Interpreting Bach Today – the revolution of historically informed performance in the 20th century and beyond

Théo Amon
May 9
6 min read

The search for authenticity in the interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries led 20th century musicians and researchers to delve into treatises and documents from the Baroque era, creating a movement that became known as HIP (historically informed performance).

This is the third text in our series "Interpreting Bach", dedicated to the "historically informed" performance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The series was written by Théo Amon, a translator and literary critic passionate about classical music, at the request of the Bach Society Brazil.

Summary

If the 19th century romanticized Bach, the 20th century sought to restore him. Starting in the 1950s, a group of musicians and researchers started a revolutionary movement: historically informed performance (sometimes abbreviated as HIP ). The central idea of this movement was to recreate the sonority and interpretative approach of the Baroque, using original instruments or replicas, following performance instructions written in historical treatises and reviving forgotten techniques. Names such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt , Gustav Leonhardt and Frans Brüggen led this change, radically transforming the way we listen to Bach today. With modernizations and new discoveries, this is the type of work that the Bach Society Brazil promotes in its physical and virtual events.

The beginning of the search for authenticity

In the previous post, I outlined a list of 19th and early 20th century performers who made a name for themselves playing Bach. But how did they play him? On instruments from their own time, those of the performers, and with the instrumental technique they had learned from the rich 19th century pedagogical tradition. And this, of course, had been conceived and propagated with modern instruments and classical-romantic music in mind.

For the harpsichord, for example, we can even speak of two instruments: the baroque harpsichord, like the one we hear at Bach Society concerts, and another, a “pseudo-harpsichord” — a monster with a metal structure, sets of extra strings tuned in lower octaves for a cavernous reinforcement of the sound, plectrums (the clamps that pinch the strings when a key is pressed) made of different materials from the baroque quill pens, and many other differences.

The curious can check it out for themselves: listen to this interpretation by Wanda Landowska, on one of the romantic harpsichords I described, playing the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major BWV 876 from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Totally different from what we hear in a faithful replica of a baroque harpsichord here at Bach Brasil, right?

Technical details that make all the difference

This didn't just happen with the harpsichord, of course. All the instruments that a baroque orchestra has in common with a modern one have changed enormously in the last three hundred or so years. And with this material change, something else has changed: the performer's technique .

Baroque musical language had a different diction, rhetoric, and “accent” than the more widespread classical repertoire (say, a Tchaikovsky , or even a Beethoven ). The “gestures,” the small groups of successive notes that, when added together, make up a melodic phrase (to make a bad comparison: the parts that make up a long spoken or written phrase, full of parentheses, subordinate clauses, adjuncts, appositives, vocatives, etc.), were smaller and denser. Thus, a passage that a “romantic” violinist would prefer to play in a single bow (the pulling of the bow, either downward or upward, to rub the violin strings and make them emit sound), a violinist in tune with the baroque way of making music would prefer to divide it into more than one bow. By doing so, he is able to better distribute emphasis, separate the essential from the accessory, perhaps even linger a little on a more prominent note and then shorten the next, less important note in the musical discourse. The result is a more intricate musical discourse , giving a more complex impression of a composer who “speaks” directly to each person, rather than addressing a crowd in a generic manner.

Listen to these two interpretations of the Allemande from Partita No. 2 in D minor BWV 1004 for solo violin and draw your own conclusions: here on baroque violin played by Marcio Ceconello, in a recording by the Bach Society Brazil.

And here in a rather romanticized interpretation by Itzhak Perlman.

The HIP movement: historically informed performance

But how do today's performers know how music was played in 1715 ? Nobody knows for sure: what we can do is deduce, especially from the Baroque treatises , that is, the large books on musical theory and practice that were written at the time.

Manuals such as the Instructional Essay on Playing the Transverse Flute (1752), by the flautist and composer Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773), or the Essay on the True Manner of Playing the Keyboard (1753-62), by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), provide precise descriptions of fingering details, posture, exercises, ornaments, interpretation and emotive aspects, playing tempo and much more. Illustrative tables, excerpts from scores and even entire compositions, published as appendices, served to guide the apprentice's training away from the master, as in today's distance learning. However, the most decisive distance ended up being not spatial, but temporal — because it is thanks to these and countless other written works, when studied together with a detailed examination of musical works, that today's musicians are able to reproduce what music composed three centuries ago sounded like.

Cover of the treatise by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, published between 1753 and 1762 — Capa do tratado de Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, publicado entre 1753 e 1762, que aborda a técnica e interpretação do teclado no contexto barroco.

Of course, these books, which were important at the time, gradually went out of circulation. This happened as a consequence of the evolution of musical aesthetics and the instruments themselves, which have changed a lot since then, as we have already explained. But a great deal of archivist work — rescuing these ancient works from obscure libraries, deciphering their obsolete language, republishing and translating this entire collection, and implementing the teachings in teaching, recording, and live performance — was initiated by a generation of great musicians from the 1940s and 1950s onwards, such as Ralph Kirkpatrick , Helmut Walcha , Karl Richter , Gustav Leonhardt , Nikolaus Harnoncourt , Frans Brüggen , the Kuijken brothers and many others).

They were also helped by a talented generation of luthiers and other instrument makers who resurrected to active musical life the original instruments of the Baroque period (those that survived time or the reforms we have already mentioned) or built faithful replicas of them. In addition, there was a historical recovery of the sound conception, the specific discourse and the socio-artistic practices of that time.

To give an extreme example: there is a complete recording of Bach's sacred cantatas, conducted by Leonhardt and Harnoncourt, which, so orthodox in its ambition to recreate exactly what would have been heard at the time, entrusts the high parts of the vocal section to boys, and not to women, who in certain cults were not allowed to perform in church! Listen to the result here .

All this complex of efforts, by conquering its place in conservatories and universities, on the concert circuit and in album recordings, ended up consolidating itself in the aspect that we call historically informed performance . It is exercised with great dedication and talent by the musicians of the Bach Society Brazil and its guest soloists, those who provide the exquisite musical evenings that our supporters and audience already know (and that you can check out in the extensive series of Bach Brazil videos on YouTube ) .

Conclusion: The search continues

Of course, we can never be absolutely certain about how certain aspects of the complex whole that results in the music we hear were produced around 1700. Some points in particular, such as pitch (at how many Hertz of frequency did the note A vibrate, which is used as a reference to tune all the others?) and the metronomic quantity of the tempos (how many beats per minute are implied in a speed indication such as Allegro molto ?), are especially obscure or vague. However, as we have already explained, we can try to get quite close to the historical truth based on written records, original instruments that escaped the mutilations we have already mentioned, artistic representations of another nature (pictorial, literary) that portray the musical making of that era, and also on more or less probable inferences and conjectures that can be drawn when all this vast material is coordinated. And this is the work that the Bach Society seeks to promote and that the concerts of the Bach Brasil series bring to its friends.