf in the tenor register expresses something absent, as it were piano, and the absolute volume is precisely the means for drawing in this imaginary quality, just as ghosts would be all the more ghostly for being more real. Of course this phenomenon has its technical correlates, such as here the consequent-character of the passage; everything has already happened, it is ‘afterwards’; the mf no longer has any function in the reinstated basic piano character, and therefore turns into an as if; such phenomena are incredibly difficult to put into words, and have so far hardly ever been described, except occasionally by Kurth.¹⁷¹ It is the pianist's task to fulfil the sense of the passage by finding a colour, a type of attack that de-realizes the mf. I do not doubt the validity of the insight, that is to say the objectivity of such interpretation, and I can also justify it in all its details through formal analysis, but all of this presupposes an act of spontaneity and imagination; without the subject of the performer, the composition's objective sense is lost. Interpretation is mimetic also in the sense that it imitates the act of composition within the composition, so to speak, that it dissolves objectification into a fluid aggregate state once more, and this is the only way for it to objectify. This theory is very close to Marcel Proust, as indeed his work – in the extra-musical domain – consists largely of experiences such as the one implied here with reference to Chopin. The paradox reached here is the real problem in reproduction.

[97]

‘… just as the playing of a great musician … is that of such a great pianist that one no longer knows whether one is really in the presence of a pianist, as this same playing … has become so transparent, so replete with its content, that one does not even notice it oneself, or only like a window that allows us to gaze upon a masterpiece.’

Marcel Proust, Guermantes, p. 66¹⁷²

Concerning p. 90 of these notes. ‘Higher questions of interpretation’ – really, this is inartistic. For everything in a work of art is equally close to the centre, of equal value. And: all spiritual questions of presentation are mediated through the concrete technical ones. Indeed more than this: the questions relating to the whole, the formal disposition, should not be resolved abstractly, in themselves, independently of the details, but only through these. But also vice versa. This must become very clear.

Concerning the theory of the conductor, p. 91. It is even arguable whether it would be desirable to make music upon the orchestra as on the piano, or chamber music. For all orchestral music, not least opera, tends by its nature towards a certain distance; it does not want everything to be heard as clearly as the other kinds. But true interpretation depends essentially upon the distance of the phenomenon from the listener. In addition the fact that Beethoven's orchestral works, and with Mozart at least the operas, are substantially simpler and more succinct than their great chamber works.¹⁷³ This shows an important mediation between the theory and society, one that here extends to the level of the aesthetic immanence itself.

[98]

A very important category is that of significance, or its opposite. An infinite amount of bad music-making arises simply from playing significant elements insignificantly. This is not always a matter of strength or even of standing out, in fact at times not even of accents. I noticed in Solti's Figaro¹⁷⁴ that the thirds in the page's first aria

dwindled away, the whole thing was worn away through a lack of significance, they had a certain dullness. Could perhaps be corrected through an accent on the upbeat; but I am not sure. – The whole of this very difficult aria suffered because the theme was not presented as a theme, i.e. that the rhythm

was so ill-defined that it was no longer recognizable as such.

[99]

A great deal concerning questions of interpretation from my unpublished introductory lecture to the Chamber Concerto by Berg¹⁷⁵ should be extracted and used. In music with a variety of colours, keeping the thread running consists essentially in ensuring that amid the rapid changes of colour, even if they are identically strong, no ‘colour gap’ arises; otherwise, in difficult pieces, an understanding of the music could be jeopardized. Also applies to classical music, e.g. the first continuation of the descant theme at the very start of the Figaro overture. – NB in the slow movement of the Berg the passage that I left out as an example owing to the incomprehensibility of the interpretation (stretto with augmentation and diminution).¹⁷⁶ This should be analysed, i.e. it should be shown what one must hear, why one does not hear it, and with what consequences. This is where the reason for the incomprehensibility is to be found.

Secret of true interpretation: remaining in control of itself at all times. This enables it to realize the work, which is only ever mediated by the imagination, in its entirety. Thus the exact opposite of a play-world, a play-instinct, or a fetishization of the mechanism. Connection to the ‘Critique of the Minstrel’.

The critique of historicism should be conceived together with the critique of arrangement. What is written in the Fetish Character essay (ad Beethoven) seemingly contradicts the arguments in the Bach essay.¹⁷⁷ But indeed only seemingly. The relationship between the colour and the construction marks the threshold. But not entirely. One must find a precise answer to the question: why is it legitimate to orchestrate organ works by Bach, but awful to reorchestrate symphonies by Beethoven? The element of history has a substantial bearing on this. But I am not entirely clear about the matter myself. Extremely important.

central

What one calls music-making is generally nothing but ego weakness, a mere surrendering of oneself to the instrument and the idiom. And it is precisely this that obstructs the work (NB the minstrel as the one who is not fully individuated. Slavic, pre-bourgeois nations!). This is the exact mediation of the statement that objectivity can fulfil itself only by passing through the subject.

[100]

There will also have to be a treatment of the socio-economic conditions of interpretation. In capitalism, where working time is exchanged as a commodity, all musical interpretation – but above all opera – tends to suffer from insufficient rehearsal through lack of time. Most performances take place at the point where the rehearsals should really begin. Reaching a consensus and functioning at a basic level takes the place of genuine presentation. A boundless reduction that impairs the meaning. Concerning this also the problem of the trade union and its dialectic, especially in the USA. The hopelessness, the realization that nothing is good enough, sediments itself as defeatism. Rottenberg's¹⁷⁸ remark ‘Ghastly, carry on’. – The German repertoire industry, imitating conducting styles, the decline of performances. Stagione not a solution. Toscanini's achievement: sufficient rehearsals. Bayreuth. Bring in all these things. The social conditions are also partly responsible for incorrect interpretation to such a degree that they permit no other – not simply to the extent of expressing themselves in it. A musical economy of scarcity, and at the same time a consideration for saleability down to the very level of the sound-ideal. If these connections were not shown, the whole thing would become too ideological.

Whether a phrase is rendered meaningfully can be converted precisely into technical correlates such as accents, breathing spaces etc. But in order for this conversion to occur, one must first understand the sense of the phrase. Very important, pursue further. Against intuitionism and positivism.

Sils Maria, August 1956

[101]

The only real difference between the presentation of traditional and new music is that the former, according to external appearances, makes the performer's work a little easier by creating a certain surface connection through fixed chordal relations and tonal hierarchy that is absent from new music. Structurally, viewed from the subcutaneous level, the problems are the same in both cases. At least, senselessness in the presentation of new music is almost universal, and this contributes to public resistance. It is primarily a result of the lack of rehearsal time. With conductors in particular, there is a disastrous shift of attention. Rehearsals revolve around the musicians staying together, not around the music hanging together, whereas the former should simply be the precondition for the latter. People suppose that, if it ‘comes off’, it must be right, even if the most abominable gibberish comes out. Zillig's statement¹⁷⁹ concerning his performance of the Berg Chamber Concerto, and the nonsense in the second movement's stretto. A case of purely vertical music-making, based on the beat, and this means: not making music at all. Rules of thumb:

the running thread, connections between voices. Particular attention to ends and continuations of voices (start of the Berg Concerto). Rudi's [Kolisch] desideratum: take up impulses
true clarification of the relationship between principal and secondary voices. It is not the theme, which one hears anyway, that is always the main concern. Exemplify this with reference to the Berg Concerto and Bach, vol. II, D major fugue.
melodic structure (refer to the main theme of the Woodwind Quintet by Arnold Schönberg). Concerning this also: the moment where things start to blur (phrasing) and: the holes in melodies.
account with the utmost precision for the formal sense of every passage – indeed note! – and play accordingly. E.g. at the start of the quintet: construction of the main theme (middle section!!!) and zeugma in the consequent; ‘entry’ of the continuation with the quaver triplets (as in a Mozart sonata); relative weight of the caesuras.
taking the dynamics literally in the sense of extremes of clarity, particularly important for woodwind instruments. p is almost always played too loudly.
[102]
treatment of tempo should always and at all costs be subordinated to musical clarity.
ritardandi etc. always from the musical context, never absolute or independent. Otherwise nonsense will result, and the entire form, indeed the musical language, can become incomprehensible. When the language has not been understood, the ritardandi are normally exaggerated. Example before the F minor entry in the 1st Chamber Symphony op. 9 [by Schoenberg]. This, above all the exposition, generally full of such problems. Perhaps develop some of these (the horn imitation in the inversion at the start is normally already incomprehensible. Sound and comprehensibility).
in rehearsal first only the sequence of principal voices, then add the Nebenstimme, and only then the actual accompanying parts. Rehearse these one system at a time.

Very few musicians know that there is also such a thing as a quick melody. Whether or not something is a melody initially has nothing whatsoever to do with the tempo.

Bruno Walter's foremost rule: the customer must never be excluded, must never be bored. So either revel, or grip them, draw them in. What happens to the music as a result is unimportant to him.

Once a particular stage of reflection has been reached, the notation, beyond its mensural and neumic aspects, wishes to say something of its own accord, as a subjective intention, and it is the perform-er's task to read this. In the Appassionata, the difference between c1-fig-5035 and c1-fig-5036 determines the character of the composition.

[103]

Bülow's statement: crescendo is piano, diminuendo is forte¹⁸⁰ has a much wider application. A semiquaver is not only less than a quaver, but above all also more than a demisemiquaver. This is generally forgotten.

Following the imperative of the clarity of all aesthetic categories, one should probably generally stipulate that every musical symbol – note, rest, expressive marking – must be distinguished absolutely from the adjacent values on both sides, except in the case of continuous transitions – and then the character of the transition itself must become absolutely clear.

Something must be said in favour of the absolute execution of tempered intonation. The ‘natural’ differences are archaic rudiments, and irreconcilable with the rational chromatic scale, the equal weight of its degrees, and the enharmonic reinterpretation that is fundamentally always possible. In favour of Sevčik's semitone method.¹⁸¹ Very important.

The text must include precise instructions for the presentation of dense polyphony, with an example.

Motifs:

every voice must be conspicuous upon its first entry, and models must above all be shown to be as such
every voice that is sufficiently incisive for one to keep following it must step back in favour of the next during its continuation
one should stress entries, not beats. It is often sufficient to linger very briefly, then that part can recede
particular attention to phrases, accents etc. that do not coincide. Simultaneous phrases of differing lengths should be kept clearly apart.
[104]
hierarchy of emphasis: thematic vs. non-thematic, prominent voices vs. mere counterpoint, voices that are important but easily obscured vs. those that one hears anyway. These desiderata often conflict with one another. Then the compositional sense must decide. Cases where all voices are of equal importance are extremely rare – and brief.
voices should be kept apart not only through the dynamics, but also through bowing, legato vs. staccato, timbre, long vs. short etc. (systematically)
Let the music breathe as far as possible. Always sustain rests. Caesuras and breathing spaces
create a sound-space. How?

continuation

Avoid the mf-soup, a pedal-like layer of sound for everything else to float on top of. Creating a sound-space means: creating the possibility of distinct extremes. – But all this still does not reach the heart of the presentation of polyphony. This must rather arise from the nature of the matter itself: the dialectic between the voices, the fact that one is the negative function of the other. Main rule: play neither only vertically, i.e. harmonically, nor purely horizontally in the sense of independent melodies, but instead recognize and carry out the interlocking of the voices. This should be explained using a single example. A given voice must, as it were, be played as the negative, the complement of the other. Not only the voices must be realized, but also their relationships: polyphony must show itself through interpretation as the medium for formal evolution.

Sound-space: in some cases, placing a single accent can render it unnecessary to play an entire line forte.

[105]

With the idea of a sound-space one must distinguish precisely between the creation of an empty space, so to speak, in which events are set apart from one another (and this is what is meant here, in the reproduction theory), and on the other hand the spatiality of the composition itself, as it was formerly provided by the harmonic perspective, and today through contrapuntal work (as developed in my course on Schönberg and counterpoint).¹⁸² But the two are connected. In reproduction, the realization of the second element assumes the creation of the first.

The main rule for the presentation of polyphony can perhaps, very much cum grano salis, be summarized as follows: all voices together must form a melody. Rehearsals must work above all towards the aspect of interlocking. Regarding this also Rudi's [Kolisch] category: taking up impulses. The voices must form one single voice – but precisely through the fact that they can be meaningfully distinguished from one another.

One of the main sources of bad – inarticulate, nonsensical – music-making is the need for false connections, i.e. those on the sound-surface. The less manifestly the musicians become aware of the structural unity, the more they fear the music will fall apart, and seek to alleviate this through the most seamless conjunctions possible. This is joined by the infantile inability to sustain rests (NB the mensural component must be reinforced if the other is to benefit from it). The basic example is the audible shift of position with bad string players; but this goes beyond a blurring of phrase-endings and beginnings to the large-scale form, where they essentially despise caesuras (NB Bruno Walter). But musical coherence arises not from simply carrying on, but rather from the inner flow, i.e. the dialectical tension-field between different parts. – The central bad habit classified here corresponds precisely to the bumble-bee¹⁸³ manner of composing. Most reproducing musicians have the perspective of the bumble bee. The fear of one's own emptiness, projected to the outside.

[106]

The very widespread mistake of dropping does not apply only to short notes and weak beats, but above all also to entire phrase-endings. Here it is also significant that, in tonal music, these can often be anticipated, they ‘go without saying’. But in truth, as with most misinterpretations, this betokens a lack of strength: one has already exhausted oneself in starting the phrase, so to speak, and simply drags the rest along fleetingly. Through this, connections – in particular continuations – easily become incomprehensible. The requirement of playing out applies above all to this phenomenon. – The opposite of musical strength is allowing oneself to be carried along by the hierarchies of the idiom.

Secret of interpretation: controlling oneself, yet not making music against oneself. One's own impulse must live on even in its negation. This is precisely where the performer's strength lies.

Lively music-making, by children, amateurs, entertainers and such like, supplies the theory with the most important exemplary material. Firstly, because here the music appears with all its cracks and holes, so to speak, deconstructed into the elements of every dimension of which it is constituted, and through it one can observe, as with broken toys, how it ‘works’. The tears are so many windows onto the problems of interpretation that proficient execution normally conceals, but then one can see in the approaches of those subjects all those things that also inspire bad official music-making, but which are covered up there by good manners, by the ‘good musician’; the normal musical education is nothing other than the history of such concealment. One should understand and deduce Toscanini from the perspective of the Frankfurt Palmengarten orchestra, and Bruno Walter from the salon trio of the Hotel Waldhaus in Sils-Maria.

The theory is neither able nor willing to develop all problems of interpretation in depth – they are infinite –; but certainly to establish models for solutions. It will not save any work or effort. Every work of art is a monad; there is no universal schema for overcoming these problems. By way of introduction.

[107]

Every composition contains – as a counterpart to the pure musical notation – elements of its own interpretation. Among these, apart from the indications and expressive markings, one also finds – especially since the 19th century – instrumentation, which always interprets the work, ensuring that it appears in one guise and not in another. Presentation must extrapolate from these elements. The fact that the trumpets, trombones and tuba are missing from the day-chord at the start of Act II of Tristan says something about the character of the sound – and thus of the entire passage, an instruction for its presentation. One must take this together with Berg's statement that any music permits several kinds of instrumentation.¹⁸⁴ The one that is selected becomes the canon for authentic interpretation.

Frankfurt, December 1956

Higher problems of presentation: composed ritardandi in Brahms. They almost always seem – wrongly – like augmentations, i.e. mensural, and not like ritardandi, i.e. mensural.¹⁸⁵ E.g. in the generally very difficult first movement of the Second Symphony: the end of the first main element before the unison passage (small score p. 2). One will probably have to do it in such a way that the wind consequent in the 2nd strophe, which already dwells on the strophe's motive before the augmentation, is slowed down to such a degree that as a consequence of this one hears the 4 closing bars as an augmentation. But it is also possible that the crescendo notated by Brahms in the 3 critical bars before the augmentation should prepare the ritardando effect without any tempo modification (dynamics can replace tempo!). But this then poses the problem in the first place, i.e. how one is to proceed so that the intended effect arises. Extremely difficult. Incidentally the idea of the composed ritardando throughout the entire movement, as already before A (p. 3). – What is so unique about the piece: that a construction which is lyrical in all its elements can nevertheless be symphonic as a totality. How this should be realized – those are the real problems of interpretation, which are simply never overcome.

[108]

The ‘higher problems of presentation’ referred to in the previous note are not, as I have already observed, a layer to be built upon lower ones. But neither do they follow naturally merely from an accurate representation of details. The two aspects are rather in a state of constant tension, both in the compositions and therefore also in their presentation: the problem is their identity, that of the non-identical. In order to decode details, it is necessary to have a knowledge of the overall character to the same extent that this latter comes to fruition as a result of pursuing impulses stemming from the details. There is no prestabilized harmony between the two; rather, identity must always be established first, and it is perhaps the innermost task of interpretation – the one that makes the work require interpretation – to renew that identity, which the text contains only as a potentiality and a problem. This is why interpretation implies both an aid and a critique of the texts, namely wherever it encounters the impossibility of that identification. This latter is always of a dialectical nature, never ‘inductive’ or ‘deductive’. Incidentally, the interpretation of the relationship between the whole and each part itself depends on the work. Where the whole takes blind priority – with Handel or Stravinsky – interpretation must follow it faute de mieux, and equally vice versa, where the music consists only of ‘ideas’. In other words: the ‘higher’ problems of presentation only really exist in high, inherently dialectical music.

A category named by Rudi [Kolisch]: the taking up of impulses. E.g. in the performance of the last Piano Concerto by Mozart, Solti had a staccato passage with acciaccaturas played very sharply and characteristically; Miss Haskil,¹⁸⁶ who has the passage after it, played it softly and blurred, and created an anti-climax at a point where the solo instrument should in fact be fulfilling a proposition. This is a problem with all ensemble playing.

[109]

One can generally say that the problems of interpretation are always – in the genuine, spiritual sense – the problems of the composition. For one thing, interpretation must bring out the idea of the composition – in the manner I described on p. 107 in the case of the 2nd Symphony by Brahms – and come to its aid. Then: it must deal with the problems that lie within the composition. It must not cover them up, as is done almost everywhere, but rather grasp their sense and obey it. Through a presentation of this sense in the problems, not by playing over them, interpretation can contribute to solving them. It aims for the extremes of the compositional content, not the compromise that lies between them. Interpretation is somewhat like a court of appeal, before which the composition is placed on trial once again. Interpreting means: composing the composition in the way that it wishes to be composed itself. This is based on the idea of the work as a force field; cf. regarding this Wagner's declaration.¹⁸⁷

[110]

Musical interpretation has several different, quite drastic layers: the analytical recognition of the sense, i.e. the truth of the work; the adequate imagination, which is the measure of all significant things; the realization i.e. the dialectical process with the sounding material. Most mishaps already occur at this most primitive level, which is furthermore almost always the first – and usually the only – level in common practice, whereas it should be the last. It almost always comes out differently to how one thinks; through frictional co-efficients due partly to each musician's own playing and singing mechanism, partly to the instrument, partly to splitting the one imagined music among several subjects (ensemble: this leads to the requirement of the unconditional authority of the one responsible for a given interpretation!); partly in the ‘social cavity’, for example between conductor and orchestra, partly in particular elements of resistance within the material, as with the choir and the stage. And yet this relationship to the sound material is certainly also dialectical. While everyone resists the imagination, many also contribute to it, namely according to the canon of the relationship of the composition itself to the material. The piano – or is not rather the arm, the wrist and the fingers, is the piano in particular not friendlier? – does not do what I would like it to, but at the same time it is always saying: this is how it can be, this is how it should be, i.e. it is itself in turn an element of the imagination, at times also its corrective (but precisely here one must take the greatest care to avoid a misunderstanding of the minstrel!). This intricate state of affairs must be represented precisely.

[111]

Here we now observe the emergence of an antinomy. For, in opposition to such ideas as might float about in the youth and lay movements, it is absolutely necessary for a mastery of the tasks of interpretation to train the playing (and also singing) mechanism independently, in its own right, removed from its concrete tasks – and to a very high degree. As in science, a separation of method and matter is called for – for the very sake of the matter itself. While, in truth, any form of presentation can only be developed from the specific matter, and every abstract method actually contradicts its purpose a priori by subsuming the work within the procedure of interpretation, a method of this kind is necessary, on the other hand, to achieve a certain level of representational means at all equal to its tasks in the first place. One cannot start from scratch with every work. In this sense, interpretation participates in the dialectic of labour division (this applies much more generally: because music itself participates in this). But through this, the playing mechanism becomes independent to such a degree that it becomes estranged from the requirements of the composition. While the amateur's fingers may not hit the right places, those of the professional run automatically, also in the metaphorical, i.e. intellectual and musical sense. One of the main problems of interpretation is therefore in essence that the habituality of each player that is acquired, and indeed necessary, is broken once more, negated, and sublated by the specific insights arising from each work. This marks the transition to true interpretation. What gives Schnabel's achievement its lasting value is the fact that, in principle, he was the first to accomplish this transition; in practice, admittedly, he often did not get beyond an abstract negation of the habitual playing approach. Webern, Steuermann and Kolisch then truly achieved it. – In the light of these reflections, it becomes apparent that the resistance to correct interpretation stems from habituality, from the subjective playing approach (the problem of interpretation being in full control of itself at any moment), and that the solution is offered by the objective approach to playing the instrument, which in a certain sense, as the very antithesis to the performer, allies itself with the work against him. [Underneath:] cf. p. 99.

Rudi's [Kolisch] refusal to recognize any difference between traditional and newer music is intimately related to the reproduction theory. For defamiliarizing traditional music means: regarding it as new music (rather as Brecht speaks of ‘Exercises based on the tragedy of Hamlet’).¹⁸⁸ And the effort involved in uncovering and realizing the subcutaneous layer of traditional music is surely no less than representing that same layer in new music, where it has already been shifted to the outside. That is to say that, from a central perspective of interpretation, all music is equally difficult. But also for the listener. The essay ‘Neue Musik Interpretation Publikum’ [New Music, Interpretation, Audience]¹⁸⁹ should be used in the text.

1957

[112]

In traditional music it is not sufficient simply to play independently of the bar lines; one must rather feel the absolute and the metric emphases at the same time, i.e. face the conflict between the two. Especially in Schumann, where this is sometimes expressly demanded (he felt very rightly that, with the dominant 8-bar structure, such means of differentiation are necessary). E.g. in the 2nd subject of the finale of the Piano Concerto, one must not only hear the apparent metre of 3/2, but also simultaneously the 3/4, thus stressing the rest in the 2nd bar, so to speak. Technically speaking, this means: emphasize the 1st beat of the model somewhat (prolong, rather than accentuating!); the 3rd of the first, the 2nd of the second bar etc. should be dropped, relatively speaking. New music is denied such effects through the abandonment of all rhythmic schemes, as with the corresponding harmonic schemes. This sheds light upon one genuine function of jazz: the preservation of those distinctions which normally disappear. As indeed interpretation in general could learn one or two things from jazz.

In the waltz from Die Fledermaus, Solti inserts a short (minimal) breathing space before the accented note in the 4th bar c1-fig-5037 , which tremendously increases the phrase's elasticity. This manner of quasi-rubato effect cannot be repeated, however, without becoming comical. But it must, on the other hand, have consequences in order to be organic. He solves the problem instinctively by dissolving the breathing space, i.e. reducing it in the 1st sequence and then letting it disappear entirely. The Revellers do something very similar in ‘In a little Spanish town’ – The things one can learn from popular music –

The sense of coloratura – the ballet of the voice – involves a curious degree of ability that goes beyond mere ability. The most difficult thing must sound ‘easy’, effortless, never merely realized. It belongs to the feeling of controlling nature that the ability should not be equal to the task, but rather exceed it. For otherwise it is truly a controlling of nature, instead of enabling its return as play. This is where a crack opens onto the metaphysics – and the retrieval – of the virtuoso element. For it is not simply control over nature as dominion over the material and the playing mechanism; rather, it loses its power and its severity by playing with that control – through its perfection – becomes imagination and is thus reconciled: dominion over nature appears ‘natural’, and becomes aware of itself as nature. Rastelli as a key figure of musical interpretation.

[113]

The following reflection shows how little the composer's intention – the ominous ‘will of the legislator’ – should define the canon for interpretation. In his imagination, everything is close together, it means the whole, in the ideal case it is momentary, simultaneous. In addition: the things of one's own that one knows exactly are tedious, (Nietzsche!),¹⁹⁰ one wants to get over with it!¹⁹¹ Therefore composers often imagine their things – quite rightly – as they exist objectively, i.e. as the unfolding of musical sense. Metronome markings in Schumann and Schönberg, for example, occasionally also in Beethoven, are probably too quick. But interpretation is the appropriate translation of musical sense into phenomena. It too is based on imagination, but of an entirely different type than that of the composer. – This is also the reason for the problem of performance tempi.

On the historical nature of interpretation. In the 1920s, in opposition to the prevalent German irrationalism, Kolisch and I had to advocate quick tempi, lack of pathos, and all things anti-Brucknerian. Then, in Toscanini's America, in the face of the dominant positivism, this changed; and these modifications are not external, but rather take place within the music itself, i.e. are predetermined by the dialectic of unity and diversity. – 30 years ago, Maria and Agathe¹⁹² lamented the decline of the Italian art of singing. Today, Solti is already complaining that there are no Wagner singers left – without this being compensated for by a restoration of the older art.

Concerning the question of interpretation already composed in the music, cite the statement made by Schönberg that a good composer should also compose the page-turns.¹⁹³

Concerning the problem of characters. The motivic fragments at the start of the 9th Symphony [by Beethoven]. They must not be in the foreground, played espressivo, as the main theme is to emerge from them. Nor should they simply be dropped, however, as the connection is then no longer comprehensible. One must find a middle path; clear, yet not underlined. This is precisely what those conductors who think in ‘two values’ are incapable of. Furtwängler takes the motive coarsely espressivo. In general the tendency towards a coarsening resulting from the conductors' striving for immediacy. – In Bruckner there is a character of suppressed ecstasy, e.g. at the introduction of the 2nd model in the main theme of the 4th (before the forte),¹⁹⁴ or where the main theme in the 7th fades away into murmuring.¹⁹⁵ This character is never rendered properly. Translate into precise indications why it is not.

[114]

The relationship between primary and secondary matters: either something is blatantly ignored, or it is addressed, but solved crudely in the sense of emerging and receding. But an understanding of the main theme in Bruckner's 4th Symphony depends largely on the clarity of the basses' primacy over the horn, without which no real perspective can ensue: only a relative receding. The way one should generally not emphasize the principal voices when they are automatically present. At the start of that passage it is more important for the horn to be veiled than to be ‘there’ – but the murmuring strings, also pp, must be there.

It must be stated clearly in the study that almost all musical interpretation today is nonsensical and wrong, and the reasons for this named. Regarding this cf. the film-music book.¹⁹⁶

Concerning the problem of mechanical reproduction. The old, relatively primitive gramophones are preferable to the pseudo-perfected modern record players, as they do not create the illusion of an original, rather appearing as its shadow. But the closer that mechanical duplication strives to come to the living, the more its untruth – not least as the ‘magnified’, bloated and therefore unclear sound – becomes apparent. The threshold is most likely marked by electric recording techniques. Of course, the quantity can transform itself into quality, i.e. the imitation can be perfected to such a degree that the category of the original loses its validity.

[115]

The lack of inner tension in interpretation – that is, the inability to connect elements meaningfully and dynamically – corresponds precisely to the ubiquitous fear of losing outer tension. This is the reason for the incredibly widespread mistake of not having phrases played out adequately. Impatience as a surrogate for tension. While most means of representation are exaggerated in interpretation, phrasings are mostly understated. Thus the most important caesuras in Viennese classicism, such as those between the two main complexes in the exposition, are normally played too short, i.e. simply taken according to the beat. Harmonic colons – often also rests – permit this without openly creating an awareness of the mechanical; but the subcutaneous organization is inevitably brought into disorder through such false exactitude. The parts may be externally separate, but the weight of the separation is lost.

The presentation of musical forms must never restrict itself merely to the formal schemes and elements, but rather always address the musical texture, or more precisely the relationship between the texture and the subdivisions – this is one of the most important rules, if not the most important. The notion of texture is central to interpretation.

Critique of the heteronomy of interpretation. Anything stemming from the sedimented difficulties of vocal or instrumental technique is bad, such as the singer's tremolo or audible changes of position in the strings, especially the celli. (normally archaisms!) But here too the most subtle of differentiation is called for, as vocal and instrumental techniques, on the other hand, are in turn also a positive aspect of interpretation. Cf. pp. 109 and 110 of these notes. If it is good, then when is it bad? The criterion would presumably be to what extent there is a meaningfully transparent connection between the ‘manners’ of presentation and the interpretation. Here the connection to the neumic element.

[116]

[117]

The text will have to deal with Hugo Riemann's writings. For all his academic narrowness, he accomplished the great feat of approaching questions of reproduction from the perspective of the matter itself, i.e. the composition; he went beyond a mere reliance on the ‘musical’, which is certainly a necessary but not a sufficient condition for reproduction, and which, in order to survive, must pass through reflection. This is particularly true for his theory of phrasing,¹⁹⁷ which he brought into meaningful connection with composition, referring to important earlier authors such as J. A. P. Schulz (NB procure the article ‘Vortrag’ [Delivery] in Sulzer's Theorie der schönen Künste [Theory of the Fine Arts] from 1772). Beyond this, Riemann achieved a fairly high degree of differentiation by not simply expounding his unquestionably rigid schemata, but rather trying to explain with their help the deviations he identified. The theory's weakness lies in the whole approach. He hypostatized the eight-bar period and everything that accompanies it, which all structural elements can ultimately be attributed to. But the eight-bar structure is itself something that emerged, and only applies to the musical area determined by the sublimation of dance forms. Bach does not deviate from the eight-bar structure, being rather exterritorial to it in the deciding layers of his work: the statement probably applies here that all polyphonic music does n o t in essence consist of eight-bar structures, for the reason that the polyphony itself wants to accomplish in the composition the very thing that the eight-bar structure imposes upon it from without (one can study this in fugues by Mendelssohn and Schumann, where the symmetry essentially contradicts the formal idea; regarding this cf. the fugal rule – whomever it stems from – that a fugal theme should principally avoid covering a period or half-period).¹⁹⁸ Eight-bar structure is a problematic and relatively external aspect of the rationalization process. This is why those later composers who do not obey it, above all Schubert and Schönberg, also Mozart, should not be taken as nuances, as deviations which could still be made to fit Riemann's schema with a little artistry, but rather as an expression of a counter-tendency, the tendency towards individual elements, towards the ‘natural life of sounds’¹⁹⁹ as an archaic legacy, an indestructible mimetic component. But Riemann thinks in terms of large-scale musical logic, as it were ‘realistically’; everything must follow from the abstract generic term as in a deductive science. It is an undialectical reproduction theory; it misses the work as a force field between the general term and the individual, the unsubsumed; classification in place of comprehension (this applies to almost all official systematic musicology). Thus his theory becomes too schematic, on the one hand, but at the same time – where it attempts to reach the unsubsumed and the schema that is incommensurable here – too complicated, a form of epicycle theory that elevates counting to the principal category and aims entirely past the essence of the phenomenon (I raised similar objections in the harmony chapter of the Wagner book).²⁰⁰ In my own language: Riemann seeks to reduce the entire reproduction theory to mensural terms. The choice of abstract proportions and frames of reference is not indifferent in relation to the matter itself, however. In overlooking the metric-harmonic force field, Riemann fails in supplying instructions for reproduction wherever the sense of the music lies in the tension between those elements, and fails completely wherever the abstract generic term is disempowered in an external sense – at a latent, subcutaneous level, after all, this tension is present in all music. Concrete examples for the misguided instruction will have to be given.

The functional interdependence of musical dimensions generally applies to reproduction. E.g. form and agogics. In certain places it can be a formal desideratum to keep the tempo going, i.e. to compensate for any loss of formal tension through an imperceptible increase in the tempo. Composers very experienced in reproduction often express this through such indications as ‘no dragging’.

Draw conclusions for the reproduction essay from the study on counterpoint, ²⁰¹ such as: not only clearly through dynamic gradations of simultaneous elements, receding after entries, distinction between legato and staccato, but also: interlock the voices, i.e. bring out the complements and relations, ‘answering’ etc. This is the objective sense of ‘taking up impulses’. This latter element – the realization of similarities – is almost never even touched on in the performance of contrapuntal music.

Schumann Concerto, 1st movement, one bar after B.²⁰² The lowest notes of the accompaniment's figures themselves form an accompaniment. But they must on no account be emphasized. So only: very short. They do not form a line through accents, but rather through detachment. Substitutability: relations of length can replace dynamic ones.

[118]

General rule: whenever one musical dimension makes an unacceptable demand of interpretation, this demand is to be met through another dimension. This corresponds to the compositional situation and the substitutability of one dimension for another.

Similarities must become clear as similarities, contrasts as contrasts, and modifications or variants also as such. Every musical event has its own formal sense according to such categories: it must be recognized, and what has been recognized must be represented. But if mediation occurs between different elements, for example, then this mediation must be made clear. So one can, equally based on the compositional situation, speak of functional interpretation. Interpreting means: representing every musical aspect in such a way that the function it fulfils in itself in the composition is fulfilled in the phenomenon. – If the composition places the fundamental element on the periphery, then this is precisely the process prescribed for interpretation by the laws of the form. – Through interpretation, the composition as a being-in-itself must become a being-in-and-for-itself – not a being-for-others. – True interpretation: the composition listening to itself.

[119]

The taking up of impulses as mere similarity is much too impoverished, and often wrong. It is always a matter of representing the relationship between an event and what precedes it, rather than simply the event as such, and this relationship can be extremely multi-faceted; it is not restricted to similarities and contrasts. It can, for example, be a reply, or a catching up, a filling out, or a bridging of something so far merely posited; or its dissolution. Interpretation (like composition) derives its true vitality from these concrete regulations; such formal categories as similarity and contrast are really only means to an end, never the carriers of musical sense or interpretation in their own right. The genuine layer of interpretation must first be discovered through the clarification of similarity and contrast, not penetrated from the outset. The process implied here and locked within the text, to be realized through the relationships among individual moments, is the life of both the works and their presentation, and this is in fact what common interpretation no longer achieves at all. Here, the nuance determines the entire sense. It is necessary to criticize the view that true interpretation is about ensuring that the whole works, after which the details – as a luxury, so to speak – are added. In art, the smallest element determines the total: cf. p. 41 – as incidentally also in philosophy. – This cannot, of course, be projected directly onto rehearsal technique. – The ‘good musician’ is the one who either knows nothing about this most central problem implied here or deliberately ignores it. Key to the ‘minstrel’: Hindemith.

Example for the previous note: to show that it is not a matter of mere contrast, but rather its specific function: opening of the A major Quartet by Schumann:²⁰³

The function of the consequent: the filling out of the interval, the translation of the call into human terms, also something in the manner of an answer, must come out in interpretation. So: the critical outer notes that are filled out must still be palpable as such through minimal emphases. Through the resulting groups, a natural accent falls on the highest note of the consequent, E, which is in turn heard as a ‘step’ in relation to the first F sharp in the antecedent (internal melody). At the same time, this structure creates metric variation through the formation of 2/4 groups, ‘false bars’, which are in fact precisely the true bars. They are ‘verified’, so to speak, by the last bar. The concluding E is then accordingly a strong beat (that should subsequently be dropped), weak downbeat, and upbeat to the repeated consequent (not a dead interval; this term of Riemann's is subject to criticism!). So a latently zeugmatic construction; a single note serves both as the 1st and the 3rd beat at the same time. And this wealth of subcutaneous detail with Schumann, the composer notorious for his eight-bar structures. So there are frequently pseudo-symmetries in traditional music; the genuine pulsation of the music deviates from these, and this is precisely what must be put into practice.

[120]

Tough luck: Schumann phrases the theme differently, in whole 3/4 bars, not subcutaneously. Is this now (as often with him) part of a power play? Or am I right against his intentions?

All reflections on the restrictions of interpretation have the following boundary: the fact that the musical document is after all the expression of a musical idea that it standardizes, reifies, and changes, so to speak, and which must be brought back to life and re-created through an ‘interlinear version’. In a certain sense, true interpretation reverses the notation. So, if one takes the start of the Schumann Concerto: here the idea is the retention of the motive c1-fig-5039 with augmentation, as a way of creating tension, and then the breakdown, which releases the tension and gives way to gravity, as it were. This can be recognized and executed. Whether the written note-values offer an adequate expression of this idea or only an intimation – that is, whether, for the sake of the idea (once it has been recognized), one should prolong the sustains and then catch up with time through an accelerando towards the breakdown – this is the second, more genuinely interpretative question. – But the problem is complicated by the fact that this reification through notation, the central aspect of musical rationalization, is not merely external to the composition (no more than tonality, for example), but rather seeps into it as an aspect in itself, as the frictional coefficient of its externality, so to speak, the resistance that strengthens it. And interpreting therefore means not simply allowing the idea to crystallize, but rather making this force field visible. But it is still always left open to what extent this genuinely occurs, and to what extent mensural fidelity kills the idea – or to what extent the idea simply remains the contingent projection of the interpreting consciousness. This is the real heart of the question of interpretation.

[121]

Against a particular kind of ‘shaping’, e.g. that of Alfred Cortot. It consists in bringing out in an exaggerated, over-conspicuous fashion elements that one hears anyway, or something that is, in the most external sense, the primary aspect. A form of false clarity: as if one were viewing a sculpture through a stereoscope. Here, interpretation means: music for idiots. I heard a recording of the Symphonic Etudes by Schumann; it sounded exactly like the joke with the sentence containing Heine and Hebbel: ‘Du bist wie Heine-Hebbel-ume’!²⁰⁴ Complete distortion through bringing something out. Schumann himself is not without blame here; arpeggios carried out through widely spaced fingerings already sound almost like Hebbelume. – Naturally Cortot, an old Nazi,²⁰⁵ has the status of a grand old man in Germany in 1957: sacred cow.²⁰⁶ – Harmful dominance of the neumic mimetic element. ‘Comedy papa’.

central

It will be necessary to oppose the definition of musical texts both as performance instructions and as the fixing of the composer's intentions with a positive one. But this would have to be the fixing of the memory, namely that of a collective tradition as it follows from liturgical conventions. This holds an infinite number of aspects. For example: it is not merely a being-for-others that is on offer, but also the being-in-itself, the idea, the music itself that is captured. Then: this being-in-itself is not what the composer imagines, but rather that which has already become fixed in practice. The objectifying aspect of notation is thus its social element and simultaneously contains the historical element – precisely as the image of a tradition – within itself. The objectivity of the work versus the imagination of the composer: this is the collectivity that enters the work through writing. But as long as this faces the subject as something non-identical, every text is at once dialectical within itself, and this dialectic is the problem of all interpretation. That means: writing in music is always both true and untrue in relation to the subject. This is the philosophical key to the entire theory.

Frankfurt, 6 April 57

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[123]

Rethink the relationship to mechanical reproduction. The old argument of the disappearance of the performer²⁰⁷ is probably in need of revision, not least in the face of the latest developments, which this argument endorses. For traditional music until Schönberg and Webern, including these, is by its own definition dependent on performers. This is very closely connected to the neumic element of notation. Where subjectivity, sense, and that which opposes what has become estranged are essential to the matter itself, yet at the same time congealed, ‘encoded’ within it, that aspect requires an equal, namely the subject, in order to be salvaged – precisely for the sake of the factual content. My earlier view was too simplified. Here I shall also have to address certain distinctions made by Kurth – admittedly expressed rather psychologistically – for example between tone psychology and music psychology;²⁰⁸ tone and music have so far been confused in the electronic theory. Equally criticize Seashore;²⁰⁹ what he calls deviation is precisely the true constituent of music, not a mere ingredient (this shows a general tendency in my thinking in relation to widespread views). See if Furtwängler's reactionary theory of ‘inexactitude’²¹⁰ and the corresponding practical approach could perhaps be retrieved. Dialectically, of course: the inexact, for example the stipulation that no beat should be mechanically equal to another, should itself be taken exactly, i.e. developed strictly from the musical context. On the other hand, music-making has often lagged behind the most advanced methods of technical reproduction – those of film – and above all, for social reasons, it has not yet made full use of the radio. And so the old-fashioned, entirely inadequate rehearsal system (cf. ‘Neue Musik/Interpretation/Publikum’) continues unchanged, instead of the radio organizing as many rehearsals as necessary in order to achieve authentic performances and then capture them. A film director can ‘shoot’ a single scene ten times and then choose the best take. The same should be possible with music on the radio, although one would still have to see whether and on what scale one could also create a final performance through montage (the ‘living totality’ of a performance, especially with larger forms, is probably a mere ideology, as in many other areas). Incidentally: the function of the conductor as compared to that of the film director. It is based largely on an archaic economy of scarcity. Because of the lack of rehearsal time, the supposedly specific conducting talent of direct, suggestive transmission of intention is demanded of the conductor; and where this is lacking, one indeed finds – under the present circumstances – only flat, inadequate performances. But where is it written that according to the matter itself interpretation should be tied to gestures and signs with the ideal of minimal explanations? It is solely the result, the true interpretation, that matters; how it is reached is unimportant; the ‘fascinating’ conductor is a fetish like the master violinist, and belongs to the culture industry. The first violinist of a quartet is already entitled to explain and interrupt as much as he pleases, and will indeed do so. A film director acts out and speaks every sequence for his actors first. The true conductor should do the same, for example sing the oboist his melody, dance it, and phrase it, instead of simply beating abstractly; if he chose to do so, however, he would be universally ridiculed as unprofessional, most of all by the orchestra. If one were to raise the objection that a voice, like a role, is on the whole something independent, and that the oboist, like an actor, has a certain attitude, one can certainly concede this, though it is usually no more than an ideological underpinning for sloppiness. This dialectic would then, as in a string quartet, have to be developed between the conductor and the instrumentalists. As the independence of the constituents in a work of art is not genuine, however, and the primacy of the whole is beyond question, it should ultimately be the conductor and the first violinist, as in the case of the film director, who have the last word (NB this thought should also be integrated in the counterpoint essay!). – It should finally also be discussed that through vinyl, radio and tape a key middleman has been introduced, namely the sound engineer. This position is normally held by a technician. This is probably the cause of the most disastrous distortions or neutralizations found in all mechanically reproduced music (culinary sound-ideal at the expense of the musical sense, lack of clarity etc. Expand). It would be of the greatest importance for the entire standard of reproduction today for this position, which is already often of greater consequence than the conductor, to be reserved for the most highly qualified of musicians with precise knowledge of the score.

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It will have to be determined precisely and concretely how the whole is to be deciphered from the individual parts, and vice versa. The former: starting with the characters, the tempo giusto in Rudi's [Kolisch] sense, the ‘shapes’; and it will at the same time be a matter of formulating this concept precisely (this is what I mean by ‘name’, which Reger lacks;²¹¹ regarding this also my theory of the idea²¹² as a form of objectivity from the ‘Minstrel’).²¹³ One must also follow whatever impulse has been given. Ideally, a correct ‘capturing’ of the posited character should give rise to everything else. – Conversely, the parts can be deduced from the whole. If in the continuation of the reprise in Chopin's ‘Revolutionary Etude’ an arpeggiated chord replaces the simple chord from the exposition, one could – taking the passage in isolation – be unsure of whether to spread it broadly or quickly. But with the very intense, dramatic tone of the whole, there can be no doubt that a short pizzicato chord is meant. – On a somewhat different level: the final group in the exposition of Mahler's 1st Symphony is to be played swiftly (I forget the precise indication).²¹⁴ But how swiftly – this is determined in proportion to what precedes it. If, as with Herr Walter, there is no development towards the swift tempo (for before this he is busy with the melodies!), but rather, for the sake of the individual character, an abrupt shift, it becomes incorrect. Ideally, one could just as well say that all constituents follow from the whole. The two claims do not converge, however, or at least do not reach a state of complete equivalence. But this is due to the objectivity of the composition, the perennial separation of the general and the particular (though the formal totality does not, of course, correspond automatically to the general in the logic of extension, as traditional harmony does – nevertheless, in a higher sense, it is dialectical, more general than that which is merely individually posited, which is naturally in turn mediated generally within itself). In a certain sense, it is the task of interpretation to master the tension between [ c1-fig-5051 τι] and concrete totality, to move beyond the opposition of realism and nominalism that lies unresolved within every composition. But the rule of thumb is to burn the candle at both ends, i.e. start from both the whole and the individual part, and let each work away at the other until an optimal result is arrived at.

The zone of polyvalence in interpretation should not simply be acknowledged, but rather determined as precisely as possible. On the basis of my old hypothesis: the more objective the predefined musical language is, the greater the interpretative freedom (against the likes of Walcha!). Nominalism = stringency. This remains to be developed precisely. The traditional element, as the ‘neumic’ aspect of interpretation, plays a deciding part.

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Spoke to Solti and Hirsch²¹⁵ after the Flying Dutchman about Karajan, about the performance of Bruckner's 8th, which I had heard in Vienna with the Philharmonic. I spoke of the perfect sensual façade and the inner emptiness behind it – how nothing was left of Bruckner. Both disagreed with me. Solti asked me whether I would prefer a highly spiritual, but imprecise and sonically inadequate performance. Hirsch: if the sensual category in a work of art is perfect, then the spiritual is also present. I was forced to concede this, if only so as not to play into the hands of German Furtwänglerism. There is a barbarism not only of perfection but also of imperfection, and it would be reactionary to preach this. But: precise analysis will then show that the musical exterior presented by Karajan is not perfect, that here the semblance of perfection conceals true perfection. But it is infinitely difficult to put this in concrete terms, and remains to be done. – Against Furtwängler and Walter – and against Toscanini! And Karajan.

Most difficult problems of large-scale form and characters in the 2nd movement of the 9th Symphony by Mahler. If one genuinely considers the 1st theme a ländler, then its length makes it almost impossible to maintain the tension until the end. But this makes the contrast to the 2nd (waltz) all the more difficult to achieve, as it is first supposed to be only slightly quicker, but then faster upon its return. So the difference in tempo would be rather slight; it is thus all the more necessary to employ all other means of contrast. But the 3rd theme must definitely be taken very slowly, truly like a slow Austrian ländler. Perhaps include a tempo analysis of the movement with metronome markings.

What is clearly bad is any didactic interpretation, i.e. one that seeks to instruct the listener as to how one should interpret. Equally any emphasis that goes beyond what the music itself demands. The intention to convey the sense can become wrong as soon as it underlines it, as soon as, instead of realizing it, it reflects as a phenomenon upon the realization. ‘This is how one plays it.’ There is a threshold of clarity; it is not an absolute category. It declines as soon as it goes beyond the immanence of the construction as a commentary, so to speak. There are people, like my cousin Franz Adorno,²¹⁶ who make music with a raised forefinger. This remains to be translated into precise technical terms. One can, for example, establish the necessary distinctions between characters in such a way that they emerge not in themselves, but rather as a lesson to the listener; but conversely also the ‘flow’. This must be one of the secrets of music-pedagogical music.

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Realization of ambiguous events. E.g. the first bar of the slow movement from op. 31, 2 [by Beethoven] is simultaneously introductory and thematic. The arpeggio allows the theme to surge up; the high B flat is at the same time the first – and subsequently continued – melody note. Both must become clear, but that also means: the highest note must be distinct from the broken chord, yet without standing out. Extremely difficult.

Rule: go towards extremes. The expansion of the dynamic scale through new music is of benefit to everyone. The wider the scale, the greater the possibilities of modelling the structure through dynamic degrees, of constructing it dynamically. And in conjunction with this the possibility of attaining extreme characters. This applies not only to ppp, but also to fff. The sensitivity to loudness is the musicality of the unmusical. In some Mahler and Schönberg, also Strauss, it is necessary – for the music's sense – to overstep the boundary of what is bearable dynamically: a declaration of war on the culinary ideal. Of course ‘classical’ dynamics were different – but now that the other exists, the old form cannot be restored. Also applies to Bach.

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Concerning the interpretation of difficult modern texts: Schönberg op. 16, I. The three-bar main theme is followed by a dissolved, also three-bar consequent that is extremely opaque. The dynamics are evidently indicated ‘subjectively’, i.e. according to the playing techniques of the instruments, e.g. an accompanying trill in two flutes is f, then the principal voice in the clarinet p; equally a distinct middle voice in the horn p, a non-melodic lower voice in the bassoon f. The final bar is a solo rhythm played by a muted horn, marked f. R. Kubelik follows the indications most obediently in the recording. But because the diving clarinet figure, which leads into the horn rhythm, genuinely comes out p through its awkward register, a dynamic hole results between it and the muted horn, despite the good ‘connection’; through the unmediated dynamic difference, one can no longer perceive that rhythm as what it is, namely the melodic continuation of the clarinet. Thus the sense of the entire passage, which is delicate enough in any case, becomes incomprehensible – and at the same time that of the entire exposition, which depends on the relationship between antecedent and consequent. The only thing that might help would be dynamic retouching, i.e. to have the clarinet play loudly enough for the horn to follow on seamlessly from it. But exactly this – contrary to the letter of the notation – presupposes analysis; the diving demisemiquavers in the clarinet are thematic (from the counterpoint to the main theme). And it is precisely this step that was not taken by the musical, faithfully vigilant conductor.

Fritz Lang's description of the cabaret girl who illustrates the song ‘Schöner Gigolo’ with mime. This is precisely how some singers sing, such as Herr Patzak,²¹⁷ naturally under Herr Walter, in Das Lied von der Erde. ‘Liegen wüst / die Gärten / der Seele / welkt hin und stirbt / die Freude’ [When the gardens / of the soul / lie barren / then joy / withers and dies] etc. Everything tragic – but the word ‘joy’ joyful. And the whole thing at this level. The word ‘Aufschwung’ at the end of the 2nd movement sung like Brünnhilde. The recitative in the final movement as expressive as the main themes – thus the entire form wrong. In the Allegro, just to make it go quickly, the pesante element of the basic character is missed completely. The sudden tempo shifts in the 4th movement all out of proportion. And this applies to Mahler's heirs.

Sils-Maria, August 57

If reproduction retraces the – objective – compositional process in a certain sense, then it raises similar problems to composition. During Eduard's [Steuermann] course in Kranichstein in July 57,²¹⁸ I observed that the students knew how to begin and how to end, i.e. they played the outer points, but gave little thought to the sense of what happens between them (2nd tableau of Petrushka). ‘Playing out’ is an important category of reproduction, related to that of ‘composing out’, and must be formulated precisely. This is also where the problem of quick melodies fits in, which is extremely relevant today.

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Pursue the relationship between the ‘parameters’, i.e. the functional dependence of material layers in reproduction. Listening to the opening of the allegro from the Barber of Seville overture, I noticed how difficult it is to play a sharp, rhythmically precise and supportive accompanying staccato really piano. There is also a general tendency to conceive of the ‘normal’ basic sound in too strong a fashion.

How does one play contrapuntal voices, especially ‘harmonic’ ones, i.e. those found in homophonic music? They must be clear, but not overbearing, with a very particular, almost intangible character of discrete emphasis. Whether or not this succeeds depends precisely on whether or not these nuances are captured exactly and concretely. Incidentally, the study must include cogent thoughts on all parameters, e.g. harmony (‘critical notes’, relationship between the overall vertical sound and its individual elements of tension), form (difference between directly perceptible and mediated, reflexive formal proportions), colour (as a means of contextual articulation, particularly also in singing) etc.

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After listening to Firkusny²¹⁹ play the – impossible – G minor Concerto by Mendelssohn, an observation that also applies to pianists such as Backhaus and Horowitz. There is a particular kind of technical endowment, a substantial part of which is in fact physical strength, which is connected directly, i.e. without relation to mental comprehension, to representational ability, as if the hands could replace the ear, and a reproduction theory that simply ignores this would probably descend into pure rationalism. Eduard [Steuermann] once spoke of the ‘dewiness’ of the young Backhaus's playing – and he, after all, was surely never an important musician. Regarding this my old note on the possibility of actors giving good performances in roles they do not understand.²²⁰ A physical, sensual, pre-intellectual relationship to music that holds the spirit in a windowless manner. Is that the neumic, mimetic element of reproduction? It should be noted, however, that the particular ability I am referring to does not necessarily have anything to do with the minstrel talent of the eastern Jewish or Slavic type; Firkusny and Backhaus²²¹ hardly have any of this. It is rather something possibly still deeper down than the psychology of ‘temperament’: a playing mechanism that becomes independent to a degree, and reaches the level of musical sense precisely through its own reification. The phenomenon is extremely difficult to grasp, but seems to me to be a key aspect of the problem of reproduction. Perhaps it is related precisely to the modern tendency for the performer to disappear in true interpretation. Then it would even be the opposite of the neumic. Pursue.

In the Gloria of the Missa Solemnis, Mr Toscanini makes the dynamic contrasts of ff and pp so extreme that, under the shadow of the ff, the pp – which would certainly be audible in isolation – is completely incomprehensible in the context, merely like a hole in the music. So there is a sort of Eulenspiegel aspect to fidelity to the text. One can take performance indications so literally that pure nonsense results. – The entire LP of the Missa is a textbook example of achieving utter perfection and completely missing the goal, so polished that the listener is cheated of the enigmatic character²²² of the Missa. – The text of the reproduction theory must draw on both ‘Neue Musik Interpretation Publikum’ and the as yet unwritten Toscanini analysis.²²³

Heteronomy of interpretation, the inevitably pre-intellectual aspect. Dependency of the pianist on his hands, the violinist on his fingers, the wind player on his breathing capacity, the conductor on his mimic talent etc. To a degree, the ear is also part of this. This is not merely external to the matter. The paw that enables the pianist to play into the piano three-dimensionally is a part of his talent. Physis and musicality. Pursue further.

Observation regarding Craft's Webern records²²⁴ November 58. Too direct, without fear and trembling, touching the music without the layer of isolation. One misses the sensitivity of the hands that perceives the mediated, symbolic aspect of each note and realizes it through reproduction. Extremely important. Perhaps also the key for Toscanini. The records contain the most subtle examples of senselessness through missed links etc., and must be quoted at length in the empirical section on new music. Already the opening, where the trumpet plays the final note of the flute melody, then similarly the horn. Senseless otherwise.

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I heard a radio performance of the Lulu Suite under Henze. It sounded abhorrent, thick, sticky – nothing was left of the music's luminous economy. This was because it was played purely with a view to sonority, and it was precisely this that prevented that sonority's realization. The music can only be made to sound if it is played thematically, if it is articulated in its construction and clarified in its development. Without consideration for this, the sound blurs, it becomes lumpy, ugly – even the euphony here is a function of the representation of sense. This was partly what Strauss meant when he remarked that an orchestra only sounds right when it is directed in meaningful polyphony.²²⁵ For instrumentation was, until its most recent phase, a form of mediation between the work and [interpretation].²²⁶

The fundamental rule for the presentation of new music, the thread of the interrupted melody, can be demonstrated in the cases where it is violated. Particularly good example: Webern's op. 6, 1, on Craft's record. Or also op. 5, 1.

Important principle for all musical interpretation: there are no approximate values. There is no continuum extending from what is wrong to what is better to the truth. Whatever is not quite right is already entirely wrong; and in some cases, what is entirely wrong can be better, as it does not claim to be the matter itself. The reasons for this will have to be analysed. Is it a generally aesthetic state of affairs?

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In new vocal music the deciding factor is not simply whether the notes are correctly intonated, as one says, but rather how decisively and unambiguously they are sung. There are not many who really sing wrong notes – but certainly ones that do not stand absolutely; where one does not entirely commit oneself, so to speak, because one is not entirely sure, and leaves room for modifications; and this attitude then affects the distinctness of the overall sound. This is probably due to a lack of specific imagining, i.e. the specific intervals in particular – which constitute the melos – are not really imagined unambiguously; only the ‘pitches’ are envisaged, by an abstract ‘ear’ unrelated to the concrete situation, and the fluctuations arise through uncertainty about the relationships between these. And the requirement of absolute clarity, unambiguity, and vividness applies especially to all new music – not only in relation to intonation, but rather in all dimensions. Everything must appear unequivocally as what it is and what function it has; e.g. also contrasts. The singer's task of both keeping the various shapes apart and mediating them reciprocally through the timbre, for example, is generally neglected. The reason for this requirement is self-evident: the lack of any frame of reference – beyond what is composed here and now – to clarify what is tacitly unclear. The same problem applies in new music to composition itself. Just as it is generally important in new music to translate all compositional actions into interpretative ones. Interpretation composes composition. And in this sense, new music is easier to interpret than traditional music.

The primacy of the imagination over mere music-making leads to the central difficulty of any act of rendition. Making music correctly demands an incessant verification of all real sounds in relation to the imagined. But thus a process of reflection. This is often barely possible, however: each time, one plays differently to how one imagines. For there is an instinctive music-making which occurs before that reflection, and which consumes a large part of that energy which should be used for reflection; and this is compounded by absorption through the various mechanical processes. The problem can probably only be solved pedagogically, i.e. by training from an early age to measure whatever one is playing or singing against one's imagination: to listen to oneself. Modern resources such as tape recordings could be very helpful here. – Incidentally, one should not hypostatize the primacy of the imagination as a primeval state. It is the result of a historical process, just as everything that is imagined was once real (dream!). But the process is irreversible. Whoever places doing before imagining in music today is guilty of regressive music-making.

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Some observations on recordings of the prelude from Die Gezeichneten,²²⁷ March 1959. Every interpretation, but above all the orchestral kind, presupposes the most precise metric analysis. Otherwise what ensue are lacunae, ambiguities, temporal gaps, so to speak; the sonic continuum replaces temporal articulation, basically the context can barely be perceived any longer, and there are compositions, Schreker's in particular, that further this to boot. – The more orchestral pieces are based around sound-mixtures, the more careful one must be that individual colours do not stand out within them: the slightest error can overturn the sense of an entire score. If, for example, a muted horn figure is reinforced for greater clarity by an accented note on an unmuted trumpet, and the trumpet is so prominent that the unity of the phrase is broken, then this is a mortal sin. Regarding this Berg's comment on the protruding nails.²²⁸ Naturally even the best and most experienced orchestrators can be mistaken in such matters: then interpretation must balance this out. – On the relationship between the principal voice and the accompaniment: this too should not be understood mechanically. There are passages, such as the opening of that prelude, where it is the intention for the accompaniment to be the main thing – the ‘idea’ – and the themes are only there ut aliquid fieri videatur, as it were. The performance must do justice to this by not simply making the principal voice stand out from its background, but rather by bringing the background to the foreground, albeit without coarsening the dynamics. – In music with opulent orchestration, it can occur that one barely recognizes a main motive as such, as with the first appearance in the horns

c1-fig-5040 — (Prelude from *Die Gezeichneten*)

In such decisive cases, interpretation must offer energetic assistance.

In the presentation of new music, the most important category is that of clarity, of playing out the themes. My eyes were opened to this while rehearsing the op. 3 songs by Webern.²²⁹ The quick second song is based on a semiquaver motive that proceeds to dissolve into irregular values (septuplets, quintuplets etc.). For the (highly musical) pianist there were 2 simply opposed categories: the thematic semiquavers and the fields of dissolution as ‘figurations’, as it were no longer in the foreground. On one occasion this led to a break in the accompaniment, i.e. the connection between the complexes was lost. But then the field of dissolution became half-hearted, the sort of pale, rushed heap of notes that literally makes such things incomprehensible. It was only after we established the thematic presence of those passages that the whole gained its sense.

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True interpretation can often be found only through experimentation. One always knows that something is wrong, whereas one does not always know why it is wrong or how it is right, and this can only be discovered by trying out different possibilities. Often the solution can only be found through relations. For example: an unaccented, but relatively long sung note on the sound ‘e’ in a song²³⁰ sounds forced and incomprehensible, and eludes correction; but it can be improved through an accent and subsequent diminuendo on the previous note.

Only what is imagined convincingly can become meaningful and convincing. Any uncertainty of imagination is projected onto the result. This is a basic rule.

Interpretation that is not in control of itself is always too strong. Pay particular attention to this. The discrepancy between imagination and realization is generally one of the most important sources of error. Listening to my Trakl songs with Miss Henius²³¹ in July 1959, for example, I found that I often spread chords, not playing together exactly on the beat, for the sake of expression and the clarification of what is important. Played quite differently to how I thought. – Because of this problem, the tape recorder is an invaluable tool. True interpretation will no longer be able to continue without its help. Here too a tendency towards the liquidation of interpretation.

The profession of the conductor is governed by an objective untruth. The performance appears as if he were its subject, the one who interprets, whereas this is the case only to a very limited – in the case of universally known works a dwindling – extent, not only on account of the resistance he is offered by the sound material – especially by the choir – but also because it is not he who is playing but rather the orchestral musicians, who are themselves subjects with their own peculiarities, preferences, and weaknesses. No oboe is like another – what can the conductor do about this? And yet it is he who imagines the performance. It is this discrepancy that harbours charlatanry, and almost all the vices and mannerisms found among conductors stem from this. After all, this problem of interpretation is based on a contradiction in the works. They are, as orchestral works, designed from the outset for a multitude of executants, in fact they practically demand them according to their own intention: a flautist is meant to sound beautiful, a solo violin brilliant etc. At the same time, however, they point as integral works of art to a unity of idea such as can only be conveyed through the conductor. In relation to this idea, as in many other respects, the orchestra is ‘archaic’.

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One should at least draw up models for specific problems of interpretation with individual composers. For example Bruckner (after a performance of the 3rd under Kubelik):²³² the caesuras and breaks are constitutive, they are part of the sense, but at the same time they are almost unbearable as disturbances. Both options are wrong: smoothing them out, conducting over them, and equally letting the pieces fall apart. The task would be to make music in such a way that they speak, themselves becoming means of the context, but what does this mean technically? Only the most meticulous analysis could be of help here. – Very nice comment by Klemperer about the lines in Bruckner: these only make the symphonies longer.²³³ This is exactly right; the structure becomes blurred, and the chaotic always lasts longer than the articulated. – Or Strauss, Elektra (after the superb performance under Solti, autumn 59): the piece, like Strauss in general, demands to be taken swiftly, not lingered on; the vocal parts should not be overpowered by the meaningfulness of the orchestra's motivic life. But this is precisely how the work loses its best features, the wrought nature particularly of such works in their details, and they already begin to approach the rousing film scores that the later ones are. E.g. the scherzo character of Chrysothemis's parts is missed by a presto that lends no profile to its themes and merely accompanies them. I said to Solti that in Elektra, paradoxically, it is important for the singers not to cover up the orchestra, but rather vice versa. Naturally, this goes completely against the grain, not least against Strauss's own wishes. Today his interpretation should be reversed once more.

Secret of interpretation: its twofold motion. Taking apart and putting together again. E.g. phrasing. The ‘long line’ on its own is as wrong as the disintegrating partial phrases. First divide it into the latter, then bring these together. But this occurs not through blurring them, but rather through a differentiation between degrees of phrasing according to the weight of their formal function, i.e. the relative significance of the caesuras.

Truly reaching new shapes very often means: only taking a ritardando far enough for some of the old shape's momentum to be preserved, which then flows into the new shape.

Always highlight critical, i.e. deviating notes.

Intonation has a formally constitutive function. If, in a piece by Webern,²³⁴ an F appears pizzicato in one instrument, then arco sul ponticello in another, the unity within this difference can only be established if the intonation is absolutely identical.

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Means of articulation: with imitation in dense polyphonic textures, always clarify the entry, then let it recede entirely.

All modifications are relative, e.g. in a ppp piece by Webern²³⁵ go to p at most, etc. But this depends on the frame of reference. In a tonally organized piece, one can take dynamic modifications within a field much further than in a non-tonal one.

Alongside bringing out the melodic thread while skipping from one voice to another, the most important thing is: the rhythmic skeleton, i.e. the main rhythm, the ‘beats’ one hears. E.g. in Webern op. 9, no. VI. – This is then a folk song.²³⁶

In very short pieces it is most important to bring out the characters of the individual elements against each other.

In long, very dense pieces above all: let the music breathe. My kingdom for a piano.²³⁷ – This can be further assisted through clear phrasing within the interwoven shapes, as well as an absolute receding of all accompaniment, even at the expense of the dynamic specifications. – It can generally be said that clarity takes priority over everything else as a precondition for musical sense. Even agogical modifications. Better to sacrifice an accelerando.

True interpretation knows no dead intervals, only Riemann.²³⁸ Very often, holes and senseless moments arise because two notes that form a melodic interval fall apart instead of being connected.

Sonority is formally constitutive. Hauptstimme in a pianissimo field should be played sul tasto so that it can remain in the field, yet emerge nonetheless. – Sul ponticello is a formal category.

Critical notes, apart from being deviations, are often: short outer pitches in awkward registers, as well as intermediate intervals. Careful with the downbeat.

In highly dissolved music such as Webern's op. 9, the smallest motivic shapes must be pieced together from the different instruments. In the 2nd; start of the 3rd piece.

Wherever there is a concentration of motivic activity there is also a Hauptstimme, even if it is only a single note.

6 December 1959

Frankfurt a. M.

Notes

5 The name of Sibelius does not appear in the Toscanini essay, but that of Toscanini certainly appears in the ‘Glosse über Sibelius’ [Gloss on Sibelius] written in 1938 (GS 17, pp. 247–52): ‘Coming to England or even to America, one finds the name [i.e. that of Sibelius] beginning to grow out of all proportion. It is mentioned as often as a make of car. The radio and the concert-hall reverberate with the sounds from Finland. Toscanini's programmes are open to Sibelius’ (ibid., p. 247). In the ‘analysis of Toscanini's style of presentation’, Adorno had evidently considered following on from the tendency diagnosed at the end of his gloss on Sibelius: ‘In a certain respect, his is the only ‘subversive’ music today. Yet not in the sense of destroying the undesirable status quo, but rather that of the Calibanian destruction of all the musical results of control over nature, which humanity bought dearly enough through the use of the tempered scale. If Sibelius is good, then the criteria for musical quality extending from Bach to Schoenberg – wealth of relationships, articulation, unity within diversity, plurality within the singular – are no longer valid. All of that is betrayed by Sibelius to a nature that is not even nature, but rather the shabby photograph of the parental home. For his part, he contributes to the great deterioration in art music, though he is still surpassed with great ease by the industrialized variety. But in his symphonies, such destruction dons the mask of creation. Its effect is dangerous' (ibid., pp. 251f.).

8 Rudolf Kolisch (1896–1978), who had been a friend of Adorno's since the latter's Vienna studies in 1925, studied violin with Otakar Ševčic in Vienna and composition first with Franz Schreker, then from 1919 to 1922 with Arnold Schoenberg. He was the leader of several string quartets; the first, the Wiener Streichquartett, gave the first public performance of Adorno's Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett in late 1926. In 1935, Kolisch and Adorno resolved to write the Theory of Musical Reproduction together, as Adorno's letter to Ernst Křenek of 23 March 1935 reveals (see Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Křenek, Briefwechsel [Correspondence], ed. Wolfgang Rogge, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, p. 72). After the outbreak of war in 1939 Kolisch, who had emigrated to the USA in 1937, did not return to Europe with his quartet following a tour of America. In 1944 he became leader of the Pro Arte Quartet, which was ‘Quartet in Residence’ at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1953 Kolisch, performing in Europe for the first time since the end of the war, participated in the summer course for new music in Darmstadt, where he gave tuition and concerts, as well as seminars on questions of interpretation. See also Adorno's 1956 essay ‘Kolisch und die neue Interpretation’ [Kolisch and the New Interpretation] (GS 19, pp. 460–2).

9 Adorno is referring, as the indication on p. 33 makes clear, to Schumann's aphorism ‘Das öffentliche Auswendigspielen’ [Playing from Memory in Public]: ‘Call it an act of daring, or charlatanerie, but it will always testify to the great power of the musical spirit. And why indeed this prompt-box? Why put fetters on the feet if the head has wings? Do you not know that a chord played from a score, no matter how freely it may be struck, does not sound even half as free as one played from the imagination? Oh, I should like to answer from your hearts: but I cling to traditional matters, for I am a German, – I would certainly be somewhat amazed if the dancer suddenly took out a page of her dance-steps, or the actor or declaimer produced his roles from a pocket, in order to dance, act and declaim more securely; but truly, I am like that philistine who, when the virtuoso's music fell from the stand and he played on calmly nonetheless, exclaimed triumphantly: “Look, look! This is a high art! he can play it from memory!” ’ (Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Heinrich Simon, Leipzig [n.d.], vol. 1, pp. 147f.).

11 In the radio lecture on Franz Schreker held by Adorno in 1959 and taken up into the essay collection Quasi una Fantasia in 1963 (see Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso, 1998, pp. 130–44), he states: ‘The fermentations of the Schreker sound have been entirely absorbed by light music, whether because its matadors learnt a thing or two from Schreker, or because his manner of simply sampling sounds is one which was itself moving in the direction of popular music and the latter spontaneously produced effects of the kind which had very different intentions in him. … Yet Schreker cherished lofty ambitions for his confections. The intoxication they induce conjures up the vision of some lukewarm, chaotic effusion, like something from the age of courtesans. It is music without firm definition of any sort. It resists definition as if it were reification itself. It is art which resents its own purely musical materials, as if they were amusical, alien to art as such’ (ibid., pp. 136f.).

12 The Vorlesungen über Musik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dilettanten [Lectures on Music with Particular Consideration of the Dilettantes] by the Swiss Hans Georg Nägeli (1773–1836) had been published in Stuttgart and Tübingen by Cotta in 1826; there he writes: ‘But appearing soon after Haydn, another one joined him, who must be termed an “impure” instrumental composer in the theoretical sense, who commingled cantabile song with the free play of ideas among instruments in a myriad of colourful ways, and caused an incredible upheaval in that entire artistic field through his gift of invention and his wealth of ideas, in this sense perhaps more deformative than formative, but had a tremendously exciting effect, and that was Mozart. A hero of the emotions and the imagination in equal measure, impulsive and forceful, he appears for a moment in all his compositions as a shepherd and a warrior, a flatterer and a man of action; gentle melodies frequently alternate with sharp, incisive passages, elegance of movement with impetuousness. Great was his genius, but equally great the flaw in his genius, namely that of creating effect through contrasts. The flaw was all the greater here for his setting of non-instrumental and instrumental music, cantabile song and free musical play, in permanent contrast. It was inartistic, as it is in all the arts when something can only gain effect through its opposite. It was deformative, first of all for himself, because as soon as perpetual contrast is elevated to the primary means of effect, the beautiful proportion of the parts in a work of art is disregarded’ (Nägeli, Vorlesungen über Musik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dilettanten, with a foreword by Martin Staehelin, Darmstadt, 1983, p. 157).

22 Frederick Dorian, The History of Music in Performance: The Art of Musical Interpretation from the Renaissance to Our Day, New York, 1942. Adorno worked through the book ‘pencil in hand’ and subsequently copied the keywords noted as marginalia into the notebook containing the ‘Notes Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction’. For the sake of greater clarity and a better overview, the quotations from Dorian's book are reproduced, in italics, immediately after Adorno's keywords; as Adorno's page numbers do not always take into account sentences beginning at the end of the previous page, the corresponding numbers have been corrected. Frederick Dorian (1902–1991), whose name was Friedrich Deutsch before his naturalization as an American, and who came from Vienna – the composer Max Deutsch (1892–1982) was his brother – studied musicology with Guido Adler (he acquired a PhD in 1924 with a thesis entitled ‘Die Fugenarbeit in den Werken Beethovens’ [Fugue in the Works of Beethoven]), compositional theory and conducting with Anton Webern and piano with Eduard Steuermann, and was a member of Schoenberg's class in Vienna. From 1930 onwards Dorian worked as a music critic, and during 1934 was Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. In the USA he was professor at Carnegie-Mellon University.

24 The note refers to the preceding quotation from Dorian, p. 31. – The reference to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit presumably relates to the famous passage towards the end of the introduction, from which Adorno also quotes excerpts in the second of his Drei Studien zu Hegel (see GS 5, pp. 247–380, here p. 295; for the English translation see Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 53ff.): ‘Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung]. In this connection there is a moment in the process just mentioned which must be brought out more clearly, for through it a new light will be thrown on the exposition which follows. Consciousness knows something; this object is the essence or the in-itself; but it is also for consciousness the in-itself. This is where the ambiguity of this truth enters. We see that consciousness now has two objects: one is the first in-itself, the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself. The latter appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. what consciousness has in mind is not an object, but only its knowledge of that first object. But, as was shown previously, the first object, in being known, is altered for consciousness; it ceases to be the in-itself, and becomes something that is the in-itself only for consciousness. And this then is the True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself. Or, in other words, this is the essence, or the object of consciousness. This new object contains the nothingness of the first, it is what experience has made of it’ (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 55).

30 Adorno expanded upon the key concept of Stravinsky's positivism in the second part of Philosophie der neuen Musik: ‘According to the philosophy implied, he belongs to the positivism of Ernst Mach: “the ego is not to be saved.” According to his attitude, he belongs to a type of Western art the highest summit of which lies in the work of Baudelaire, in which the individual – through the force of emotional sensation – enjoys his own annihilation. Therefore, the mythologizing tendency of Sacre continues where Wagner left off, negating the tendency at the same time. Stravinsky's positivism clings to the primeval world as though it were a matter of proven actuality. He constructs an imaginary ethnological model of the pre-individualized, which he would like to distil with precision in his works’ (Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster, New York: Seabury Press, 1973, p. 166).

33 ‘If we are to explain to ourselves what we mean by “effect” [Effekt], it is important to be careful that we do not generally make the more natural choice of “effect” [Wirkung]. It is our instinct to imagine the term “effect” [Wirkung] only in connection with a preceding cause: if we begin to doubt involuntarily the existence of such a context, or if we even know for a fact that there is no such context, then we look in our desperation for a word that might somehow express the impression supposedly left by the works of Meyerbeer, for example, and so we employ a foreign word more remote from our instinct, such as this word “effect” [Effekt]. If, therefore, we seek to define more precisely what we mean by this work, we can translate “effect” [Effekt] into “effect [Wirkung] without cause” ’ (Wagner-Lexikon: Hauptbegriffe der Kunst- und Weltanschauung Richard Wagner's in wörtlichen Ausführungen aus seinen Schriften zusammengestellt von Carl Fr. Glasenapp und Heinrich von Stein [Wagner Dictionary: Keywords from Richard Wagner's Views on Art and the World collected from his Writings], Stuttgart, 1883, pp. 129f.).

34 Adorno is presumably referring to remarks made by Bruno Walter in conversation, or perhaps to reports by Thomas Mann, as Walter's book on questions of musical interpretation was only published in 1957; see Bruno Walter, Von der Musik und vom Musizieren, Frankfurt am Main, 1957. Walter writes: ‘[…] of all thematic elements, it was those of the slow movements, especially the Beethovenian Adagio, that spoke to me most strongly. There, it seemed as if the music's deepest secret was revealing itself to me. But inevitably I sensed traces of the ‘eternally feminine’, this quality that draws us to the music, far beyond the domain of the slow movements, indeed even in numerous thematic formations found in fast movements. In fact every theme or motive, even the most energetic and masculine, seemed to me still to bear traces of that world of primeval songful musicality, just as nearly all vocal phrases indeed also showed elements of activity and rhythmic life. […] For it would be wrong to assume that a vocal theme can only be something we are truly able to sing, that is to say a phrase whose rendition is suited to the range and technique of the human voice. […] Thus whatever can and should be delivered by an instrument or voice with a singing expression – cantabile – is songful in the true sense, and it is precisely this that we should associate with the notion of the lyrical’ (ibid., pp. 67f.).

36 In the passage in question from The Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 4: 1866–1883, New York, 1946, Ernest Newman writes the following concerning allusions to Wagner's writings in Nietzsche's works: ‘The reference to On Conducting relates to the paragraph in which Wagner protests against the superficial “classicity” of most of the time-beaters of the day, the tradition of which he traces back to Mendelssohn's “cheerful-Grecian” conducting of great works. Neither of these citations has any particular bearing on music and Greek tragedy as such.’ Newman is referring to the unpublished ‘Foreword Addressed to Richard Wagner’ to The Birth of Tragedy from February 1871, in which Nietzsche writes: ‘I know of you, my honoured friend, and of you alone, that you, like myself, distinguish between true and false notions of “Greek gaiety”, and find the latter – the false – around each and every corner in the state of unchallenged contentment; I also know of you that you consider it impossible to reach an insight into the true nature of tragedy from that state of false gaiety. For this reason, it is to you that I owe the following discussion of the origin and aim of tragic art, in which I have undertaken the difficult attempt to translate that most wonderful consonance between our sentiments into words and ideas’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869 bis 1874, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazino Montinari, vol. 7, Munich, 1988, p. 351).

40 The argument returns in Adorno's essay ‘Tradition’ (GS 14, pp. 127–42), where he writes towards the end: ‘Historicism defames its own principle, the force of history. For that reason it fails to do the matter justice in any of its facets. Its fidelity is infidelity, for example in the insistence on the original instrumentation common in Bach's day. The fact that in those times, as The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue blatantly demonstrate, ensembles and instrumental colours were not as unequivocal as they are today points to a central difference: here, colour does not function in the same sense, that is to say as the composition's integral component – which it had become since the nineteenth century, culminating in Klangfarbenmelodie and the organization of timbral scales as part of serial procedures’ (ibid., pp. 141f.). See also Adorno's lecture ‘Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’ [The Function of Colour in Music], which he gave in 1966 during the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik; a transcription from the surviving tape-recordings appeared in 1999, in the special edition in the series Musik-Konzepte (ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn) entitled Darmstadt-Dokumente I.

46 In his essay ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Reihenkomposition’ [On the Prehistory of Serial Composition] (GS 16, pp. 68–84), Adorno writes: ‘The fact that the idée fixe of the Fantastic Symphony, the allegory of the dream-beloved, is distorted and degraded in the final movement at once conveys something of an absolute musical nature. Berlioz still feels, as it were, what he is inflicting upon the traditional, static motion of the theme, even the Beethovenian, and yet dares to do what was still inconceivable for Beethoven – the idea of distortion and caricature conceals, as so often in music history, the emergence of a new quality. In Wagner's works, under the name of ‘psychological variation’, we now find what still constituted a shock in Berlioz congealed to an unproblematic, unquestioned and well-wrought compositional technique: to a stylistic principle’ (p. 71).

50 Reviewing a new production of Lohengrin, Adorno wrote in February 1930: ‘A further word on the trick of the performance: the missing swan. Indeed, what else can a director do but remove that symbolic fairy-tale animal? In naïve, naturalistic guise it becomes comical, yet ornamental and stylized it is no less ridiculous; a swan constructed from beams of light would not be tolerated by reactionary opera-goers. So the swan leaves behind its cavity. Only: if the swan on stage is abolished, then text and music must follow; for how can Lohengrin sing the praises of that empty space in his song of thanks? Rather, every word and every note of Lohengrin, which lives off the power of its images, would have to be erased along with it; and what would then become of the work? Or rather: what is truly the place and the state of Lohengrin today?’ (GS 19, p. 170). See also Adorno's essay ‘Bürgerliche Oper’ [Bourgeois Opera] from 1955, in Sound Figures, pp. 15–28, especially p. 16.

63 In Der getreue Korrepetitor [The Faithful Répétiteur], in his interpretation analyses of Anton Webern's op. 3 and op. 12, Adorno writes: ‘This time, my investigation into problems of interpretation does not unfold systematically according to various compositional dimensions and their interrelations; rather, in examining the most varied questions of presentation, I have followed the suggestions made by the course of the songs as revealed to me in the process of rehearsing them. I must concede a degree of wilfulness in doing so. For there are literally an infinite number of paths leading into any work of art and any interpretation thereof; any choice among them is fortuitous to a degree; but they must all converge in the work's core, its content. The possibilities of falling short of a work are equally infinite, and here too one can speak of arbitrariness. But every such beginning, to the extent that it derives from a true perception of its object, should reveal all its interpretational aspects. Indeed, Rudolf Kolisch once told me during a rehearsal that it makes little difference what aspect one criticizes; if something is amiss, one need only begin working critically on the passage, and everything else will happen of its own accord’ (GS 15, p. 252).

64 Ernst Wendel (1876–1938) directed the State Philharmonic Orchestra of the Free Hanseatic Town of Bremen from 1909 to 1935. Adorno attended Wendel's performance of Ernst Křenek's Fourth Symphony on 8 March 1926 in Frankfurt; see his concert review in GS 19, pp. 70f. In December 1924, Adorno wrote about one of the Frankfurt Museumskonzerte: ‘Ernst Wendel gained his greatest success with Bruckner's Eighth and Beethoven's Ninth. How grateful one must always be to that thorough orchestral educator and experienced conductor for the programming of his Monday concerts – behind his audience's frenetic applause, after all, lies a great deal of idleness and relief at being spared the effort of encountering anything foreign or problematic in the programme and its presentation. Wendel allows himself to be carried by tradition, and there is no longer any conducting tradition today that can carry such a load; where it restricts itself to craftsmanship, it lacks evidence of humanity, and even craftsmanship cannot save it without a further anchor. The performance of the Ninth was clear-headed and controlled, and it was pleasing to hear how astutely, for example, Wendel resisted the temptation to indulge in Nibelungen-like demonism in the coda of the first movement. But he lacks the strength truly to embark, he lacks the confidence to hear a work fixed through decades of musical practice in a new way, both from its roots and from his own; or the courage to reach beyond himself at the risk of error; in short, everything that is so utterly forceful and compelling, time and again, about Furtwängler. It is no fault of the conductor that a safe, self-enclosed manner of conducting is no longer feasible, but it certainly exemplifies the tragic situation facing artists, both those who produce and those who reproduce. For all his serious intentions, Wendel ultimately remains confined within the musical director's routine’ (GS 19, pp. 44f.).

67 Adorno is referring to Benjamin's foreword – ‘The Task of the Translator’ – to the Baudelaire translations published in Heidelberg in 1923; the passage in question reads: ‘To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous in its intention to the argument by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of a theory of imitation. In the latter, it is a question of showing that in cognition there could be no objectivity, not even a claim to it, if this were to consist in imitations of the real; in the former, one can demonstrate that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for a likeness to the original. For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process’ (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press, 1996, p. 256).

84 Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970), who was born into a Swedish-German family, began his studies at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, but was forced to leave Germany in 1933. After spending some years in Switzerland, he went to the USA in 1938 and studied with Nadia Boulanger in California; he taught at the University of Southern California from 1945 to 1970. He was active as a composer, conductor and pianist, and worked with Stravinsky. Dahl had written to Adorno on 2 January 1949, criticizing his stipulation that jazz too should be notatable. The ‘formulation disputed’ was located in Adorno's review of two books on jazz (see GS 19, pp. 382–99), and had already been published in 1941; it reads: ‘The authority of written music remains palpable at every moment behind the freedom of performed music. Then, however, it is not only in folk music that notation reaches its limits, but equally in art music. A Beethoven quartet played exclusively according to the notes on the page would be senseless. Now, the rhythmic notation in European art music has meanwhile become so advanced that the improvisations viewed by Sargent as unnotatable are certainly within the realm of the notatable. The idea that a solo chorus by Armstrong cannot be fixed in notation, while a quartet piece by Webern can be written down, is somewhat risky – to say nothing about the question of where and when anyone is really improvising anymore in actual jazz practice’ (ibid., pp. 383f.). Adorno's response to Dahl, of which a carbon copy of the typescript has survived, dates from 10 January 1949:

Dear Herr Dahl,

Warmest thanks for your letter. I consider the problems you touch on so important that I would like to attempt a somewhat more detailed justification of my position.

Let us begin with the question of notation. The formulation disputed by you, namely that it must be possible to notate jazz if Webern can be notated, was intended to dispel mystical notions about the supposed irrationality of the ‘improvisatory’ solo choruses. This naturally does not mean that I would seriously advocate any blind rationalism in questions of notation. I would say that all musical notation is inexact to a certain degree, i.e. that all music becomes senseless if one simply plays what is written in the very strictest sense. Reading music has two dimensions: the first relates to notation, the second to something I would like to term the tone-lingual element, that is to say a knowledge and experience of the structured material that forms the basis of any compositional style. However: one must know this language as thoroughly in any Beethoven violin sonata as in jazz: no notation exists within a vacuum, as every notation is rather a way of fixing the music within a respectively given tone-lingual continuum. To a certain extent, jazz constitutes this manner of continuum sui generis, and what seems unnotatable about it is in truth simply the fact that the underlying tone-lingual continuum – to put it crudely, the epitome of all conventions of delivery – is somewhat different to that of Western art music. As soon as one is within this continuum, however, one can use notation just as well as Western art music can be notated within its continuum. In any case, the difficulties of jazz notation essentially relate merely to the differences between the declamations of the principal voice and the rhythmic contours of the accompaniment. These differences can mostly be notated – but naturally, living music will only ensue if one understands the sense of the language as a whole. And even this is not entirely beyond the reach of technical determination. One of the most important tone-lingual elements, I would say, is the distinction between counter-accents and syncopations, which had been viewed as identical in Western music until the latest developments.

Your second main point, the connection between ‘dirty notes’ etc. and social sadism [see GS 19, pp. 386–8], cannot be replied to in isolation or in purely musical terms. The respective passages in my critique relate to a social theory of jazz that I published in 1936 – under a pseudonym – in our Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. The essay in question was written in Europe, and many details are out of date, but I still stand by the basic conception today; as I myself have it only in a collection, you can perhaps check for yourself: ‘Über Jazz’ [On Jazz], by Hektor Rottweiler, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. V, 1936, pp. 235ff. [see Essays on Music, pp. 470–95]. Here I shall only say this much: I am certainly familiar with the origin of those shadings in non-rationalized music systems. But I believe that the deciding factor with jazz is the question of what the pseudomorphosis of American dance-music with those exotic elements actually means. And here, I must say, I think that this is not simply added ‘spice’, but rather an expressive element of failure, infringement, and degradation, profoundly connected to the whole custom of ‘adaptation’ in contemporary mass culture. Instead of dissolving, the conventional musical language is rigidly adhered to, yet at the same time presented to a certain extent as untrue and subjected to a form of mockingly casual procedure, and it is largely this function that is served by the introduction of exotic elements. The phenomenon I am referring to can perhaps be compared to the manner in which a resentful girl, upon hearing the name of an elegant restaurant, would say: ‘I've never been there, it's too genteel for me’, or that of an anti-intellectual who, whenever he refers to psychology, says ‘pychology’. But as I say, such observations gain their significance purely in a fundamental theory of jazz, not as isolated interpretations. I will gladly concede to you that such factors serve a different expressive function in strict Hot Jazz, but jazz as a mass phenomenon in American society, which is my primary interest in this context, treats these elements in the way I have attempted to classify. Incidentally, this is also very much in keeping with pop lyrics – it is no coincidence that one of the most famous ones ten years ago was called ‘Goddy. Goody’. […] I hope we shall speak again soon!

Yours with very best wishes.

86 This statement by Mahler was reported by the artist Alfred Roller, who was set-designer at the Vienna Court Opera from 1902 onwards, and occasionally worked with Mahler as a director: ‘With each new production he practically reinvented the language of the stage; drawing wastefully on his immense strength, he was as young, enterprising and bold as he had been on his very first day. He mocked those who adhered to a comfortable scheme, and despised the Ariadne's thread of routine. It was in such a context that he made the statement – quoted again and again, and always incorrectly – about tradition. “What you theatre people call your tradition is your idleness and sloppiness!” ’ (Alfred Roller, ‘Mahler und die Inszenierung’ [Mahler and Stage-Production], in Musikblätter des Anbruch 2 [1920], p. 273).

148 It is possible that Kolisch's ‘statement’, about which Adorno supplies no further details, is close to a passage from his essay ‘Über die Krise der Streicher’ [On the Crisis Among String Instruments]: ‘The priests of this religion have placed only one ideal upon their altar, namely that of the beautiful tone. This is an extra-musical phenomenon in so far as no work of art music was ever written for ‘beautiful tone’. Its exclusive cultivation substitutes a subjective-sensualist, musically indifferent aspect for all dynamic-expressive elements of musical language. Under its aegis, musical reproduction takes place outside of its true task, namely the uncovering of construction, merely as a cult of the beautiful’ (Rudolf Kolisch, ‘Über die Krise der Streicher’, in Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik I, ed. Wolfgang Steinecke, Darmstadt, 1958, p. 86).

151 See on this the following passage from The Philosophy of Modern Music: ‘The unity of discipline and freedom was conceived in the sonata. From the dance it received its integral regularity, and the intention regarding the entirety; from the Lied it received that opposing and negative impulse which, out of its own consequences, again produces the entirety. In so doing, the sonata fulfils the form which preserves its identity as a matter of principle – even if not in the sense of a literal beat, or tempo. It does this with such a multiplicity of rhythmic-melodic figures and profiles that the “mathematical” pseudo-spatial time, which is recognized as tendential in its objectivity, coincides with the psychological time of experience in the happy balance of the moment’ (ibid., p. 198).

158 Adorno is presumably referring to the following passage from Schoenberg's essay ‘Faschismus ist kein Exportartkel’ [Fascism is Not an Export Article]: ‘Homophonic music concentrates the entire development on a principal part and consigns the other elements to a subordinate role since it promotes only the development and comprehensibility of this principal part. For this reason, the principal voice is unable to develop quickly from its own resources or to produce very different characters, moods, shapes, images and sonorities without losing sight of the larger context, without becoming incomprehensible. In contrast, the contrapuntal method calls for the entire attention of the listener, not merely for a principal part, but simultaneously for two, three or more parts, none of which is the principal part, since they are all principal parts’ (Arnold Schoenberg, Stil und Gedanke: Aufsätze zur Musik, ed. Ivan Vojtěch, Frankfurt am Main, 1976, p. 318).

160 See, for example, ‘Eroica’ Symphony, first movement, bars 93–4 – In his notes on Beethoven, Adorno commented on this: ‘Furthermore, there is a habit of closing a crescendo on I, the climax, with a piano (as has often been remarked). Probably a means of linking – always very difficult within the very ungraduated and limited field of dynamics. Instead of one thing closing and then (fragmentarily) something new beginning, the close is denied by the p – one could speak of a dynamic syllogism – while the cadence's gradient is at the same time resisted. – Perhaps the late style was formed by the emergence of such peculiarities – in classicist terms it would be called mannerism. – The violin sonatas are especially rich in such features’ (Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, p. 53).

179 The composer and conductor Winfried Zillig (1905–1963), a student of Schoenberg, was ostensibly the conductor of the recording of the Berg Chamber Concerto criticized by Adorno on p. 120 above. He seems also to be the nameless conductor of whom Adorno writes in his essay ‘Neue Musik, Interpretation, Publikum’ [New Music, Interpretation, Audience]: ‘It once occurred that a conductor – who was otherwise excellent, and had grown up in the respective New Music tradition – said after a performance of an admittedly especially difficult work, noting my sceptical gaze and seeking to reassure himself: “One more rehearsal, and it would have gone as smoothly as a Haydn symphony.” Listening to the recording afterwards, it transpired that the central aspect of one of the most important, imitative passages of the work, namely the combination of the theme with its augmentation and diminution, was entirely imperceptible’ (Sound Figures, p. 29 [alternative translation]). Regarding Zillig as composer, see also Adorno's obituary ‘Winfried Zillig: Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit’ [Winfried Zillig: Possibility and Reality], in GS 17, pp. 318–26.

210 No quotation could be found to support the allegation that Furtwängler was an advocate of ‘inexactitude’. In the ‘Conversations About Music’ that Furtwängler conducted with Walter Abendroth, he states: ‘A well-known conductor supposedly said that one has to rehearse for so long that the conductor no longer seems necessary. This is a fundamental error, stemming from a misconception about the details not only of rehearsing more or less, but also of the entire nature and purpose of music-making. For the urge to fix all details, even the most minute, ultimately comes from the performer's fear of being too much at the mercy of momentary inspiration. They attempt to force this inspiration as far as possible into the background through the most fastidious preparation, and ultimately to replace it and render it superfluous. They wish to predetermine every last effect, to calculate it on paper, so to speak, to “embalm” it. This is wrong for the simple reason that this fails to do justice to living works. The great musical masterpieces are subject – to a much greater extent than is generally assumed – to the laws of improvisation’ (Wilhelm Furtwängler, Gespräche über Musik, Zurich, 1948, p. 66). Regarding Furtwängler, see also the first part of Adorno's essay ‘Drei Dirigenten’ (GS 19, pp. 453–5) and ‘Wilhelm Furtwängler’, from 1968 (GS 19, pp. 468f.).

211 In his 1953 essay ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music’ (Essays on Music, pp. 135–61), Adorno writes: ‘As a language, music aims for the pure name, the absolute unity of matter and sign, whose immediate manifestion is lost to all human knowledge. It is in the utopian and at once hopeless efforts to find the name that music's relationship to philosophy is located, and this is why it is incomparably closer to the latter in its idea than any other art. But in music, the name is manifest only as a pure sound, removed from its carrier, and thus the opposite of any kind of signification or any intention to capture the sense. As music does not know the name – the absolute as sound – directly, but rather, if one can view it in this manner, seeks to achieve its invocatory construction through a whole, a process, it is thus itself intertwined in this process, where categories such as rationality, sense, meaning and language apply. It is the paradox of all music that, as an attempt to reach that non-intentional state to which we apply the inadequate term “name”, it unfolds precisely through its participation in rationality in the widest sense’ (pp. 139f. [alternative translation]). Concerning Reger, he writes in In Search of Wagner: ‘Wagner's hostility to standard forms ends in absurdity, in the nameless, the unspecific and the abstract – to such an extent that in Max Reger, for example, there is no theme or bar in any work that could not be transposed into any other, while the internal dislocations in the motive material of his Neo-German successors, Strauss and Pfitzner, became apparent by the extremes of boastful banality and helpless incoherence that characterize them’ (p. 54).

216 Franz Calvelli-Adorno (1897–1984) had studied law, and was himself an excellent pianist and violinist. He was forced to give up his post as district court administrator in Frankfurt as his mother was Jewish. He gained a qualification as a private music tutor in Dortmund, and taught piano and violin privately until 1945. From 1934 to 1938 he played in the orchestra of the Jüdischer Kulturbund [Jewish Cultural Association] under the direction of the former general musical director of the Frankfurt opera, Wilhelm Steinberg. After 1945 he was made president of the Senate for Compensation by the Americans, and worked as directing judge until his retirement. He was on the executive committee of the Frankfurter Museumsgesellschaft. As well as essays on music, he published a book entitled Über die religiöse Sprache: Kritische Erfahrungen [On Religious Language: Critical Experiences]. (The editor would like to thank Frau Elisabeth Reinhuber-Adorno for this information.)

264:	As even the great theatre managers, according to the laudable taste of their courts, have the very highest opinion of these favourite operas, it is not surprising that the demands of works entirely unpopular among these gentlemen could only be fulfilled if the conductor happened to be an important man with a serious reputation, and if he himself knew very well what is required of an orchestra today.
264:	Emphasis on the authority of the conductor. (NB with the growth in the sense of reproduction, its repressive character also grows: ad philosophy of modern music. In other words: the fetishization of reproduction, the senseless Toscanini ideal, is in fact produced by the radical pursuit of musical sense itself. The ‘monopolization’ of music arises from within its own confines).
268f.:	I received my best instruction regarding the tempo and delivery of Beethoven's music from the soulful, securely accentuated singing of the great Miss Schröder-Devrient; since that time, for example, I have found it impossible to let the oboe reel off its cadenza in the first movement of the C minor Symphony [bar 268] in as helpless a manner as I have never heard elsewhere; indeed, I then also felt, retracing my steps from the delivery of this cadenza now that I had understood it, what meaning and expression should already be lent to the first violins' [g] [bar 21] that is sustained as a fermata at the corresponding point, and through the profoundly moving impression that I acquired of these two so apparently unassuming moments, I gained an entirely new insight that breathed life into the whole movement.
268f.:	retrospective interpretation (starting from the oboe cadenza in the 5th). I.e. totality as looking forwards and backwards. The meaningful interpretation transcends the mere present. The mark of poor interpretation is its fulfilment in the representation of whatever is present: the positivistic withering of memory. Definition of effect as mere present. Cf. Wagner's ‘cause without effect’³³ (NB Wagner contradicts this p. 285 [None of our conductors dare to afford the adagio this quality to the proper degree; from the very start they are on the lookout for some figuration within it so that they can then set the tempo according to the supposed movement of the same.])
269:	From a very early age, the orchestral performances of our classical instrumental music left me with a marked feeling of dissatisfaction, and this feeling has returned whenever I have attended such performances in recent times. Things that seemed infused with such soulful expression at the piano, or while reading the score, were barely recognizable to me as they rushed past listeners, for the most part quite unnoticed.
269:	‘infused with soulful expression’: musical sense first of all defined by expression for Wagner.
271:	The orchestra had just learned to recognize the Beethovenian melody in every bar that had entirely escaped our well-behaved Leipzig musicians at that time; and this melody was sung by the orchestra.
271:	the requirement to ‘recognize the melody’. Regarding this: 1) interpretation as insight. 2) melody here essentially means the ‘running thread’, i.e. context. (Proof 286 [The most significant of Beethoven's allegros are largely dominated by a basic melody that belongs, in a deeper sense, to the character of the adagio, and this lends them the sentimental meaning that sets them so clearly apart from the earlier, naïve form of the same.])
273:	How were those Parisian musicians able to reach the solution to this difficult task so infallibly? First of all, obviously, only through the most conscientious diligence, as is native to those musicians who are not content to pay each other compliments, who do not imagine that they can understand everything by themselves, but rather feel timid and concerned in the face of something not yet understood, and attempt to grasp what is difficult from the side upon which they are at home, namely the side of technique.
273:	on the interaction involved in true interpretation: ‘Grasp what is difficult from the side of technique.’ Through a conversion of representational problems into technical ones, the subjective element of interpretation asserts itself by necessity. (Reification – subjectivity). But therein at the same time the positivistic element so characteristic of the progressive Wagner (separation of meaning and technique; therefore Gesamtkunstwerk etc.)
274:	But only a correct grasp of the melos also dictates the correct tempo: the two are inseparable; one conditions the other. […] If one wishes to provide a summary of all that is required of a conductor for the correct performance of a musical work, it lies in his always supplying the correct tempo; for the choice and determination of the same allow us to recognize immediately whether the conductor has understood the musical work or not. The correct tempo almost guides good musicians, once they have become closely acquainted with the musical work, towards the correct delivery, for the former is already based on a recognition of the latter on the part of the conductor. But the difficulty of determining the correct tempo becomes clear from the fact that the correct tempo can only be found through a recognition of the correct delivery.
	[12]
	tempo as a function of the ‘melos’ (context) and a criterion for understanding. The mutually contradictory statements made by Wagner (show contradiction) at the bottom of the page are the most precise expression of a dialectical state of affairs, which the anti-Hegelian Wagner would have been the last to admit.
275:	In this, the musicians of old had such a good instinct that, like Haydn and Mozart, they were normally very general in their tempo indications: placing ‘Andante’ between ‘Allegro’ and ‘Adagio’, with its most simple of increases by degrees, covered almost everything they considered necessary. With S. Bach, we finally encounter an almost complete absence of tempo indications, which for true musical sense is the most correct of all. For this sense might well ask itself: if someone does not understand my theme, my figuration, its character and expression, what good can one of these Italian tempo indications still do for him? – To speak from my own very personal experience, I shall mention that the early operas I had performed at various theatres contained quite elaborate tempo indications, which I proceeded to fix infallibly (or so I thought) through the metronome. Now, whenever I heard a ridiculous tempo in a performance, for example of my ‘Tannhäuser’, the persons in question defended themselves against my recriminations by assuring me that they had followed my metronome indication with the utmost scrupulousness. From this, I saw how unreliable a means mathematics is in music, and henceforth not only left the metronome off, but also restricted my instructions for the main tempi to very general indications, being meticulous only about the modifications of these tempi, as our conductors know next to nothing about these.
275:	the romantic thesis of the primacy of sense over notation. Wagner's centrepiece, the theory of ‘tempo modification’, is directly contingent upon this.
282:	Herein lies that most crucial aspect, which we must seek to understand very clearly if we are to move beyond a rendition of our classical works of music that is so often neglected and spoilt through bad habits towards a fruitful communication. For bad habit apparently has the right to insist upon its assumptions regarding the tempo, on account of a certain agreement that has developed between it and the common delivery, which on the one hand conceals the true vice from the parties it affects, but on the other hand tolerates a clear deterioration owing to the fact that the accustomed mode of delivery, when subjected only to one-sided changes in the tempo, normally becomes quite unbearable.
	Wagner's concession of the relative – historical – validity of incorrect interpretation (as second nature. Has very far-reaching consequences).
	To clarify this through the most simple of examples, I shall choose the opening of the C minor Symphony [by Beethoven]: our conductors pass over the fermata in the second bar after lingering there briefly, and linger thus almost entirely for the purpose of directing the musicians' concentration towards a precise rendition of the figure in the third bar. The note E flat is not normally sustained any longer than the duration of a forte on stringed instruments when played with a careless bow. Now let us assume that Beethoven's voice called out to a conductor from the grave: ‘Will you hold my fermata long and grimly! I did not write fermatas for my own entertainment or for lack of ideas, to pause for thought about what should come later; but rather to cast into the intense and rapidly figured Allegro, as I might require it, what in my Adagio the tone, which should be wholly and fully absorbed, means for the expression of sensual revelry, as something blissful or a dreadfully sustained convulsion.’
	[In the left-hand margin, crossing the subsequent note:] NB Rheingold prelude.
	The magnificent passage on tone. (NB the absolute tone is pure expression that is transformed into the expressionless. It denotes the opposite of sense, i.e. absolute construction, which is transformed into expression), namely:
283:	‘And now pay attention to the specific thematic intention I had with this sustained E flat after three turbulent short notes, and what I want to say with all the equally sustained notes in what follows.’
	the expressive sense as ‘thematic intention’ (!)
	But this evenly sustained tone is the basis for all dynamics, in the orchestra as in singing: only by taking it as a point of departure can one reach all those modifications whose diversity determines the character of the delivery in the first place.
	the even tone.
	Without this basis [the evenly sustained tone] an orchestra may make much noise, but without any force; and herein lies a first characteristic of the weakness of most of our orchestral performances.
	Wagner against ‘weakness’ (within limits: ideal of monumentality)
285:	Here, then, the Adagio stands opposite the Allegro, like the sustained tone of figural motion. The sustained tone dictates the rules of the tempo adagio; here, rhythm melts away into the life of the tone, which belongs to itself and is content with itself.
285:	the famous passage on adagio and the pure tone.
286:	B. Walter's theory³⁴ of the adagio character of cantabile themes. Even in the Allegro, examining precisely its defining motives, it is always the song borrowed from the Adagio that dominates.
286:	Misunderstanding of the Eroica theme (expand). [Adorno noted in the margin of Wagner's essay, next to the music example showing the first subject of the first movement of the Eroica: this is not an ‘adagio melody’ – not a ‘melody’ at all.]
287:	Here [in the finale of Mozart's E flat major Symphony and that of Beethoven's A flat major Symphony], the purely rhythmic movement celebrates its orgies, to a certain degree, and therefore these allegro movements cannot be taken determinedly or fast enough. Whatever lies between these extremes, however, is subject to the law of mutual relations, and these laws cannot be grasped delicately or variedly enough. For they are, at a profound level, the same ones that modified the sustained tone itself in every conceivable nuance […].
287:	the ‘law of mutual relations’.
(288:	The most perfect of this kind [‘Mozart's fast alla breve movements’] are the Allegros of his opera overtures, especially those from ‘Figaro’ and ‘Don Juan’. One knows about these that they could never be played fast enough for Mozart's taste […]. Extremes. Mozart's )
290:	Initially, I was concerned only to solve the dilemma myself, and to make it clear to all people that, since Beethoven, there has been a very substantial change in the treatment and delivery of music in comparison to former times. Things that used to be held apart in single forms complete in themselves, each living their own life, are here kept together and developed with reference to one another, at least in terms of their innermost main motives, in the most contrasting of forms, and enclosed by these very forms. Naturally this must also be taken into account in the manner of delivery, and the most important way to ensure this is for the tempo to be no less delicate than the thematic fabric itself, which should convey itself through the tempo according to its movement.
290:	Main evidence in Wagner for the historical character of interpretation (‘since Beethoven, there has been a very substantial change in the treatment and delivery of music in comparison to former times’)
292–93:	The real weakness of variation form as the basis of a movement, however, becomes apparent when starkly contrasting parts are juxtaposed without any connection or mediation. […] The most unpleasant effect of this careless juxtaposition can be experienced when, after the quietly measured theme, an inexplicably gay first variation immediately enters. The first variation of the uniquely wonderful theme in the second movement of the great A major Sonata for piano and violin by Beethoven [op. 47] has always driven me to the point of outrage at any further music-listening, as I have never heard a virtuoso treat it any differently than is merited by a ‘first variation’ serving the purpose of gymnastic production. […] So it would therefore seem natural for the performer, who, in such a case as the Kreutzer Sonata, demands the honour of representing the musician entirely, to attempt to establish a gentle connection between the entry of this first variation and the mood of the theme that has just ended, by showing a certain consideration with regard to the tempo through an initially mild indication of the new character in which – according to the unalterable opinion of pianists and violinists – this variation enters: if this were to be carried out with the proper artistic sense, then the first part of this variation, for example, would itself create the gradual transition to the newer, more lively attitude, thus also gaining – quite aside from all that is otherwise interesting in this part – this particular charm of a pleasantly ingratiating, but in fact not insignificant, change of the basic character established in the theme.
292–93:	Wagner's mania for transition. He is incapable of understanding contrast as a means of creating context. It is precisely this common sense of mediation as something gradual that leads to a distortion of interpretation (C sharp minor Quartet [op. 131 by Beethoven]). NB everything ‘over-defined’ in Wagner, the musical drama embodies totality as tautology.³⁵
294:	This Allegro [the second movement – marked Allegro molto vivace – of op. 131, which is separated from the first only by a fermata] thus directly follows an adagio of a dreamlike melancholy perhaps unlike any other by the master […]. The question here is now clearly how this [the theme of the second movement] is to approach the frozen melancholy of the immediately preceding Adagio ending, as it were to emerge from within it, so that it does not injure our sentiment more than engaging it through the abruptness of its entry. – Entirely appropriately, this new theme is also initially presented in an unbroken pp, precisely in the manner of a delicate, barely recognizable vision, and soon melts away into a fading ritardando; only then is it animated, so to speak, to reveal its true self, and through the crescendo enters the sphere unique to it. – Here it is clearly a delicate task for the performer, appropriate to the sufficiently clear character of this Allegro, also to modify its first entrance through the tempo […]. – [Adorno notes along the edge of the musical example:] NB as the connection has already been established by motivic means, it would be pleonastic also to keep the tempo constant [?]. It would be distasteful.
294:	criticize the example of the C sharp minor Quartet.
298:	Once I had thus given the introductory Adagio [of the Freischütz overture] back its grimly mysterious dignity, I allowed the wild motion of the Allegro free rein in its passion, being in no way restricted by consideration for the gentler delivery of the delicate second subject, as I was entirely sure that I would be able to curb the tempo sufficiently once more for it imperceptibly to reach the correct level for this theme.
298:	Furtwängler as Wagner's heir.
299:	In order no longer to interrupt my account of that performance of the Freischütz overture with the Vienna Orchestra, I shall now continue by relating how, after the utmost heightening of the tempo, I used the drawn-out song of the clarinet, entirely derived from the Adagio:

	to restrain the tempo imperceptibly from here on, where all figural movement dissolves into sustained (or trembling) notes, sufficiently for it to arrive, despite the more active intermediate figure:

	in E flat major, with the cantilena thus beautifully prepared, in the mildest nuance of the still constant main tempo.
	the element of reason in Wagner's modifications.
299ff.:	[This passage follows on directly from the one cited in the preceding note:] If I now insisted that this theme

	should be rendered at an even piano, that is to say without the usual accentuation of the ascending figure, and also with even phrasing, so not

	then this admittedly had to be discussed with the otherwise so excellent musicians first. But the effect of this delivery was then so conspicuous that, when the tempo subsequently increases imperceptibly with the pulsating

	I needed only to make the quietest suggestion of this motion to find the entire orchestra equally showing the most insightful enthusiasm for the return of that most energetic nuance of the main tempo and the subsequent fortissimo.
	[13]
	the superb analysis of the interpretation of the Freischütz overture (esp. 299 below). Here, however, the modification is justified by the constructive defects of the composition. I.e. the space of interpretative freedom is always the fragility of context in the work. One of my main theses. Interpretation is the work's retrieval.
308f.:	As I have touched upon a number of times above, attempts to modify the tempo for the delivery of classical, that is to say Beethovenian, musical works have always met the resistance of the conducting faction in our times. I showed in greater detail how a one-sided modification of the tempo, without a corresponding modification of the delivery in terms of the tone itself, would appear to give cause for objection; on the other hand, I also revealed here the error upon which this is more fundamentally based, thus leaving no other possible explanation for these objections than the incompetence and lack of vocation of our conductors in general. A genuinely valid reason for criticizing the approach that I find so indispensable in the cases mentioned, however, would be that nothing could be more harmful to those musical works than nuances – also in the tempo – incorporated wilfully into their delivery, of the kind that give free rein to the fantastic whims of every vain tempo-beater aiming for effect or enamoured of himself, and would in time disfigure our classical music repertoire completely beyond recognition. Of course, all that can be said in response to this is that our music must indeed be in a sorry situation for such fears to arise, as this at the same time reveals that people no longer believe in the power of true artistic consciousness, which would immediately defeat such acts of wilfulness, in our collective artistic states.
308f.:	Discussion of the objections to Wagner's subjectivism (NB connect Wagner's theory to the nominalism of his entire oeuvre)
310:	[One] must now realize what state the manner of these works' delivery, in which they are eagerly conserved according to the laws of that incompetence and dreariness, must be in if one considers without reservation, on the other hand, in what way even a master such as Mendelssohn dealt with the direction of these works! […] And I shall therefore subject this sanctimonious rejection of that spirit which I have termed the correct one for the performance of our great music to closer examination, in order to show in all its poverty the peculiarly recalcitrant spirit which that defensiveness feeds off, and above all to remove the aura of sanctity which it presumes to place around itself as the chaste German artistic spirit. For it is this spirit that inhibits any free progress in our musical life, that keeps every breath of fresh air at a distance from its atmosphere, and which could in time truly blur our glorious German music into a colourless, indeed ridiculous ghost.
310:	against historicism: Wagner's insight that it is precisely conservation that is destructive.
312ff:	In our world, the musician always remained merely a strange being, half wild, half childish, and was employed as such by his patrons.
	Wagner's sociological theory of the musician.
	The ‘new’, ‘elegant’ performer as an agent of circulation (anti-Semitic theory), as a parasite upon the work. ‘Educatedness’ Just as the Jews, for example, have remained strangers to our trade life, our newer musical conductors have not come from the class of musical craftsmen, which was repugnant to them already on account of the strict proper work it entails. This new conductor instead placed himself immediately at the top of the musicians' guilds, just as the banker does with our trade partnerships. To do so, he had to bring something from the start, something which the musician coming from the bottom precisely lacked, or which he could gain only with the greatest difficulty, and rarely to a sufficient degree: just as the banker brings capital with him, this new type of musician brought educatedness. (consider very closely)
314:	In general, it is a primary characteristic of this educatedness that it does not dwell intensely on anything, does not immerse itself profoundly in anything, or also, as one says, does not make a meal of anything. […] It therefore avoids all that is monstrous, divine or demonic, simply because it cannot find anything in it to imitate, which is why it is common for this educatedness to speak, for example, of excesses, exaggerations etc., which has in turn given rise to a new aesthetic that professes to be influenced by Goethe, claiming that he was also averse to all things monstrous, and therefore invented such a beautiful, calm clarity. Here, then, we find the ‘harmlessness’ of art being praised, while Schiller – who was too intense upon occasions – is treated with a certain degree of contempt, and thus, in prudent accordance with the philistine of our times, a whole new idea of classicism is being developed, one which in other artistic fields the Greeks are finally also drawn into, on account of their being so well attuned to clear, transparent gaiety.
314:	Educatedness as conformism, ‘harmlessness’.
315:	Here it only remains for me to explain the merry Greek quality of this ‘passing over things’ so urgently recommended by Mendelssohn. […] Mendelssohn's aim was: to hide the inevitable weaknesses in the performance, perhaps also in what is being performed; with those [his followers and successors], however, this is joined by that quite particular motive for their educatedness, namely: to conceal things in general, to cause no fuss.
315:	Conformist performance as ‘concealment’ (opposite of x-ray photography) NB: ideological character of positivism in particular.
316:	A large part of their education has always consisted in taking as great a care over their comportment as one who is burdened with the natural impediment of a stammer or a lisp, and who must avoid any arousal in his announcement, lest he descend into the most improper stuttering or bubbling. […] The German is stiff and awkward when he seeks to appear well mannered: but he is sublime and superior to all others when he catches fire. Are we supposed now to restrain this for the sake of those people?
316:	Wagner's insight into the classicist style of presentation as repressed mimesis.
317:	First of all, and most importantly for our investigation, the success of this negative maxim showed itself precisely in the delivery of our classical music. This was now determined solely by the fear of descending into the drastic.
	‘fear of descending into the drastic’ (superb)
	It was only the great Franz Liszt who fulfilled my desire to hear Bach. Certainly, Bach in particular was also cultivated there; for here, where there was no modern effect or Beethovenian intensity, that joyfully smooth, entirely insipid manner of delivery could seemingly be conveyed particularly well. I once requested a performance of the eighth prelude and fugue from the first part of The Well-Tempered Clavier (E flat minor) from one of the most renowned older musicians and comrades of Mendelssohn […], because this piece had always exercised a particularly magical attraction upon me; I must confess, I had seldom experienced such a shock as I received upon the cordial fulfilment of this request of mine. For there was then certainly no trace of a sinister German Gothic style or any such humbug; on the contrary: under my friend's hands, the piece flowed over the piano with a ‘Greek gaiety’ to such a degree that I was quite speechless at so much harmlessness, and involuntarily saw myself transported into a neo-Hellenic synagogue, from whose musical cult all Old Testament emphasis had been eradicated in the most well-mannered fashion.
	the ‘neo-Hellenic synagogue’.
319:	This aversion [the maxim: ‘under no circumstances any effects’], which, after all, originally merely concealed their own impotence, has now become an indictment of potency, and this indictment draws active force from suspicion and slander. The breeding-ground upon which all this prospers is the poor spirit of German philistinism, of a sense that is caught at the pettiest level of being, and which we have seen also to encompass our musical life.
319:	objectivism as resentment (Nietzsche-like theory. Triebschen?) cf. Newman IV, 337³⁶
321:	Some time ago, a South German newspaper editor accused me of ‘pietistic’ tendencies in my theories on art: the man clearly had no idea what he was saying; he was simply looking for a scathing word. For according to my experience of the nature of pietists, the peculiar nature of this abhorrent sect lies in its striving after what is delightful and seductive in the most insistent fashion, only to repel true delight and seduction after meeting with their ultimate resistance.
321:	‘pietist’ (Wagner himself!)
327:	Nowhere is tempo treated with the right modification in favour of a comprehensible delivery, which must be accounted for with no less certainty than the correct execution of the notes themselves.
	modification in the service of comprehensibility.
	I classified the main tempo of this piece [the Meistersinger prelude] with the indication ‘with very moderate movement’ [sehr mäßig bewegt]; according to the older scheme, this roughly means: Allegro maestoso. No tempo is in greater need of modification than this one, when it is of extended duration and involves a strong episodic treatment of the thematic content, and it is a popular choice for the execution of ‘manifold combinations’ [marginal note by Adorno: ‘that surely means: successively’] of different kinds of motives, because its broad division into regular 4/4 bars supports this execution with great ease through the suggestion of that modification. [The analysis of the Meistersinger prelude continues to page 330.]
	The not quite lucid analysis of the Meistersinger prelude (I have interpreted it).³⁷
334:	We are most profoundly tempted to doubt whether these gentlemen [‘from the general staff of our army of tempo-beaters’] are true musicians: for they clearly exhibit no musical sense at all; but they really hear with great exactitude (namely mathematical exactitude, albeit no ideational exactitude: after all, not everyone encounters the disaster of the wrong orchestral parts!); they have a clear overview, read and play at sight (at least a great many among them); in short, they show true expertise; and their education – in spite of all – is such that can only be afforded to musicians of whom, if one were to deny them this, nothing would remain, or least of all a stimulating person.
334:	mathematical and ideational listening.

231:	When I conducted this wonderful work of music recently, I was struck by various concerns which, relating as they did to something I find so indispensable, namely the clarity of delivery, preoccupied me so intensely that I afterwards sought ways to alleviate the problems I had perceived. I herewith present the results of this to serious-minded musicians, if not as a demand to imitate my methods, then at least as a stimulus for productive reflection thereupon.
	the reason for the modifications is clarity, i.e. the realization of the musical context. Formulation of how the musical conception goes beyond the capabilities of the orchestra, i.e. the construction beyond the sonic material.
	In general, I would like to point out what a peculiar situation Beethoven found himself in regarding the instrumentation of his orchestral works. He orchestrated according to the same assumptions about the capabilities of the orchestra as his predecessors Haydn and Mozart, while in the character of his musical conceptions he went inconceivably far beyond them. That same aspect regarding the separation and grouping of the different instrumental complexes of an orchestra that we can most certainly term tactility had, in the music of Mozart and Haydn, grown into a fixed equivalence of character between their own conceptions and the composition and delivery of the orchestra as it had been developed and cultivated up to that point.
	concept of tactility in distinguishing between instrumental complexes.
232:	In this respect his ‘Sinfonia eroica’ remains not only a miracle of conception, but also no less a miracle of orchestration. Only here, he already imposed a mode of delivery upon the orchestra that it has been unable to master to this day: for the delivery on the part of the orchestra had to be no less brilliant than was the orchestral conception of the master itself. From this point, from the first performance of the ‘Eroica’, therefore, begin the difficulties for an assessment of these symphonies, indeed even hindrances to their enjoyment, the musicians of old never having been quite able to partake of this enjoyment. These works lacked clarity of execution, because the achievement of this clarity was no longer guaranteed, as it was for Haydn and Mozart, by the orchestral organism employed, but could only arise through a musically brilliant performance by each individual instrumentalist and their conductor extending to the point of virtuosity.
232:	objection to the lack of clarity in the instrumental realization of Beethoven's works since the Eroica.
233:	This is the reason, for example, for that demand which became so quintessentially Beethovenian, namely a crescendo that does not culminate in a forte at its highest point, but suddenly switches to piano: this one very common nuance is still so foreign to most of our orchestral players that careful conductors, wishing at least to ensure that the piano appears at the right moment, made it their musicians' duty to reverse the crescendo wisely, giving way to a cautious diminuendo. The true sense of this most difficult of nuances, to be sure, lies in the fact that, here, the same instruments are required to execute something that only becomes entirely clear when it is handed over to different instruments in alternation with one another. Our new composers, who have the richer modern orchestra and its now customary usage at their disposal, know this. These composers would have been able to achieve certain effects intended by Beethoven with greater clarity and without any eccentric demands of virtuosity from the orchestra, simply because a distribution among different instrumental complexes has now become easier.
233:	Main evidence of instrumental construction: the Beethovenian p to be realized only through instrumental division of the melody (this is essentially already the principle of the Schönberg school, probably also through the mediation of Mahler, whose entire orchestration practice could be considered the test of Wagner's study on the 9th).⁴⁵
233f.:	Here [in Beethoven's string quartets], the individual player often has to function as several players, in a certain technical sense, so that an exceptionally well-performed quartet of this later period can frequently create the illusion of hearing, as a close-knit ensemble, more musicians than are actually playing.
	the passage about the illusory aspect of the last quartets.
	This clarity now consists, in my opinion, in nothing other than a drastic emergence of the melody.
	clarity = ‘drastic emergence of the melody’.
235f.:	Admittedly Beethoven sometimes succeeds in giving the woodwind the corresponding effect through the involvement of the brass instruments: yet he was so pitifully restricted in this through the character of natural horns and trumpets, the only possibility known at that time, that precisely the use of these instruments for the reinforcement of the woodwind caused those same misunderstandings that we now view as the seemingly unavoidable prevention of the melody's clear emergence. I need hardly point out the deficiencies of Beethoven's orchestral instrumentation touched on here to the musician of today, for he can easily avoid them through the now widespread use of chromatic brass instruments; I will only confirm that Beethoven was forced to let the brass instruments break off suddenly in distant keys, or to disturb the music with shrill single notes, being all they could offer at that time, and thus distract from both the melody and the harmony.
235f.:	criticism of natural brass and structural necessity of retouching.
237:	With time, however, regarding the most disruptive participation of the trumpets in the first forte of the second movement of the A major Symphony, I ultimately decided upon an energetic remedy. Here, I let the two trumpets, which should, as Beethoven quite rightly felt, be playing, but were prevented from doing so in the necessary fashion by their simple construction at that time, intone the complete theme in unison with the clarinets. This had such a splendid effect that none of the listeners sensed a loss, only a gain, which for its part was not even perceived as an innovation or a change.
237:	the – apologetic – passage on gain and loss of retouching.
238:	[Wagner discusses the second subject of the Scherzo from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, bars 93ff., which is left to the woodwind.] The support they receive in this from the brass instruments [horns in D and B flat] is, as described earlier, such that the fragmentary incorporation of natural overtones does far more to impair than to increase the clarity of the theme. I challenge any musician to state with a clear conscience that he has ever heard this melody clearly in orchestral performances, indeed, whether he would even know it if not from reading the score or playing it at the piano? In our customary orchestral performances, one does not even seem to have resorted to the most obvious measure, that of considerably damping the strings' ff, for as often as I met with musicians for this symphony, everything collided with the most furious power at this point.
238:	‘impairment of the clarity of the theme through the fragmentary incorporation of natural overtones’.
239:	Experience never confirmed my assumption, however, or only very inadequately, for the woodwind instruments were always expected to produce an incisive energy of tone that will always, at least in the sense of the arrangement found here [in the second subject of the Scherzo of the 9th], go against their character. If I had to perform this symphony once more, I am certain that I would know of no other remedy to the undeniable evil of this most energetic dance motive's disappearance in indistinction, if not inaudibility, than to specify a quite particular thematic involvement at least of the four horns.
	[16]
	the way Wagner's theory grows ever further: the woodwind's absolute lack of ‘incisive energy’ as an intrinsic contradiction between classical instrumentation and musical content.
240:	One should now test whether the reinforcement of the notes of the theme implied here [see the citation in the preceding note] is sufficient to allow the quintet of string instruments to carry out the accompanying figure in the ff indicated by the master, which is most crucial at this point, for Beethoven's intention here is quite unmistakably the same boisterously joyful one that leads, upon the return of the movement's main theme in D minor, to such an incomparably wild excess as could only be expressed by the most original inventions of this unique, wonderful artist. I therefore already considered it a very poor remedy to assist the emergence of the wind instruments through a restraining of the strings, as this would only dilute the wild character of the passage beyond recognition. My final advice is therefore to reinforce the woodwind theme, even through the trumpets, as far as necessary for it to emerge clearly in the correct, powerful sense and achieve dominance, even with the most energetic fortissimo in the strings.
	in favour of Beethoven's ‘wild excesses’. (ad Berlioz)⁴⁶
	retouching for wildness (technification and archaism). (NB the dialectic of enlightenment is much more complicated than we have so far shown.)
241:	When making such decisions, the question is whether, listening to a similar work of music, one prefers not to perceive the composer's intentions for a while, or rather to have the expedient means to do them justice.
241:	Wagner's law of retouching, admittedly in the sense of representational theory (the composer's intentions), yet still formulated in terms of ‘clarity’.
245:	I can thus not recall ever having heard the start of the Eighth Symphony (in F) without being disturbed in my recognition of the theme through the unthematic addition of the oboe and the flute above the clarinet's melodic song in the sixth, seventh and eighth bars; whereas the flutes' preceding involvement in the first four bars, despite also not being exactly thematic, did not impair an understanding of the melody, as this was presented with such powerful clarity by the great numbers of violins.
245:	the very sound objection to the instrumentation of the opening of the 8th Symphony. (NB it would be possible to critique the instrumentation at the start of the development of the 9th, which indeed demands the neo-German orchestra, which then always imitated this passage, as also the coda.)⁴⁷
246:	It would be rather too daring, and would not seem appropriate to the character of Beethovenian orchestration, whose justified peculiarities we must certainly pay attention to, if one were to omit the flute entirely here [9th Symphony, first movement, bar 138 et seq.], or employ it solely for reinforcement as a unison doubling of the oboe.
246:	the element of caution in retouching, very good passage. NB the passage with the tied semiquavers still sounds incomprehensible.
251:	If we duly consider how important it is for every musical utterance that the melody, though the composer's art might allow it to manifest itself only in its smallest fragments, should keep us enthralled at all times, and that the correctness of this melodic language should in no way be second to the logical correctness of the conceptual thoughts expressed in verbal language, without confusing us in the same way that an incomprehensible sentence does, then we must recognize that nothing merits the most careful effort more than the attempt to remove any lack of clarity in a passage, a bar, even a note in the musical utterance directed at us by a genius such as that of Beethoven […].
251:	main passage on the connection between the categories ‘musical language’ – expression – clarity. Transformation of the subjective-mimetic desideratum into the objective-constructive.
252:	interpretation and insight: one should not ‘pass hastily over a single bar of a tone poem like Beethoven's without clear awareness of it’.
253:	Even with the most careful observance of the instructions thus given, however, one will be unable to avoid the worst consequences of misunderstanding the master's intentions in the passages that return in the last part of the same movement, as the dynamic discrepancy between the instrumental complexes alternating here increases the difficulty of a remedy through delicate treatment of the required nuances to the point of impossibility. This applies first of all to the opening two bars of the similar passage on p. 47 of the score [= bars 359–60 of the first movement of the 9th Symphony], where the first violin is immediately called upon to perform a crescendo together with all the strings, and the clarinet, following on in the corresponding manner, is unable to continue this crescendo with the suitable strength and intensity: here I had to decide on a complete abandonment of the crescendo for the first two bars […].
253:	problem of dynamic proportion and instrumental colour (ad unity of musical elements).
255ff.:	For the very reason I have mentioned as informing all my efforts towards a truthful clarification of the master's intentions, I must finally also discuss an extremely difficult passage for the four solo voices, where it was only after many years of experience that I was able to locate the problem depriving this otherwise so beautifully crafted passage of a truly satisfactory effect in every performance. This is the final passage for the solo voices at the end of the symphony, the famous B major: ‘wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt’ [bars 836–41]. […] The obstacle preventing a pure and beautiful effect in this movement, which can only be overcome through radical measures, lies in the tenor part, which on the one hand impairs the clarity of the overall effect through an untimely figuration, but on the other hand faces an inevitably laborious task whose demands it cannot, according to every rule of correct breathing, meet without being caught in an alarming struggle. If we examine the passage more closely, we observe how, following the entry of the second-inversion chord and the new key signature of B major, the tenor's captivating melodic material dissolves into a figural motion in the soprano, which, alternately moving downwards, is continued with free imitation by alto, tenor and finally bass. If we leave out the parts that merely accompany this melodic motion, we find the master's intention expressed clearly in the following manner:


	Now, however, the tenor echoes, already upon its second entry, the complete figural motion of the alto in sixths and thirds [= bar 837], through which its subsequent entry, with the continuation of the melody in the third bar [= bar 838], loses not only its meaning but also its effect upon the ear, whose attention it had previously drawn towards itself, and which now misses the stimulation which the reappearance of the soprano's melismatic figures in the tenor is supposed to provide. But not only the fact that the master's melodic intention has thus become unclear, rather also the fact that the tenor cannot master the two figured bars in succession with the security he would doubtless have if he only had to sing the figure in the second bar harms the effect of this magnificent passage. I therefore decided, after long deliberation, henceforth to spare the tenor the difficult figuration that precedes his main entry as an echo of the alto voice, allocating to him only its principal harmonic pitches; according to which he would then sing as follows:

	I am convinced that every tenor who formerly had to torment himself fruitlessly with this passage as long as he had to sing this instead

	will be very grateful to me, and now render all the more beautifully the melodic motion that truly suits him, to which I would advise him to lend the following dynamic nuance

	in order fully to master its correct expression.

238	‘presumed’. We will reach the conclusion in our representation of the music of antiquity by discussing, at least in short, the nature of Greek musical notation, and seeking to develop an idea of its presumed development.
	pitch intervals The coupling of all the symbols in vocal notation with their equivalents in instrumental notation, and additionally in scale charts that leave no doubts as to the pitch intervals, makes the task of transcribing the ancient notations into our own system as easy as one could possibly wish.
	instrumental notation older than vocal notation The unanimous result of the different studies found in the books in this field that were published around the same time (Fr. Bellermann, ‘Die Tonleitern und Musiknoten der Griechen’ [The Scales and Musical Notation of the Greeks] 1847 and K. Fortlage, ‘Das musikalische System der Griechen in seiner Urgestalt’ [The Musical System of the Greeks in its Original Form] 1847) is that the vocal notation was evidently calculated according to the relationships of the enharmonic tone-system to begin with, whereas the instrumental notation seems instead to have been adapted to this system after the fact, originally having not an enharmonic but rather a diatonic basis. From this, one must naturally conclude that the instrumental notation, or at least elements thereof, is older than the vocal notation.
219	[26]
	‘exploitation of the notation's appearance for heightened aesthetic effects’. Westphal is also mistaken in claiming (op. cit., p. 80) that until Bach's day faster pieces of music were written with smaller note-values, slower pieces with longer ones; but it was already the change in style around 1600, with the introduction of tempo indications such as Allegro, Adagio etc., that brought an exploitation of the notation's appearance for heightened aesthetic effects (rushing semibreves and minims, restrained quavers and semiquavers etc.), not only the time after Bach.
	cf. the entire passage.
	rhythmic notation according to ‘feet’ This [the fact that ‘Aristoxenos already envisaged, just as we do today, the ordinary beat as the real foundation of rhythm’] is certain from the distinctions between monopodic, dipodic and tripodic, tetrapodic and pentapodic verse-formations, where 2, 3, 4 or 5 separate feet are joined together, and each individual foot becomes a beat.
4	Connection between the origin of music and sport etc. For the Greeks, not only poetry, music and mime or dance formed a close unity; bodily force and skill also appeared to them in the light of artistic perfection.
5	‘andreia’ They thus attained virile seriousness () both through music and by developing their bodies, and for their martial training they moved according to the rhythm of a song ( ).
	the best dancer supposedly the best warrior (attributed to Socrates) The statement by Socrates cited in that very place [in the ‘Deipnosophists’ of Athenaeus, written at the start of the third century ad], namely that the best dancer would also be the best warrior, indeed becomes comprehensible through this explanation.
	NB the Greek artistic relationship to violence mirrors the origin of the artistic in the same.
8	There is already a Greek science of delivery:⁶⁹
	^¸Eζαγγελτικόν⁷⁰ [exangeltikon]
	the use of facial expressions as [hypokritike], that is to say acting, alongside singing and instrumental performance.
9	Riemann denies facial expressions the status of musical elements. In the sense of the stricter separation between the arts that we have today, the play of facial expressions (as mime and dance) does not belong to music in the strict sense any more than poetry – in fact, even less. For while language doubtless still contains certain musical elements in its musical sound, we cannot say the same of the facial expressions, which speak only to the eye.
31	the possibility that neumes arose from cheironomy, i.e. the conductor's hand-movements. It is even conceivable that neumic notation is itself of Greek origin, having developed from cheironomy, the hand-movements of the choral conductor of antiquity, who directed the melodic movement and the corresponding movements of the chorus.
31	Cf. II, 84.⁷¹ As early as 1889, six years before the first volume of the ‘Neumenstudien’ [by Oskar Fleischer] was published, Dom Mocquereau gave the third chapter of the introductory study on the facsimile edition of the Codex 390 from St Gallen the heading ‘Notation oratoire ou chironomique’, and referred to the close connection between gestures and the raising or lowering of the voice, […] describes the accents as a way of tracing the outline of the pitch movement (‘pictographie’), and also places clear emphasis on the fact that in the Middle Ages, in both the Greek and the Roman church, the conductor's hand-movements were used to suggest the raising and lowering of the melody and, at the same time, the rhythm and the tempo, thus directing the chorus in a clear fashion.

Ad Dorian22

On Richard Wagner's ‘Über das Dirigieren’ [On Conducting] (G.S. 8, p. 261ff)32