Historically Informed Performance - Issues

Issues

Some motivations for historically informed performance are.

• Historically informed instruments, in association with a historically informed playing technique, offer a balance of musical elements, such as timbre contrast and contrapuntal clarity, that differs from non-informed performances.
• Such balance is structural to the agogic and idiomatic constituents of the culture surrounding the composer, no less important in delivering the musical content than the culture surrounding the listener.
• Incorporating in the performance cultural elements of the composer, as opposed to omitting them in total favour of the listener's culture, results in a stronger and deeper performance rendition.

As in literature, where early poetry or prose can be accessed both through the original text and through a paraphrase or a metaphrase in modern language in the performing arts, historical respondence may be of difficult implementation, both practically (how do we do it?) and conceptually (what meaning and function should be attributed to aesthetic elements that have evolved?). Prior to audio and video recording, no direct record of performing arts survives. Opinions on the implications of the aforementioned motivations and on how they should translate into criteria for historically informed performance vary.

Even within the early music revival, awareness of the pitfalls was clear. Though championing the need (for example in his editorship of Scarlatti sonatas) for a thoroughly-informed approach, not least in understanding as fully as possible a composer's actual wishes and intentions in their historical context, Ralph Kirkpatrick, while pioneering the harpsichord rediscovery, highlights the risk of using historical exoterism to hide technical incompetence: "too often historical authenticity can be used as a means of escape from any potentially disquieting observance of esthetic values, and from the assumption of any genuine artistic responsibility. The abdication of esthetic values and artistic responsibilities can confer a certain illusion of simplicity on what the passage of history has presented to us, bleached as white as bones on the sands of time."

Yet, the acceptance of the concept is rapidly evolving. Today, performing an Early Baroque opera, such as Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo without, at the very least, full historical awareness, would be inconceivable.

Classical recording producer Michael Sartorius writes: "While the debate on authenticity in baroque performance will continue, certain essential characteristics should be present, if the performance is to reflect the true baroque spirit."