Clive Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performance Practice, 1750–1900 first appeared in 1999 and quickly became a standard reference work for historical performance studies, cited and used by musicologists and performers alike. The book established itself as a cornerstone: a foundational reference text whose empirical precision anchored the still-forming field of nineteenth-century performance-practice research. Over the past decades conductors from Roger Norrington to Kent Nagano and performer/researchers from Neal Peres da Costa to David Milsom and Kate Bennet Wadsworth have expanded upon and put into practice the book’s findings.Footnote ¹ Drawing on a mountain of written evidence – treatises, reviews, correspondence, manuscripts and early editions of scores – Brown offered an unprecedented synthesis of how performers from the time of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) through Antonin Dvořák (1873–1904) might have approached the expressive and technical parameters of the musical repertoire in performance.

A quarter-century later, Brown’s mammoth second edition (2025) represents not a simple revision but an act of renewal and recontextualization. The field that the first edition helped to define has evolved considerably. In the intervening years, attention to early recordings, performer individuality, and the social embeddedness of musical practice has reframed what it means to study ‘performance practice’. While Brown’s empirical approach remains deeply rooted in documentary evidence, his engagement with early sound recordings and his more flexible understanding of notational prescription signal an awareness of this shifting landscape.

The new edition opens with an assertion that could serve as its methodological manifesto. The purpose of the book, Brown tells us, is:

This statement encapsulates the volume’s enduring aim. Brown’s careful distinction between what composers notated and the way performances might actually have sounded remains central to his argument. Yet the revised work goes further, suggesting that ‘there may well be scope for a more adventurous approach to the interpretation of late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century notation’ (p. 6, second edition).

Such a phrase carries quiet significance. For all his empiricism, Brown has never been an advocate of mechanical literalism; his aim has always been to demonstrate that the written score functioned as a prompt for interpretative intelligence. The second edition sharpens this position, suggesting that historically informed performance involves not simply the recovery of facts but an understanding of how historical musicians treated those facts imaginatively.

This review examines three interrelated developments in the second edition: Brown’s more systematic integration of early recordings as primary evidence; his increasingly flexible approach to notation as a historically situated prompt rather than prescription; and his expanded treatment of performer agency in ornamentation, tempo modification and expressive nuance. Together, these revisions signal not merely an update but a methodological evolution that reflects – and in some ways anticipates – broader disciplinary shifts in performance studies.

To appreciate the magnitude of the revision, it is worth recalling what made the first edition so foundational. Published at a time when ‘authenticity’ debates still raged in the field of early music, Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performance Practice turned the discussion toward the nineteenth century, a period then often caricatured as on the one hand espousing the beginning of modern, literalist execution, and on the other as a font of excessive performer-centred virtuosity and emotionalism. His achievement lay in demonstrating that nineteenth-century performers shared with their eighteenth-century predecessors a culture of flexibility, nuance and individuality. Indeed, Brown’s first edition was encyclopaedic. Its meticulous footnotes, exhaustive quotations and dense cross-referencing mapped a landscape of practice that included articulation, ornamentation, bowing, vibrato, portamento, tempo modification and expressive nuance. His conviction that notation ‘was viewed as indicative rather than prescriptive’ overturned modern assumptions of textual fixity (p. 713, second edition). The book’s influence extended beyond musicology as performers sought to use it as both a scholarly reference and a practical handbook. Yet the very strengths of Brown’s first edition also defined its limitations. Its hefty accumulation of data left little room for interpretive speculation or for comparative weighting between conflicting sources. Brown often treated much of the documentary evidence as equally representative, even when national, institutional or personal contexts might have affected their applicability. Moreover, the first edition relied heavily on written documents – treatises, pedagogical manuals and letters – while giving limited attention to early recordings, which in 1999 were less readily accessible but are now recognized as essential witnesses to both mid- and late-nineteenth-century performance styles.

Despite these caveats, the first edition remains one of the most influential single-author studies of historical performance in print. Its authority stems not from dogma but from labour: a lifetime of archival investigation distilled into a reference work that has shaped the assumptions of a generation of performer/researchers. The new edition does not displace this achievement but rather expands upon it, refining its argumentation and greatly extending its evidence base.

The second edition preserves the overall architecture of its predecessor but significantly reorganizes and supplements many sections. The chapters on accentuation, articulation and tempo from the first edition remain largely intact, although the previous musical examples have been replaced by scans of primary source materials. This change, while seemingly cosmetic, strengthens Brown’s argument that notation must be understood as historically situated. Seeing the typography, engraving and layout of period sources reminds the reader that interpretation begins with the physical act of reading music, as nineteenth-century performers did. These images of original primary sources add vividness, although sometimes at the cost of visual clarity; several of the scans are faint or cramped, requiring close scrutiny on the part of the reader.

Brown also devotes individual chapters to such issues as articulation and string bowing; tempo modification; improvised ornamentation and embellishment; asynchrony, arpeggiation and flexible rhythm; sliding effects; and trembling effects. His treatment particularly of string articulation has been clarified and expanded: he argues that ‘Most period instrument string players … assume a pronounced degree of non-legato for separately bowed notes in Baroque and Classical repertoire … In many of the contexts where this is commonly used, it undoubtedly runs counter to the expectations of the composer … [and is] unsupported by documentary evidence’ (p. 227, second edition). The ramifications for ensembles and pedagogues working in this repertoire are considerable, potentially requiring a wholesale reassessment of the articulation choices that have become virtually unquestioned in both historically informed and mainstream spheres.

Brown’s earlier discussion of ‘heavy and light performance’ – the historical practice of varying accentuation and articulation to create dynamic contrast within phrases – has been reorganized and integrated into his broader discussion on phrasing and bowing, clarifying how these techniques functioned within performance aesthetics (p. 627, first edition; p. 257, second edition).

The revisions to the tempo chapters reveal Brown’s explicit engagement with debates about the relationship between notated and unnotated forms of tempo flexibility – a central concern in current nineteenth-century performance research. In the first edition, the discussion of tempo modification was dispersed; in the second, it is consolidated and clarified (pp. 549–64, second edition). Brown now distinguishes more sharply between structural tempo relationships – ratios between movements, thematic recall and metre – and local expressive deviations.

He places particular emphasis on the performer’s discretion, noting that tempo flexibility should be a ‘response to the expressive content of the music’ (p. 559, second edition). These refinements bring Brown’s argument closer to that of early recording scholarship. He observes that the nuanced tempo modifications audible in the playing of Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) and Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) correspond to written descriptions by nineteenth-century writers, effectively demonstrating that early recordings can at times illuminate – rather than contradict – written documentary evidence.Footnote ² In this respect, the second edition often succeeds in bridging the documentary and the auditory.

Two chapters on ornamentation have been substantially reorganized. What was titled Appoggiaturas, Trills, Turns and Related Ornaments is now Notated Ornamentation, broadening its scope to explore how notation encodes expressive flexibility (p. 455, first edition; p. 626, second edition). Embellishment, Ornamentation and Improvisation has become Improvised Ornamentation and Embellishment, a retitling that subtly signals greater emphasis on historical performer agency (p. 415, first edition; p. 713, second edition). The restructured chapter on improvised ornamentation integrates extensive new material on vocal practice, particularly in art song and opera. Brown draws on primary accounts of improvised embellishments laid out by Domenico Corri (1746–1825) and Johann Michael Vogl (1768–1840) and aligns these with instrumental treatises that deal with the parallel improvised ornamentation of melody instruments such as those of Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) and Michel Woldemar (1750–1815).Footnote ³ The inclusion of these sources widens the conceptual field, positioning improvised ornamentation as a more prominent feature of historical performance practices. Brown discusses how the improvisatory ethos of eighteenth-century practice persisted into the nineteenth century, albeit with changing stylistic expectations. He emphasizes the importance placed historically on the difference between ‘correct and beautiful performance’ rather than literal accuracy (p.713, second edition). Numerous examples demonstrate how notated turns, trills or grace notes functioned as prompts for varying forms of elaboration rather than as fixed prescriptions.

At times, Brown’s empiricism results in an uneven weighting of sources. Letters and pedagogical writings are treated with equal authority, regardless of their possible distance from practice; one sometimes wishes for a more clear hierarchy of evidence. Yet his cumulative method – allowing a pattern to emerge through quantity and juxtaposition – remains persuasive. What results is a study of ornamentation that subtly recasts the role of notation, reinforcing Brown’s larger thesis that written symbols point toward a historically conditioned and flexible realm of aural expectations.

The old sub-section on Arpeggiation is given a self-contained chapter, now called Asynchrony, Arpeggiation and Flexible Rhythm (p. 609, first edition; p. 832, second edition). The new title reflects Brown’s recognition that these practices formed part of a broader nineteenth-century aesthetic of temporal flexibility and asynchrony rather than representing isolated ornamental devices most commonly found in keyboard playing. This expansion allows Brown to synthesize earlier material on texture, tempo and expression, illustrating how nineteenth-century pianists, singers and string players used asynchrony and rhythmic alteration as an expressive tool. Many of the examples are from familiar sources (Türk, Garcia, L. Mozart), but Brown’s commentary situates them within broader stylistic tendencies and establishes asynchrony as central to historical performance practices.Footnote ⁴ His treatment distinguishes several categories: arpeggiation as a written figure, as a spontaneous expressive gesture and as a deliberate temporal displacement between hands or instruments. Brown’s insistence that such practices were not signs of imprecision but rather hallmarks of style carries particular weight in light of early recorded evidence such as Carl Reinecke’s numerous piano rolls (1824–1910) and recordings by pianists such as Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860–1941) and violinists such as Joachim.Footnote ⁵

Elsewhere, sections on dotted rhythms and overdotting have been revised with a greater selection of score examples (p. 614, first edition; p. 862, second edition). The addition of a discussion of agogic nuance addresses temporal inflections that elude strict metric notation (p. 882, second edition). This section, although compact, is among the most insightful in the volume, drawing attention to the gamut of possible performance practices between rhythmic precision and expressive elasticity.

Equally important are the additions to the chapters on vibrato, portamento and the action of the bow. The treatment of vibrato – now in a chapter titled Trembling Effects – is expanded and better contextualized than in the earlier edition (pp. 953–1017). Brown distinguishes between ornamental and structural uses of vibrato, drawing on not only written descriptions but also recorded evidence. Here Brown seeks to capture the plurality of expressive fluctuations – vibrato, tremolo and related devices including their myriad confusing terminologies – that coloured nineteenth-century sound. His central argument is that such effects were ornamental and were applied in subtly varied ways in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vocal, string and wind performance. Crucially, the revised chapter incorporates greater comparative commentary on early recordings. Brown notes how recorded violinists born in the mid-nineteenth century – from Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931) to Joachim – used vibrato more sparingly than their twentieth century counterparts. He juxtaposes these examples with textual sources to illustrate both continuity and change. Brown succeeds by showing that vibrato, far from being a universal feature of romantic expressivity, was one among many options for expressive ornamentation.

Portamento, a relatively minor topic in the first edition, is given greater prominence in the chapter Sliding Effects with a substantial new introductory section (p. 888, second edition). Here, Brown draws on both treatise evidence and early recordings, acknowledging the technique’s expressive centrality in both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century string and vocal performance.

String bowing technique is treated in greater depth in the second edition. The section on ‘The Action of the Bow Arm’ now includes a sequence of photographs drawn from historical treatises – images of hand position, bow grip and arm angle that illustrate the physical principles underlying technique and tone production (pp. 344–55, second edition). These images underscore the embodied dimension of performance that purely verbal descriptions can scarcely convey, reminding readers that nineteenth-century performers learned through physical demonstration and tactile imitation rather than abstract instruction alone. The section is further extended with a discussion of Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824) and his influence on bowing (pp. 380–92, second edition).Footnote ⁶ This material, largely new, connects eighteenth-century French violin schools with the evolving performance practices for Ludwig van Beethoven’s works and beyond. Brown shows how Viotti’s conception of the bow stroke – at once vocal and declamatory – influenced successive generations of violinists, particularly in relation to articulation, accentuation, and phrasing. The implications for understanding the performance practices current at the time of the First Viennese School of composers are profound.

The cumulative effect of these revisions is significant. The book’s practical relevance to performers is greatly enhanced: each chapter now connects more explicitly to issues of realization and interpretation. Brown’s caveat – that the performer must ultimately decide how to reconcile divergent evidence – is now reinforced by a greater quantity of examples and by the author’s willingness to underline diversity of practice. The aforementioned ‘adventurous approach’ to practice is implicitly modelled in the structure, tone and spirit of this second edition (p. 6, second edition).

One of the most conspicuous new features in the second edition is the sustained engagement with early recordings. A telling example appears in Brown’s discussion of articulation and phrasing:

Whereas the first edition drew on recordings largely as an addendum to written sources, in the new edition Brown integrates them throughout as corroborative or illustrative material. He cites a range of early-twentieth-century performers (Joachim, Karl Klingler (1897–1971), Reinecke, Adelina Patti (1843–1919)) – mostly within the Austro-German tradition – whose recordings illuminate rubato, portamento, phrasing and articulation practices described in nineteenth-century sources.Footnote ⁷ These examples lend audible reality to his argument that the late-nineteenth-century sound world was defined by flexible context-informed interpretation rather than rigidity.

Brown’s use of recordings, however, also exposes methodological tension. His claim that early recordings enable ‘enhanced insights into the relationship between musical notation, the written word, and the realities of performance’ places him in valuable dialogue with current performance-studies scholarship (p. 1, second edition).Footnote ⁸ While he draws genuine insights from recorded evidence – particularly in discussions of tempo flexibility and portamento – he occasionally appears to hear what textual sources lead him to expect rather than what recordings actually reveal. His claim that Francesco Tamagno’s vibrato involves ‘little or no perceptible fluctuation of pitch’ seems unsupported by careful listening to the recordings themselves (p. 1001, second edition).Footnote ⁹ Similarly, his comparison of the Capet and Klingler quartets’ recordings of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 no. 5, where he suggests that the Klingler players perform ‘much more on string’ requires more detailed analytical substantiation than Brown provides (p. 440, second edition).Footnote ¹⁰ These instances suggest a tendency toward confirmatory listening – using recordings to illustrate pre-existing textual conclusions rather than allowing them to challenge or complicate documentary evidence. As a result, recordings seem most useful to Brown when they complement the written record, creating a tendency to overlook the fact that they often reveal aspects of musical life untraceable in written documents – the unnotated subtleties of timing, dynamic inflection, unprompted improvisations and expressive distortions that formed the essence of performance style. A more open engagement with recorded evidence as independent discourse – something that recent scholarship has increasingly embraced – would have strengthened his position.Footnote ¹¹

Nevertheless, Brown’s inclusion of recordings represents a major conceptual advance, situating the second edition firmly within the twenty-first-century landscape of performance research. His recognition that notation alone cannot capture performance aligns, albeit cautiously, with the broader reorientation of the field from text to sound. The importance given to recordings in a reference work of this kind marks a significant disciplinary shift: it recognizes that the sound of music must form part of any credible account of historical performance practice.

In total, the second edition spans over 1000 pages, almost 400 pages more than the original. It is a massive undertaking – comparable in ambition to multi-authored volumes such as The Cambridge History of Musical Performance, but singular in its authorial unity and comprehensive command of evidence.Footnote ¹² Brown’s voice remains remarkably consistent: formal but lucid, patient in argument, and understatedly passionate in his conviction that historical awareness can enrich present-day artistry.

If the first edition presented itself as an encyclopaedia of factual knowledge, the second reads more like a critical companion, with greater awareness of its own interpretive boundaries. Its scope is tempered by humility: a recognition that performance cannot be fully recovered but only imagined through the traces it leaves behind. Brown crystallises this position in the remark: ‘The creative energy that can result from sensitive employment of these practices – not as an attempted recreation of the past, but as a contemporary expression of feeling – can invest the well-known masterpieces … with more of the emotional depth envisaged by their creators’ (p. 6, second edition). Here Brown gestures toward the interpretive space where evidence ends and practical judgement begins. It is in this open space, between documentation and performance, that the enduring value of Brown’s project resides.

The most striking evolution from the first to the second edition is not only the quantity of new material but the subtle shift from description to interpretation. Brown remains devoted to evidence and precision, yet the evidence he presents now allows more space for performer agency and interpretative latitude. This is not to suggest that Brown abandons his empiricist framework. Rather, he refines it, acknowledging that reconstruction of nineteenth-century style involves negotiation between text and sound. His discussions of bowing, ornamentation and tempo flexibility illustrate an author increasingly aware of the creative dimension of performance. The result is a book that both consolidates and reanimates its subject, preserving the scale of a reference work while offering glimpses of interpretative vitality.

The principal challenge in evaluating the new edition of Classical and Romantic Performance Practice lies in recognizing its extraordinary achievement while also engaging critically with its methods. Few single-authored musicological studies encompass so vast a range of evidence or exert such influence over the field. Brown’s work has been, and remains, indispensable for anyone seeking to understand nineteenth-century performance. The gravitational pull of the written source remains strong even when the author gestures toward the primacy of the aural. The consequence, as a result, is that while his book legitimizes recorded evidence as a scholarly category, it ultimately reasserts the authority of the text as the arbiter of authenticity.

These tensions illuminate the position of Classical and Romantic Performance Practice within the evolving discourse on historically informed performance. When the first edition appeared in 1999, it offered an unprecedented consolidation of documentary evidence and effectively established the foundation upon which later empirical and practice-based studies would build. The new edition arrives in a different intellectual climate – one shaped by the work of Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and others – where performance is treated not merely as the exploration of historical data but as a site of epistemic inquiry in its own right.Footnote ¹³ Cook argues that within current paradigms, ‘performance is seen as reproducing the work, or the structures embodied in the work, or the conditions of its early performances, or the intentions of the composer. Different as these formulations are … they all have one thing in common: no space is left for the creativity of performers’.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, Leech-Wilkinson’s Challenging Performance calls into question the very premise of normative stylistic reconstruction, proposing instead that performances be viewed as creative acts that generate meaning beyond fidelity to score or source.Footnote ¹⁵

From within this trajectory, Brown’s book appears both seminal and transitional – marking the culmination of documentary-empiricist performance practice research while opening pathways toward more experimental methodologies. Indeed, one might argue that Brown has done for the textual archive what later practice-based researchers have done for the recorded one: rendered the evidence audible, legible and practically usable. The second edition, by virtue of its updated commentary on recordings and its emphasis on notation as indicative rather than prescriptive, tacitly acknowledges this disciplinary shift, even if it stops short of fully embracing the implications that recordings might generate meanings independent of – or even contradictory to – written sources.

Another way to assess the second edition’s importance is to consider its methodological synthesis. Brown’s work remains grounded in philological precision – the careful weighing of treatises, marginalia, correspondence and early editions – yet it also gestures toward a more holistic conception of historical performance that includes physiology, psychology and acoustics. That said, the field has moved toward collaborative and practice-led forms of scholarship that contrast with Brown’s single-authored synthesis. Recent projects – such as research on early recordings by the AHRC funded Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music – involved performers, musicologists and others working collaboratively rather than one scholar marshalling evidence toward definitive conclusions.Footnote ¹⁶ In this context, Brown’s comprehensive reference work may appear somewhat anachronistic. Yet such apparent anachronism has value: the discipline still requires authoritative synthesis alongside experimental exploration, and few scholars can match Brown’s combination of archival rigour, stylistic clarity and genuine sympathy for performers’ practical concerns.

At the heart of Brown’s intellectual project lies the question of authority. Whose voice, in performance-practice scholarship, should carry the greatest weight – the historical witness, the contemporary performer or the musicological observer? Brown’s answer has consistently been to privilege the informed performer who reads and listens with disciplined historical imagination – someone who neither fetishizes documentary evidence nor ignores it, but rather uses it as stimulus for creative engagement with the past. In this sense, his book functions simultaneously as reference work, pedagogical guide and implicit manifesto for a mode of musicianship that balances reverence for historical evidence with acknowledgment of the expressive freedoms that evidence documents.

Nevertheless, the very notion of a ‘correct’ historical style, however cautiously framed, sits uneasily with recent understandings of performance as a situated, plural and evolving act. Brown is acutely aware of this tension – his concluding remarks acknowledge that

At the same time, it is hard to escape the impression that his taxonomic impulse inevitably reinscribes hierarchies of rightness and wrongness. Brown perhaps could have done more in his second edition to foreground the diversity of nineteenth-century sound worlds and to resist the temptation to resolve them into a coherent narrative.

This evidential conservatism is mirrored in Brown’s periodization. The phrase ‘Classical and Romantic’ in the title suggests an endorsement of these colloquial yet arbitrary historical categories. Yet the very material he assembles – spanning from C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch to early recordings of Joachim pupils – points to the instability of such categories. Brown’s expanded discussions of portamento, ornamentation, tempo modification and asynchrony gesture toward expressive practices that resist neat classification as ‘Classical’ or ‘Romantic’. By maintaining this binary, Brown’s work reproduces an inherited historiography increasingly at odds with the fluid, overlapping performance traditions that his own evidence reveals. The continuities he traces – from over 150 years of history – resist periodization more stubbornly than his title suggests.

Beyond its arguments, the second edition also invites comment as a physical and editorial product. Oxford University Press has presented it handsomely: clear typography, judicious cross-referencing and a comprehensive index make it a pleasure to consult. The inclusion of a great number of score examples – especially those illustrating bowing, portamento and tempo flexibility – significantly enhances its pedagogical value. The expanded bibliography, running over 20 pages, testifies to Brown’s lifelong dedication to the accumulation and curation of knowledge. For many readers, these practical features alone will justify the purchase, even if they already own the first edition.

In sum, the second edition of Classical and Romantic Performance Practice stands as both culmination and renewal – consolidating five decades of archival research while engaging, however cautiously, with disciplinary shifts toward practice-based inquiry and recorded sound as primary evidence. Brown’s achievement lies not only in the encyclopaedic scope of his documentation but in his insistence that historical awareness can and should inform the living act of performance. For scholars and performers alike, the book remains an indispensable point of departure. Those who wish to explore the early recorded legacy in greater analytical depth will need to go beyond Brown’s selective examples, yet they will do so with gratitude for the foundations he has laid. His work reminds us that performance history is not a closed archive but rather an ongoing conversation between evidence and imagination. In his second edition, Brown invites performer/researchers into that conversation not by prescribing how nineteenth-century music should sound, but by revealing the range of choices historical performers considered legitimate – and by asking how we might inhabit that space of interpretive freedom with both historical awareness and artistic conviction.