Fakta og fiksjon i barokk oppførelsepraksis

En historiografisk studie i fortolkningens kunst

Abstract

Do performers of early music really know what they are doing? Or do we - musicians, researchers and listeners alike - take fully into account how our concern for musical history create ever-new versions of it? Probably not, is this contribution to an answer, Facts and fiction in baroque performance practice. A historiographic study of the art of interpretation If this holds true, it might be worthwhile considering a seemingly contradictory point of view, manifest in the the historical performance movement and its striving for authenticity. The point of this essay is to reconsider the aims and results of the historical performance movement, where regarded as a play of the contemporary creative sensibility upon the past. After a brief historical survey, spanning from Wanda Landowska, Arnold Dolmetsch via Thurston Dart and up to representatives from the vogue for historical performance in the 70s and 80s, the movement as a whole is interpreted as part of a widespanning framentisation of the classicai-romantic tradition, manifest since the emergence of modernism.
Tendencies to seek the past as refuge are dismissed as uninteresting, as the essay focuses on the work of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt. Thus, it becomes
clear that a thorough knowledge of how to play early music implies a thorough knowledge of the rhetorics and aesthetics of the times in question. Working with problems
of performance, we find ourselves confronted with the task of reconstructing past meanings; from a hermeneutic point of view an impossible task that nevertheless results
in powerful and creative re-interpretations rather than faithful reconstructions.
The ideal of authenticity is shown to be another word for interpretation, unfolding
within a contemporary context and sharing with interpretation in general the illusions
of the intentioned work, discrete from its reproductions as an ultimate goal. The fantasmatic ideal of the original version is relegated to the fictitous realm of the not-yet
investigated, along with manifest hermeneutic illusions in contemporary musicology.
Tradition deconstructed and history recreated, by contemporary subjects expressing something new, are what remains.