Let's Rescue Poor Schumann From

His Rescuers
By Richard Taruskin
May 17, 1998
New York Times May 17, 1998, Section 2, Page 30

DON'T look now, but Robert Schumann is being rescued again. This time the
deliverers are John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique,
his period-instrument ensemble, performing the four numbered ''canonical''
symphonies, plus the early unfinished one in G minor (in somebody's eclectic
conflation of its two extant sources); the original 1841 version of the Fourth; the
Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the ''Konzertstuck'' in F for four horns and
orchestra, all in a three-CD Archiv set (457 591-2).

It happens about as regularly as El Nino. Some conductor suddenly realizes that

Schumann was not the hopeless bumbler we thought he was, but was rather a good
composer, actually. All we have to do is trust him. In the 60's it was Leonard
Bernstein. ''Mr. Bernstein has faith in the rightness of Schumann's own
instrumentation,'' the jackets of the New York Philharmonic's recordings proclaimed.
They gave listeners a chance -- nay, ''the unique opportunity'' -- to hear the music
''just as Schumann left it, unburdened with the usual revisions designed to 'correct'
the composer's reputed deficiencies as an orchestrator.''

In the 50's it was George Szell, who promoted his Cleveland Orchestra set with an
essay in these very pages announcing that ''Schumann's symphonies can be a thrilling
experience to both performers and audiences if Schumann's case is stated clearly and
convincingly through the proper style of interpretation.'' Szell acknowledged
Schumann's ''inability to establish proper balances,'' admonishing further that ''this
can and must be helped with all means known to any professional conductor who
professes to be a cultured and style-conscious musician.'' Retouching, however, must
be applied with ''much soul-searching and discrimination.''

Gustav Mahler (who had not yet been canonized but was about to be) took some
ritual lumps. He had made ''a most unfortunate mistake'' by resorting to ''wholesale
reorchestration'' of the symphonies, in perpetrating which he ''adulterates the
character of these works by wrapping them in a meretricious garb of sound
completely alien to their nature and, in some instances, even goes so far as to change
the music itself.''

Szell's own amendments covered ''the whole range from subtle adjustment of
dynamic marks to the radical surgery of reorchestrating whole stretches'' (as distinct,
somehow, from ''wholesale reorchestration''), but this was not mentioned on the
record jackets. Instead, in a move that anticipated by decades the claims of Early
Music maestros today, the emphasis was placed on hardware. ''Listeners may note
the unusually mellow trumpet sound,'' the sleeve note suggested. ''Known as
'Austrian trumpets,' the instruments used here are of wide bore and have rotary
valves.''
Now come Mr. Gardiner and his band, elevating the rhetoric still higher. ''The general
view is that Schumann was a gifted amateur who could not orchestrate,'' the
conductor has been telling interviewers.

In the booklet, he writes about removing ''the false patina of late-Romantic orchestral
sonorities which is totally alien to Schumann's esthetic and ideals,'' maintaining that
any problem conductors have had with Schumann within living memory ''simply
evaporates in an accomplished period performance.'' By reducing the orchestra to the
size ''for which Schumann had assiduously fashioned his symphonies,'' by restoring
the right ''bowing styles, phrasing and articulation, as well as the spatial deployment
of the musicians (with violins and violas standing for symphonies, as was the custom
then in Leipzig),'' one dispels the ''web of myth'' and reveals Schumann as he really
was, ''an intuitively able and imaginative composer for the orchestra of his day.''

Stuff and nonsense, every word. By now it is easy to see what performers are really
seeking when they noisily side with the composer against critics real or imagined
(including ''practical critics,'' like Mahler) and presume to speak on his behalf. They
are seeking authority (code name: ''authenticity'') and privilege. ''Criticize me, and
you're no friend of Schumann'' is the threatening implication. L'auteur, c'est moi.

This is an old ventriloquists' ploy, and now, of course, it is especially rife among early-
musickers. ''What do you think Bach would say if he were here?'' the harpsichordist
Davitt Moroney asked a student at a master class in Berkeley, Calif., not long ago,
immediately casting himself as Edgar Bergen to old Sebastian's Charlie McCarthy.
Hand on heart, I swear and depose that the first thing Mr. Moroney's Bach puppet
wanted to know was, ''What edition are you using?''

It's not always that risible, but the position is always false, and in the case of
Schumann its mendacity goes right to the first assumption, that the composer needs
defenders. Well over a century ago, in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, the great German scholar Philipp Spitta wrote that
''Schumann's symphonies may without injustice be considered as the most important
which have been written since Beethoven.'' Surely few today would disagree that they
were the most important Classical-style symphonies to appear between Beethoven's
and Brahms's.

Nor were Mahler's interventions the arbitrary vandalism that Szell, and now Mr.
Gardiner in his booklet, have alleged. They did not amount to a whole new score, just
retouchings and (in particular) textural thinnings that Mahler marked in his
performance scores and had copied into the players' parts. They were never
published, but the scores and parts have been available on rental from Universal
Edition since Mahler's time, and have even been recorded (by Aldo Ceccato and the
Bergen Philharmonic on two Bis CD's). Their lightening effect is actually quite similar
to what Mr. Gardiner achieves with his period band.

So the ''general view'' Mr. Gardiner cites is his own little web of myth. If Schumann's
reputation as a symphonist ever suffered an eclipse, it was during the period from the
1850's to the 1870's, when, under pressure from Liszt, Wagner and the so-called
''New Germans,'' the symphony itself briefly suffered one. It was Brahms who rescued
Schumann, not Bernstein or Szell, let alone the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et
Romantique.
BUT revolutionary? Romantic? Prim and perky would be more like it. The tradition
that feeds Mr. Gardiner's approach to Schumann is that of 20th-century modernism
and nothing earlier. If these were really ''period'' performances, they would be awash
in tempo rubato, string portamento and other practices of which Mr. Gardiner, as a
20th-century musician, heartily disapproves. Not that his tempos are completely
inflexible. He even lets his strings slide ever so gingerly through large slurred
intervals (as in the introduction to the Overture, Scherzo and Finale). But these are
grudging, chary concessions to ''performance practice,'' not the joyful recovery of
forgotten lore that they might have been. And that is because the ''false patina'' Mr.
Gardiner deplores was the historical reality. His attempt to scrub it away could not be
more anachronistic.

This really should not bother anyone. Remaking the classics is the only way to keep
them alive. The trouble is that the bright, fresh, delightfully clean and clear-textured
if somewhat top-heavy sonority Mr. Gardiner elicits from his band is rarely matched
by any comparable novelty in interpretation. Tempos, to begin with what is
objectively testable, are almost always what we're used to, not what Schumann
prescribed with his metronome. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. At least one
of Schumann's metronome settings, for the finale of the Second Symphony, is
generally conceded to be unplayable, and it is not attempted here. But falling back on
the modern consensus hardly validates a claim to the composer's authority.

In the First Symphony, Mr. Gardiner's tempos are fully in accord with those listed
two decades ago by Brian Schlotel, an English scholar, in a useful survey of
midcentury recordings, including Szell's. As in most of the others, Mr. Gardiner's first
movement is faster than Schumann's, his second movement slower, and the finale
much faster. The speeds of the scherzo and the first trio in the third movement,
unlike those Schumann notated but like most of the ones Mr. Schlotel calibrated, are
in a simple proportional relationship: two beats of scherzo equal three of trio.

The Boston conductor David Epstein, in his recent book ''Shaping Time,'' claims that
the pleasure we take in proportional tempos is ''natural'' and that music in repertory
inevitably slips into such relationships over time, making them ''traditional.'' That
sort of tradition, Mr. Epstein suggests, is what keeps repertories alive. But the period-
performance movement is founded, at least in theory, on resistance to socially
mediated tradition, what Mr. Gardiner so sneeringly calls the ''patina.'' (So is
modernist music-making, of course, beginning with Mahler's famous battle cry
equating tradition with sloppiness.) Should he not practice what he preaches, or else
stop preaching?

His performances differ noticeably from traditional ones only in the niceties of timbre
and balance. And nice niceties they are. But are they enough? In the ''Konzertstuck''
for four horns, they certainly are. The soloist's opening riff is hair-raising, almost
worth the price of the album. Ditto the early version of the Fourth Symphony. The
lightness of the orchestration contrasts all the more tellingly, in Mr. Gardiner's
hands, with the dark, thickly laden version that we know, making the latter's sterner,
even somewhat dingy coloration (the result of massive doubling of lines) seem less a
miscalculation and more a deliberately struck, Beethovenian ''D minor'' attitude.

Mr. Gardiner's chief reason for preferring the earlier version is different, though, and
symptomatic: the original audience found it baffling. To a modernist that reaction is a
plus. To Schumann it was a reason to revise. The revision was successful in that it was
well received. To Mr. Gardiner, however, Schumann's success smacked of
compromise, ''as though he was willfully expunging some of the more audacious
features of the original, replacing them with something safer but, in the process, more
commonplace.'' Yet anyone listening to the original version who knows the standard
one will miss the thematic recalls in the finale, which occurred to Schumann only as
he was revising. They are something added, not expunged, and they are the opposite
of commonplace.

In the canonical symphonies, as opposed to the novelty items, there is as much loss as
gain in Mr. Gardiner's performances; and what is lost, unfortunately, has a lot to do
with why the symphonies are loved (that is, why they have become canonical and
familiar). Arguing against foolproofing the scores, Mr. Schlotel put it this way: ''The
sense of striving for high ideals, which the symphonies communicate, is in a way
echoed by the orchestra striving for effect in those passages that are difficult to bring
off.''

In other words, there is an ethical dimension, endemic to the Romantic concept of

art, that is lost from the sleek sound-surface that modern performers -- and period
performers, paradoxically, most of all -- have fetishized. The really crucial and
compelling aspects of Romantic music are precisely what is undreamt of in their
philosophy.

THE upshot, simply, is that Mr. Gardiner's ''esthetic and ideals'' are very different
from Schumann's. And why not? He's entitled. And we are equally entitled to prefer
his brisk Lipton-tea approach to the music if, like him, we are leery of anything
stronger. His performances are full of charming details (my favorite: the articulation
of the woodwind accents in the second theme from the opening movement of the
First Symphony). And like many scrupulous period bands, the Orchestre
Revolutionnaire et Romantique is much more alert to dynamics than are most
standard orchestras today, which is also a pleasure.

But to the odious claim of privilege he has alleged, Mr. Gardiner and his band are
manifestly not entitled. Its dishonesty diminishes them. It taints their excellent
musicianship with charlatanry. They really ought to give it up.