Abraham’s Sacred Duty

Before we can make sense of Grützmacher’s perspective as an editor, it is worth examining a few details in Abraham’s letter. First, Abraham applies his editorial ideal specifically to ‘the classic works’. While he does not offer a definition here, we can see from the context of this letter that the classics include the works of Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin. In another letter, he supports Grützmacher’s decision to abridge the tutti sections in his edition of concertos by Bernhard Romberg (1767–1841), because ‘Romberg is not a classical author [Klassiker], with whom every note is sacrosanct’.Footnote ¹⁴ Even this small sample makes it clear that Abraham’s conception of the ‘classic works’ is not dependent on the time period in which the composers lived, but rather on some mutually understood quality within their work. For works without this quality, his moral imperatives as an editor were more relaxed.

Second, he couches his ideal of strict textual fidelity in personal terms: ‘a sacred duty, indeed my life’s work’. While this ideal was not unique to Abraham, it was by no means universal in the nineteenth century. Mendelssohn’s correspondence with the London Handel Society about his edition of Handel’s Israel in Egypt in the 1840s reads like an inverse of the Grützmacher–Peters correspondence, with the editor insisting on perfect fidelity to the original and the publisher advocating a more hands-on guide to current performing practice.Footnote ¹⁵ This ideological divide must have been widespread enough that the groundbreaking Bach-Gesellschaft, formed in 1850 to publish critical editions of the complete works of J.S. Bach, felt the need to include in their mission statement that ‘any arbitrary changes, omissions or additions are excluded’.Footnote ¹⁶ When Breitkopf & Härtel published its complete edition of Beethoven’s works in the following decade, its commitment to textual fidelity was loudly proclaimed on the title page: ‘Ludwig van Beethoven’s Works, complete edition, critically reviewed, justified throughout’.Footnote ¹⁷ However, alongside its line of textually chaste collected editions, Breitkopf & Härtel continued to publish editions of the classics enriched with performance advice for students and amateurs, marked by respected performers such as Ferdinand David (1810–1873) and Friedrich Hermann (1828–1907). These appeared within a jungle of competition among music publishers, each with their own line of annotated classics.Footnote ¹⁸ Even after the turn of the century, the cellist and historian Edmund van der Straeten could defend Grützmacher’s editions by claiming that most editorial intervention was instigated by greedy publishers ‘who, by deliberate falsification, seek to establish a new copyright for ancient compositions’.Footnote ¹⁹

A third detail worth considering is Abraham’s acknowledgement that an edition needs to be adjusted in certain ways to be more accessible to musicians. As purist as it sounds, his ideal of reproducing the classics ‘exactly as they are composed’ is tempered from the outset by the practical needs of his intended readers. This balancing act between the ideal (text-facing) and the practical (reader-facing) persists in modern editing, leaving the editor much more interpretive space than the word ‘Urtext’ tends to imply.

The fourth and perhaps most significant detail is the distinction Abraham draws between the duties of an editor and those of a performer or teacher. In this view, the laws of artistic integrity apply differently to the same person working in different contexts. As we might expect in a letter about editing, Abraham does not shed any light here on the type of artistic integrity proper to a performer or teacher. However, in a letter from 1887, he gives a list of influential musicians who share his view of editing, in the hopes of winning Grützmacher over to his perspective: ‘Brahms, Joachim, Frau Schumann, Davidoff, Klengel, Schröder, Cossmann, Hausmann and many other authorities and cellists have declared themselves decidedly against any changes, and I still hold out hope that you too will convert at last to the common view’.Footnote ²⁰

Abraham’s list of commendable editors – let us call them ‘classical editors’ – provides a window onto the type of artistic integrity he is invoking in order to persuade Grützmacher. Of these, the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) provides a particularly rich illustration of what this ideal looked like in practice. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Joachim’s name was synonymous with all that was deepest, richest and loftiest in music-making.Footnote ²¹ His performances of classic works carried such authority that a cultural historian at the end of the century could speak of his playing as ‘Klassikervortrag’, the playing style for the classics.Footnote ²²

Joachim’s editions tend to stay extremely close to the composers’ texts, with no changes of notes, slurs, accentuation, or nuancing.Footnote ²³ In the violin treatise he wrote together with his student, Andreas Moser, ‘modern editing’ practices of textual intervention are condemned in the same emotionally charged language that today is aimed at Grützmacher, with words like ‘vandalism’ and ‘sacrilege’.Footnote ²⁴ However, this condemnation is immediately followed by a lengthy discussion of the extra-textual knowledge a performer needs to bring to the score in order to read it properly, especially for music written before the mid-nineteenth century, and music by composers whose main instrument was not the violin.

In performance, Joachim found such flexibility in the text that one of his students remarked that he ‘never played the same Bach composition twice in the same way’.Footnote ²⁵ While we cannot test this assertion by listening to the tiny handful of acoustic recordings he made in 1903, the divergence between the text and the sounds he has left us – especially in the recording of his own Romance in C Major – makes it possible to reconstruct something of Joachim’s elastic treatment of notation.Footnote ²⁶ It may even be that the neutrality of the text was essential to Joachim as a backdrop or a springboard for his creativity on stage. When the publisher Alfred Dörffel asked him to make an edition of the Bach Chaconne, showing his treatment of the long stretch of arpeggiated chords in the middle section, he replied that his approach could not be written down: his arpeggiation was a response to the pacing of the crescendo, which worked out differently in every performance.Footnote ²⁷

In teaching, Joachim and his closest disciples at the Berlin Hochschule not only allowed but demanded a flexible treatment of notation. The violinist Marion Bruce Ranken, who studied at the Hochschule at the turn of the last century, gives a detailed account of the so-called ‘Joachim school’, with particular attention to the essential difference between notated and sounding rhythm, sometimes called ‘Freispielen’ (free playing) and sometimes ‘Gestaltungskraft’ (the power of shaping). ‘Not only were you “allowed” this freedom from the beat,’ she reports, ‘but if you did not take it, you were at first looked upon as a novice who required instruction and later on as an unmusical person whom it was not worth instructing.’Footnote ²⁸ The metaphors she uses to explain this art are nearly always biological: an unwritten melody is like a bird, caged by the notation to keep it from flying away;Footnote ²⁹ composers’ additions of performance markings are like the panicked instructions of parents trying to save their dying baby;Footnote ³⁰ the beat and the note are like two friends who have determined to stay in touch with one another by checking in from time to time.Footnote ³¹ The essence of her description shows that the craft of music-making, as it was taught by Joachim and his disciples at the end of the nineteenth century, was still firmly rooted in the Romantic Idealism that Mary Hunter and others have pointed to in early nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and its legacy in music criticism over the following decades.Footnote ³² The score, Ranken explains, is only a shadow, and the solemn duty of the interpreter is to make contact with ‘the real thing that has cast the shadow’, giving the audience ‘not a grinning gargoyle with each feature equally hard and unnaturally marked, but a face with a guiding spirit in it’.Footnote ³³

Taken together, these four clues place Abraham’s letter within a very different conversation from what it appears to be. The 40-year correspondence between Grützmacher and Abraham shows the struggle of two competing ideals for music editing, which by its nature occupies a middle ground between the notion of a composition and the notion of a performance. According to the philosophy that Abraham shared with Joachim and the others on his list, the classical editor worked from a primary loyalty to the composer’s text, tempered by consideration for the reader. At the same time, the performer’s first loyalty was to something beyond the text: some transcendent essence of music making that could not be set down in writing, and for that reason had no place in an edition.

Grützmacher’s Highest Goal

In a letter from 1884, Grützmacher gives an especially thorough defence of his own philosophy, in response to a (now lost) letter from Abraham about a draft edition of Schumann’s works for cello:

Grützmacher’s tone here is extremely close to Abraham’s. He shows equal reverence for the composers in question (‘such great men as Schumann, Mendelssohn, etc.’), and takes his role as editor just as seriously as Abraham takes his (‘highest goal and greatest honour’). The main difference between his view and his publisher’s is that for him, there is no divide between the first allegiance of an editor and that of a performer or teacher. Instead, the score is an incomplete record of a shared, living language of music making, and someone fluent in that language is in a position to ‘complete’ the markings (as he puts it later in the letter) for the benefit of the uninitiated.

He goes on to claim this position of privileged musical knowledge and justifies his claim in three ways. First, he alludes to ‘the manifold experiences which I have had with many famous composers, who have entrusted me with the task of editing their works, and have always been full of approval.’Footnote ³⁵ In other words, the confidence and trust that living composers have placed in him have given him a solid sense of what he, as a performer, has to contribute to a new musical text. This is probably the most easily verifiable claim that Grützmacher makes in this letter, since the concertos of both Joachim Raff and Carl Reinecke list Grützmacher on the title page not as the editor but as the dedicatee, even with cello parts that bear all the hallmarks of a Grützmacher edition.Footnote ³⁶

Next, he points out that his interpretation of Robert Schumann’s music in particular has won the approval of the composer’s closest allies and guardians of his legacy, such as Clara Schumann and Woldemar Bargiel. This cements his claim to a knowledge of good musical taste relevant to the specific works he and Abraham are discussing here. Grützmacher had begun his career in Leipzig, as the principal cellist in the Gewandhausorchester, member of the Gewandhausquartett, and cello teacher at the Leipzig Conservatorium from 1848 to 1860. This brought him into especially close contact with Mendelssohn’s musical circle, which included the Schumanns when they visited to make music in public and in private.Footnote ³⁷

Finally, and crucially, he makes it clear that the legitimacy of his markings does not stem from the approval of any individual composer or musical authority, but rather from the residue of his long and varied musical experience.

In other words, Grützmacher’s sense of an emergent musical truth came as much from his interactions with colleagues and listeners as from those with composers. From 1860, he was based in Dresden, where he led the cello section of the Königlichen Hofcapelle under Julius Rietz and held the title of solo performer to the court (Königlicher Kammervirtuos) of the King of Saxony. Through his membership in the Dresdner Tonkünstlerverein (of which he later became the president), as well as his busy touring schedule, Grützmacher was able to build relationships with musicians across Europe. An article in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt in 1870 asserts that ‘one can justifiably claim that he is the most significant cellist of his time’, referring to his reputation as both a soloist and a chamber musician, and citing ‘numerous concert tours in Germany, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.’Footnote ³⁹ His position in Dresden also involved teaching at the Conservatorium, where he occupied a central position in a line of cello pedagogy often referred to as the Dresden School.Footnote ⁴⁰ The same article tells us that already in 1870, he had a reputation as ‘the foremost and most sought-after’ teacher of his instrument, ‘always surrounded by a large number of students from all countries’, many of whom went on to become ‘famous in their own right’.Footnote ⁴¹

Grützmacher’s other letters to Abraham allude to a rigorous editorial process that grounded his markings within a common set of stylistic understandings and questions. He would begin by studying all previous editions of the piece and taking note of what he called ‘imprecisions’ (Ungenauigkeiten).Footnote ⁴² After creating his more precise version, he would test it out, first by playing it through with a pianist (usually Carl Hess, his colleague in Dresden), and then by going over it with one of his students.Footnote ⁴³ In his intentions at least, his editions were thus the opposite of the ‘vandalism’ ascribed to him by Campbell (and to unnamed ‘modern editors’ by Joachim and Moser). That word implies interference that is not only destructive but also chaotic: a crime against order. Grützmacher’s priority, by contrast, was to make the score even more orderly than it had been before, using a finely honed sense of performance style to correct any vagueness in the writing.

What Did It Mean To Be the ‘Joachim of the Cello’?

In the end, Abraham’s list of editors proved to be effective in persuading Grützmacher to adopt their more classical editing style (at least in his editions for Peters). Not only did Grützmacher consent to having his editions of Mendelssohn and Chopin’s music for cello reprinted in 1887, with his contributions reduced to bowings and fingerings, but when Abraham suggested doing the same for Grützmacher’s edition of the Beethoven Cello Sonatas in the 1890s, Grützmacher actively welcomed the idea.Footnote ⁴⁴

What must have made Abraham’s list of editors especially powerful was that there was something about their musicianship, off the page, that they shared with Grützmacher as well as with each other. Four of the five cellists – Bernhard Cossmann, Karl Davydov, Robert Hausmann and Julius Klengel – share with Grützmacher the distinction of having been called ‘the Joachim of the cello’ at least once in the press.Footnote ⁴⁵ Grützmacher himself was clearly happy with this epithet, since he included a press quote with it in a letter to Hugo Bock (1848–1932), the editor of the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, asking him to reprint it there in preparation for some upcoming concerts in Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁶

When discussing the idea of artistic integrity as symbolized by Joachim and his musical cohort, the word ‘classical’ surfaces again and again, both in contemporary descriptions and in current scholarship. This word is so familiar within our own usage that we have perhaps not grappled fully with its otherness in a nineteenth-century context. Joachim’s leading role in what William Weber has called ‘the great transformation of musical taste’ in concert programming,Footnote ⁴⁷ as well as the public image of priestly gravitas Karen Leistra-Jones has dubbed ‘Werktreue performance’,Footnote ⁴⁸ can easily create the impression that this species of artistic integrity is defined by the performer’s relationship to the classic work. However, long before the term Werktreue was coined, there were other discourses in play that attached artistic integrity to something more subtle and diffuse.Footnote ⁴⁹

Mary Hunter, weaving together the abstract discussions of the role of the performer in early Romantic aesthetics with the more practical advice in instrumental treatises, speaks of a ‘soul-merge’ of performer and composer, which in turn facilitates an elevating, ego-dissolving experience in the listener’s soul. Within this model, the composer becomes ‘an acolyte of the Absolute’, who ‘establishes the frame through which the Ideal is to be glimpsed’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The performer’s own creative spirit then joins with the composer’s to form a prism that can refract the Ideal or the Absolute into specific sounds. The performer’s gaze is thus directed not so much at the work as through it.

Mine Doğantan-Dack isolates a very different discourse by looking at nineteenth-century treatises on musical phrasing, especially in connection with the emerging concept of absolute music. Here, the composer and the work are peripheral, and the performer’s highest loyalty is to the laws of the music itself. These laws are not dictated by any particular authority, but discovered, like the laws of physics. In the writings of Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny (1762–1842) and later Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), for example, different scale degrees naturally attract and repel one another in various ways, creating melodic and harmonic relationships that a composer can harness when creating (or in the literal meaning of composition, ‘putting together’) a musical work. If the composer has correctly apprehended the nature of these relationships, then the performer need not be torn between the composer’s intentions for the work and the musical elements brought together to express them. When these two are misaligned, however, the theorists are fully prepared to pronounce the notation incorrect – even in the works of highly revered composers such as Brahms and Schumann.Footnote ⁵¹

The listener is also part of the equation, rather than a mere receptacle for fully formed musical experiences. George Barth characterizes Carl Czerny’s advice on playing the music of Beethoven and other classical authors as ‘preservation by translation’ – a metaphor that grants the listener an essential role in the ideal performer’s process. Once a performer has apprehended what Czerny refers to as Beethoven’s ‘conception’ (Auffassung), the shared sense of taste between performers and their listeners can and should guide the way this conception surfaces in the world of sound. Having noted the strong moral overtones of Czerny’s language, Barth attempts to locate the moral compass regulating the interactions between classic works and contemporary taste. Through a careful process of elimination, Barth concludes that it must lie not in the score, not in the sound, and not in a specific way of playing, but rather in what Czerny himself terms the performer’s own ‘sense of propriety’, which is formed over time through ‘well cultivated feelings and much experience’.Footnote ⁵²

While Czerny’s phrase, ‘well cultivated feelings’, could plausibly refer to the formal education of his day,Footnote ⁵³ his reference to ‘much experience’ suggests something beyond education: an ongoing absorption of taste and wisdom throughout a person’s life, drawn from many sources, and therefore not invested in deriving personal authority solely from other authorities.Footnote ⁵⁴ George Kennaway has shown that this concept of ambient good taste, which was such a strong presence in the theoretical writing of the eighteenth century, continued to exercise an influence in nineteenth-century discussions of musicianship, even though the Romantics’ addition of a metaphysical element (Hunter’s ‘soul-merge’) changed the concept’s anatomy in subtle ways.Footnote ⁵⁵

The following section makes the case that when the term ‘classical’ was applied to nineteenth-century performers, it carried a broad range of meanings encompassing this entire ecosystem of artistry and taste.

Classical Musicianship

This broad characterization of the playing of Adolf von Henselt (1814–1889) appears in an essay by his former pupil, Sophie Kaskell (later Sophie von Baudissin), who grew up in a family on intimate terms with Mendelssohn, Chopin and the Schumanns, and who penned this essay as a member of Robert Schumann’s artistic alliance of ‘Davidsbündler’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Kaskell’s use of the term ‘classical’ (classisch) to mean a worthy model for imitation aligns with the primary definition given in Johann Christoph Adelung’s 1802 dictionary: ‘Excellent in its kind, so that it can serve as an example and a guideline for others.’Footnote ⁵⁸ This sense of the word – exemplary (vortrefflich/mustergültig), without any hints as to what makes it exemplary – was still present at the end of the nineteenth century. The Muret-Sanders bilingual dictionary from 1910 gives the English translation of ‘Klassizität’ as ‘high standard, excellency’, while ‘klassisch’ is translated as ‘classical’ with the clarification of ‘mustergültig’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The alignment of classicity with perfection tapped into a Romantic longing for the Ideal, which, as Mary Hunter has observed, had direct implications for the listener’s experience of a musical performance. After quoting from Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s famous story, ‘The Remarkable Life of the Musician Joseph Berglinger’ (1797), in which the young Berglinger listens to an oratorio and feels his soul soaring up into the radiant sky, while the present sinks away before him, Hunter comments that the idea of listening, here and in other early Romantic descriptions, is a ‘metaphor for idealized spiritual communion’. She then makes the curious observation that the performer does not seem to figure into this listening experience.Footnote ⁶⁰ A full century after the Wackenroder story, the conductor and composer Dr Friedrich von Hausegger depicts a similar listening experience, in a review of the soprano, Camilla Landi (1866–1930):

In Dr Hausegger’s account, as in Wackenroder’s, the listener experiences a feeling of elevation, covering many dimensions: the listener is elevated above moods, above the influences of the moment, and even above individual selfhood. In this version of the listening experience, however, the performer and her art are absolutely central. It is the perfection of Landi’s singing that brings the listener into direct communion with the Ideal, not necessarily because she is trying to communicate the Ideal, but because in the ‘complete apparatus’ of a well-trained voice and a flawless art, she embodies the Ideal. Her classicity is thus a potent spiritual force, independent of the spiritual power of the works she is singing.

Also colouring this vision of the Ideal was the idea of ancient Greece, seen at the time as a perfect harmony of the aesthetic and the spiritual, of form and content.Footnote ⁶² The image of a lost perfection from Classical Antiquity mostly lurked behind the concept of classicity in discussions of musicianship through recurring key words such as mind/spirit (Geist), cultivation (Bildung), objectivity (Objectivität), repose (Ruhe), clarity (Klarheit), and simplicity (Einfachheit). However, it could also be invoked as a living metaphor. An 1857 review of the violinist Edmund Singer (1830–1912) characterized his performance style as ‘calm and classical, as one applies this expression to the art of the ancient Greeks, a sculptural quality firmly applied from the boldest to the finest.’Footnote ⁶³ Joachim’s performance of a Bach fugue in 1868 was also described as ‘sculptural’ (plastisch) in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,Footnote ⁶⁴ and Clara Schumann’s performance of a Beethoven sonata in 1854 led Franz Liszt, in a remarkable essay on her playing, to depict her as a Delphic priestess.Footnote ⁶⁵

The relationship between classical musicianship and the idea of the past had other layers as well. The Meyers Großes Konversationslexikon of 1851 makes the point that already in Antiquity, classical authors were being grouped into periods of excellence, meaning that ‘classical’ could also designate a literary golden age from which the classics were drawn. This sense also extended to modern literary history, so that every European country could speak of its own classical period in literature.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the sixth edition of the Konversationslexikon in 1902, this metaphor had widened to include other local peaks of cultural achievement: ‘Within Antiquity, the times of flourishing and their intellectual/spiritual products, especially of an artistic nature, were specially honoured with the name classical. In the same sense, the modern civilisations [Kulturvölker] have their classical periods and their classical authors.’Footnote ⁶⁷

In the ebb and flow of cultural achievement over the centuries, then, there are various high points that can be honoured with the laurel of classicity, both within a given country and within a given field. This sense of the term allows for a certain tradition or ‘school’ of playing to be granted classical status, although classicity in this sense can only be awarded in retrospect: a peak is only recognizable once the decline has begun. Thus an article in Cäcilia advertising a German translation of the younger Manuel Garcia’s treatise on singing in 1843 praises Garcia’s method for providing a guideline into the ‘old classical Italian school’ of singing, which the translator considers ‘unsurpassed to this day and serving as a model for all cultivated peoples’, lamenting that it ‘seems almost to have disappeared’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Two decades later, an AMZ article on the history of the violin names François-Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849) as the last representative of ‘the classical orientation of French violin playing’, with its ‘noble artistic style’.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the end of the century, the singer Clara Kathleen Rogers reflected on her years studying piano in the Leipzig Conservatorium in the 1850s, when ‘the spirit of Mendelssohn pervaded the Conservatorium’, as a time when the ‘classic traditions had been developed to their highest point, and modern innovations had not yet a disturbing influence’.Footnote ⁷⁰

When writers use the term ‘classical’ in this more nostalgic sense, it is not always possible to know whether they are referring to isolated local peaks of excellence or to a unified classical tradition. Richard Wagner writes contemptuously of what was called ‘classical’ playing in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, with Mendelssohn’s musical circle directly in his sightlines. In his famous 1869 essay, Über das Dirigieren, he himself puts German ‘classical’ playing in scare quotes, painting it as a small-minded distaste for excess, which Romantic Hellenism was ‘pressed into service’ to defend.Footnote ⁷¹ At the same time, he shows great admiration for what he calls the ‘classical tradition’ of the old Italians (no scare quotes this time), which he credits directly for the singing style of early nineteenth-century French violinists such as Habeneck.Footnote ⁷² This Franco-Italian classical tradition, in Wagner’s view, held the key to the proper performance of Mozart’s music, not because it was dictated by Mozart, but because Mozart’s compositions were the residue of the same tradition.Footnote ⁷³

Writing at the turn of the century, Joachim and Moser quote Wagner’s account of Franco-Italian classical musicianship as a way to show the international credentials of a style of string playing that, they complain, had increasingly come to be thought of as German. In their account, the ‘classical traditions of the Italian bel canto’ were translated by French violinists into ‘a singing tone on the violin, free from mannerism and artificiality’, with ‘a supple and independent style of bowing, one serviceable to the characteristics of each variety of stroke’. Their Violinschule aims to preserve this style, pointing out that ‘the method of treatment accorded to the violin by all masters of instrumental music, from Haydn to Mendelssohn, has its roots in the teaching and the technical acquirements of that school.’Footnote ⁷⁴ While their mention of Mendelssohn departs sharply from Wagner’s view that mid-century German classicity was an outlier, they are in full agreement with him about the relationship between classical musicianship and classic works. The classical tradition of music making, born of Italian singing, was a stream that flowed through the great classical compositions, as well as through German and (earlier) French string playing. To be acquainted with it, therefore, was the surest way to grasp the conception behind the works.

These three senses of the word ‘classisch’, as applied to musicianship, allow for a more complex and symbiotic relationship with classic works than mere audible Werktreue. When it was used in the sense of exemplary, it referred to musicianship that could provide a model of excellence to musicians, while delivering an experience of the Ideal to listeners. When the word was invoked as a reference to the ancient world, it drew specifically on a Romantic longing for the lost perfection of ancient Greece. In both of these contexts, a classic work could be either absent from the programme or brought in as an aid to this abstracted experience of classicity. This effectively turns the usual relationship of composer, performer, and listener on its head: the listener’s longing for classicity could be the prime mover of musical experience, served by the performer with the help of the composer. When the word ‘classisch’ referred to a tradition of excellence in music making – whether this tradition was understood as a local peak or a longer, international arc – classic compositions could nestle into the surrounding musical tradition, rather than commanding work-centred traditions of their own. This meant that to be true to the spirit, or even the intentions, of the composer, meant simply to breathe the same air of conception and expression.

Within this thicket of meanings, a particular type of historical document was allowed to flourish: heavily annotated editions, in which a musician seeks to provide a good model for other musicians to follow, at times clarifying and at times overriding the composer’s written instructions. Grützmacher may not have been a classical editor, but the critical reception of his playing portrays him as an unimpeachably classical musician. An 1870 review in the Fränkischer Kurier, quoted in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, pronounces Grützmacher’s playing ‘classical, if we understand by that [word] the development of the highest technique in every respect, but at the same time only in the service of the clearest and warmest reproduction of every single piece of music’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even his most extreme editorial sins (from today’s standpoint) seem to match up with performances that met the criteria for classical musicianship. This review of his performance of a complete Bach Cello Suite, from 1867 (the year he published his now-notorious concert version), contains a litany of key words and phrases associated with classical playing, alongside an untroubled awareness that Grützmacher has made alterations in order to bring the listeners into closer contact with the spirit of the composer.

Grützmacher’s editorial vision, therefore, represents some essence of music-making that he has neither derived from simple formulas, nor crafted out of a desire to put his personal stamp on the material. As a performer, he has done his best to ‘make contact with the thing that has cast the shadow’ of the notation, and his editions represent perhaps a biological drawing of the animal, aiming not only for anatomical accuracy but also for realistic shading. A close examination of his editions can grant us access to some of the lost specifics of a playing style that was in its own way analogous to Abraham’s textual fidelity.

Classical Priorities through the Lens of Grützmacher’s Editions

Discipline in Tempo

One specific feature of classical playing mentioned in written accounts is a disciplined sense of tempo. An 1868 review of the pianist Anton Rubinstein contrasts his characteristic ‘idiosyncrasy’ (Eigenthümlichkeit) with a ‘metronome-bound academic quality’ (Metronome geregelten Acadämlichkeit) that seems to be expected for a ‘classical’ performance of Beethoven (although it goes on to note that his performance of Beethoven’s G Major Concerto was surprisingly ‘classical’ on this occasion).Footnote ⁷⁷ In an otherwise glowing review of the pianist Mary Krebs in 1885, her performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 53 was criticized for ‘a too obvious rushing in the last movement, as well as an exaggerated dragging in the middle theme of the first movement,’ which ‘distanced her too sharply from the fundamental character of the work to be called classically beautiful.’Footnote ⁷⁸

At first glance, these reviews seem to support Wagner’s accusation that German classicism was nothing more than a distaste for anything extreme (and indeed, a large portion of Wagner’s essay is concerned with tempo modification). One great strength of annotated editions, however, is that they can offer a glimpse of these general principles as they behave ‘in the wild’, in an endless variety of specific musical contexts. Grützmacher’s editions of Mendelssohn’s works for cello and piano are explicit about setting down a style of music making directly connected to Mendelssohn’s musical circle, as he explained in a letter to Abraham in 1878.

In order to pre-empt any possible sceptics you are concerned about regarding the rightness [Richtigkeit] of my markings, I would like to recommend putting on the title page:

Precisely marked according to the traditions of the composer and edited by F. Gr.

I can truly claim that no one has come to know these very works so exactly at the source as I have (and indeed through a connection to authorities such as Moscheles, David, Rietz etc.) All of my little additions to the markings (since my work does not extend beyond these) are therefore also just the fruit of this association, over many years, that I have referred to.Footnote ⁷⁹

Abraham took this advice, and the resulting edition – at least in its first version – contains a wealth of performance advice, including some very specific tempo indications.Footnote ⁸⁰

If we consider these markings to be a set of glosses on a classical management of tempo, they show us that a ‘metronome-bound academic quality’ does not mean a pulse that never varies. Rather, they point to an internally steady pulse that can be faster or slower depending on the character of the music. Example 1 shows a transitional moment in Op. 58 that could be performed with a ritenuto, but that Grützmacher marks instead with tranquillo plus a dotted line, ending abruptly with a caesura in the piano part (within a rest), plus risoluto in both parts.

Example 1.

Tranquillo with a dotted line in Mendelssohn Op. 58 mvt 4, bars 144–145, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

Grützmacher’s student, Hugo Becker (1863–1941), who is characterized as a ‘classical player’ in Edmund van der Straeten’s history of the cello,Footnote ⁸¹ is very insistent on the distinction between a gradual change of tempo versus the internally steady pulse implied by tempo-character terms such as animato, tranquillo, and sostenuto.

Animato is the marking for that feeling that makes us talk faster when relating events that affect us very strongly. (St. Saens concerto 1st mvt.). Meno or più tranquillo, on the other hand, should check the flow of the narrative; it can be used either as a calming effect, or to underline the meaning of a particular place, in order to bring out something musically significant. Sostenuto represents a similar moment. Sostenuto means held back and is not to be confused with ritardando.Footnote ⁸²

Grützmacher’s tempo-character terms include all of these examples, as well as pesante, which appears to be a slower tempo with very pronounced accents (of which more later). He can mark these terms over a phrase, a section of a phrase, or even an individual motive, as he does at the transitions between sections in the second movement of Op. 45 (Examples 2 and 3).

Example 2.

Pesante accents at a structural joint, Mendelssohn Op. 45 mvt 2, bars 42–51, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

Example 3.

Animato leading into a structural joint, Mendelssohn Op. 45 mvt 2, bars 86–91, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

Gradual changes of pulse, such as accelerando or ritenuto, are very rare in Grützmacher’s editions, unless he marks them as transitions between these internally steady tempos, as in the first movement of the Sonata Op. 45, where he buttresses a crescendo with an accelerando to lead into the coda of the movement, which he has marked animato (see Example 4).

Example 4.

Cresc. with accel. leading into animato, Mendelssohn Op. 45 mvt 3, bars 323–333, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

Words for a gradual slowing of the tempo (ritenuto, rallentando, ritardando) are even more rare than accelerando (although he is fond of calmando as a transition to tranquillo sections). In the second movement of Op. 58, he even marks senza rallentando at the end of a lyrical section (see Example 5).

Example 5.

Senza rallentando at the end of a melodic section, Mendelssohn Op. 58 mvt 2, bars 84–90, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

The pattern of a steady but variable pulse even holds for the third movement of Op. 58, in which the piano’s opening phrases are marked ‘Chorale’ and the cello’s entry in bar 12 is marked ‘quasi recit’. It is tempting to speculate that ‘the tradition of the composer’ here connects to Mendelssohn’s own treatment of Bach’s sacred recitative, making the cello an evangelist rather than a character in an opera – especially when we consider the marked difference between Grützmacher’s timing in this recitative and the open soliloquy style of his concerto cadenzas. In the cadenza to the slow movement of his edition of Romberg’s Concerto No. 1, for example, nearly every bar has either an accelerando or a ritenuto, a constant fluctuation of pulse.Footnote ⁸³ In the slow movement to Mendelssohn Op. 58, however, only one bar gets this treatment: a flurry of semiquavers over a static 6/4 chord in the piano. For this bar (Example 6), Grützmacher recommends a small tempo arc of accelerando-rallentando-tranquillo, punctuated by two different types of accent (presumably with an agogic component), plus a fermata over the last beat.

Example 6.

More rhapsodic timing than usual, Mendelssohn Op. 58 mvt 3, bar 18, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

This may well be a way of expressing Romantic subjectivity, in contrast to the classical objectivity of the rest of the piece. In his later, more restrained edition of the same sonata, he removes the specific advice and instead writes a piacere in parentheses over this bar, suggesting that the advice we see above is meant to convey a moment of ‘Willkür’: passion briefly escaping from self-control.

Physical Presence

In his memoirs of famous musicians, the pianist, conductor, and composer Carl Reinecke (1824–1910) speaks in glowing terms of the dramatic soprano, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (1804–1860), noting in particular the perfect embodiment of classical beauty in her physical presence and motions. ‘In Copenhagen she sang Romeo in Bellini’s Montecchi und Capuleti and Iphigenie and Gluck’s opera of the same name,’ he recalls. ‘Truly special was the classical grandeur and beauty with which she portrayed the Greek priestess. A painter who was sitting next to me in the theatre, exclaimed repeatedly: “One could set this whole thing down on canvass! Every pose is a perfect masterpiece of fine sculpture”’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The idea of a classical performance as embodied sculpture may also lie behind recurring words such as ‘grandeur’ (Größe) and ‘repose’ (Ruhe) in descriptions of classical playing. For example, an 1889 review of the pianist Emil von Sauer (1862–1942) remarks that his ‘grand repose, which has a fundamental influence on the playing, is truly classical.’Footnote ⁸⁵

The physical component of this classical ‘große Ruhe’ is reflected in Grützmacher’s bowings and fingerings. He often sets up both hands in such a way that it is possible to be absolutely motionless between phrases, and even within phrases, extraneous motion is kept to a minimum. This aspect of his technique allows the cellist to sit very still in performance, drawing the audience in, rather than entertaining them with exaggerated poses as some of Grützmacher’s contemporaries reportedly did.Footnote ⁸⁶

In the right hand, he accomplishes this by making it largely unnecessary to lift the bow from the string. First, he will often bow a motive or small phrase ‘backwards’ (meaning the strong beats fall on an up-bow), so that the time he spends on a down-bow is gradually balanced out by the time he spends on an up-bow.Footnote ⁸⁷ If this balance does not occur naturally with the original slurring, he will often change the slurring so that it does. This means that he rarely needs to ‘recover’ the bow (meaning to lift the bow in order to resume bowing in the right direction and in the preferred part of the bow), a technique that both modern and baroque cellists use today.

Second, when he does need to recover the bow, he is much more likely to hook two notes together (marked by two staccato marks under a slur) than to lift the bow in the air between two consecutive down-bows (often called ‘retaking’). He very rarely marks an up-bow or down-bow sign, and it was not part of his language to mark two of these in a row, as we can see from a letter he wrote to Abraham in 1896, defending his additions of dots under slurs in an edition of Beethoven variations for cello and piano.

I have not added any dots or slurs, and your comment about these can only refer to those places where the composer has written two separate notes, e.g but which for the sake of practicability (the right bowing) must be played in one bow, thus: . In order to provide this direction, there is no other way than to add dots and slurs, which comes to the same effect as the composer’s separate notes.Footnote ⁸⁸

As a result, it is very easy to lose track of when Grützmacher is on an up bow or a down-bow, and even in his most densely annotated editions, many lines of music can go by before he marks one of these signs.

Just as Grützmacher’s bow mostly stays on the string, so his left hand stays almost constantly grounded on the neck of the instrument. In his book of Tägliche Übungen, Op. 67, he makes clear through his marking of finger holds (horizontal square brackets) that fingers should be kept on the string as long as possible, even during shifts (see Example 7).

Example 7.

Finger holds over upward and downward shifts: Grützmacher Op. 67 p. 5.

Grützmacher’s paedagogical editions of older works, particularly Romberg’s sonatas and concertos, show these finger holds in a wide variety of musical contexts. It is possible that within dolce and espressivo markings, the finger holds also represent warnings against using too much vibrato, since they often appear over the most expressive notes in the melody, when vibrato seems almost irresistible.

Grützmacher also sometimes marks the word restez, a word which in cello music is normally used in the context of thumb position, meaning to leave the thumb in place. In Example 8, he marks it over nearly a full bar of rest in the lower positions, which must mean that the cellist needs to keep the thumb grounded on the neck so as not to lose the pitch over the rest.

Example 8.

Restez marking over an open string plus a rest, Romberg Op. 43, No. 2, mvt 3, cello 2, bars 99–106.

From a twenty-first-century vantage point, the most salient feature of Grützmacher’s editions is his use of portamento, both in glissando markings and in shifts under slurs implying some kind of slide.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Example 9, he writes gliss. from an open string to a stopped note, with an expressive marking of con grandezza.

Example 9.

Gliss. from an open string to a stopped note, Beethoven Cello Sonata Op. 5, No. 2, mvt 2, bars 277–281, ed. Grützmacher 1867.

Since contemporary accounts of his playing do not discuss his portamento, it seems very likely that his fingerings and glissando markings represent an undisputed norm of string playing, rather than either a personal quirk or a particularly classical feature.Footnote ⁹⁰ In his pedagogical editions, he occasionally even marks non gliss., suggesting that portamento is such a normal part of cello playing that it needs to be managed rather than prescribed. Because portamento acquired such a loaded meaning for musicians in the twentieth century,Footnote ⁹¹ it is a considerable challenge for twenty-first-century musicians to imagine Grützmacher’s classical ethos while looking at his fingerings. If we keep the classical value of stillness in mind, though, we can see that some fingerings that look like ‘effects’ are actually designed to anticipate a coming shift. In Example 10, the density of implied portamento (including three slides in the first phrase alone) looks at first to be the defining characteristic of this performance. However, when we look more closely, we can see Grützmacher’s commitment to the silence between phrases. First, Grützmacher invests in the silence at the end of bar 2 by shifting into position for the A in bar 3 just before the rest.

Example 10.

Classical stillness between phrases in Beethoven Cello Sonata Op. 102, No. 2, mvt 2, bars 1–10, ed. Grützmacher 1867.

Since the second phrase begins with an implied up-bow, both hands – and therefore, the entire body – can be absolutely motionless during the rest, allowing the cellist to hold the audience in a deep stillness before the second phrase. For the next two silences, the left hand needs to shift, but thanks to Grützmacher’s symmetrical slurring, the bow can still remain motionless between phrases. Finally, at the espressivo marking in bar 10, Grützmacher marks both a shift and a new down-bow, which must have created an effect similar to a singer taking a breath before an outpouring of feeling.

Character-Led Bowing

When Joachim and Moser criticize the turn-of-the-century Franco-Belgian school of violin playing for having lost touch with the older and more international classical school, they focus their attention on the relationship of bow technique with expressive nuance and musical character. ‘In [the Franco-Belgian] performance of the various bowings’, Joachim and Moser complain, ‘there is as little trace of the “characteristic” (a quality with which the interpretation of both German and Romance classical masterpieces is intimately bound up), as there is of that modulatory richness in variety of tone, whereby all nuances of expression may at once be commanded’.Footnote ⁹²

The central importance of accent and nuance, expressed through the bow, was also perhaps the main point of tension between Grützmacher’s and Abraham’s editorial visions. Abraham’s letter to Grützmacher, quoted at the beginning of this essay, goes on to give an irate list of places where Grützmacher has changed the accentuation markings in the first of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Op. 73.Footnote ⁹³ In his own defence, Grützmacher writes:

It always seemed to me that the specific purpose of your edition (and I also believed that you shared this view) to bring the works closer to the many people who are not in a position to orient themselves sufficiently within them, through the most scrupulously precise markings – but not only through fingerings, since for masters that is the smallest matter (one can still play a piece even with the wrong fingering) but namely through guidance as to the right performance style [richtigen Vortrag], through the introduction of the necessary nuances and contrasts, without which no musical work in the world can be conceived and realised.Footnote ⁹⁴

Grützmacher’s underlined words in this passage are worth considering more closely. The statement that no musical work in the world can exist – even in thought – without ‘the necessary nuances and contrasts’ fits within Doğantan-Dack’s framework of ‘the music’ as the prime mover of conscientious music-making. As far as Grützmacher is aware, no composer has ever attempted to create a work that excludes the necessary nuances and contrasts, and any composer who did attempt this would be in error. The definite article in this phrase makes Grützmacher’s statement even more specific: he is not merely claiming that nuance and contrast are essential to music. Rather, he is referring to a specific set of nuances and contrasts, which he and his colleagues would immediately supply to a piece of music as a matter of common sense.Footnote ⁹⁵ The specific purpose of his editions for Peters – his other underlined word – is to transmit this musical common sense to ‘people who are not in a position to orient themselves sufficiently’ when encountering a new musical work. Through exposure to good models, these cellists can develop the ‘well-cultivated feelings’ referred to by Czerny, so that they gradually learn how to connect specific nuances with the demands of the music, in any context. From this passage, it seems clear that Grützmacher meant his additions to the score as a model of good musical taste: classical in the sense of exemplary. His pedagogical editions – recognizable by the title page inscription, ‘precisely marked for teaching’ (für den Unterricht genau bezeichnet/zum Unterricht genau bezeichnet) – are particularly specific about the connections between accentuation and musical character, as well as their implications for bow distribution and articulation.

Behind all of Grützmacher’s nuancing lies a basic grammar of local emphasis. In the melody, greater emphasis is given to tessitura peaks, accidentals, and notes that form part of a surprising harmony. Accompanimental figures generally mirror the emphatic notes in the melody, although they can also introduce an extra layer of metrical accents (strong beats), which are either absent in the melody or too subtle to mark. Within this basic grammar, however, the frequency of Grützmacher’s emphatic notes varies considerably according to the character of the music. For example, pesante includes accents on nearly every note, while brillante (Grützmacher’s favourite marking for passagework) lets many notes go by without any emphasis whatsoever.

Just as the frequency of accent varies with the character, so does the type of accent. Most of the characters within forte dynamics involve some combination of accent marks (<) and staccato marks (·). Since accents are thickest on the ground in pesante, we can think of them as an especially heavy emphasis. In an unusually pictorial marking in Mendelssohn Op. 58 (Example 11), he combines accent marks with the word ‘Mitternachtsglocke’ (midnight bell) over Mendelssohn’s arco/pizzicato unison at the end of the third movement.

Example 11.

Accents as a midnight bell in Mendelssohn Sonata Op. 58, mvt. 3, bars 41–47, ed. Grützmacher 1878.

In this instance, Grützmacher has replaced Mendelssohn’s original sf markings with accent markings, suggesting that he found them especially fit for the purpose of imitating the long decay of a giant bell. The bow distribution markings in his paedagogical editions bear this out: accents tend to require more bow than the surrounding notes, often the whole bow (marked G.B.) as in Example 12.

Example 12.

GB markings over accented notes in Romberg Op. 43, No. 2 mvt 1, cello 1, bars 156–157, ed. Grützmacher.

Staccato marks represent the opposite pole of loud emphasis: in his editions of Romberg’s cello sonatas, they are the most densely marked in energico, while in the Romberg concertos they are the most frequent in brillante. In the sonata version of brillante, in which the cellist does not need to work as hard to project, a staccato mark appears only occasionally, to show local emphasis such as a tessitura peak (see Example 13). Since staccato marks are absent from Grützmacher’s mf character markings (such as sonoro and gioviale) we can think of them as an energetic, fiery emphasis, like a shout in forte or a quiet exclamation in piano.

Example 13.

Brillante in Romberg Op. 43, No. 3 mvt 3, cello 1, ed. Grützmacher.

Within a more lyrical context, Grützmacher’s two most common markings are dolce and espressivo. In the Mendelssohn Cello Sonatas, he replaces Mendelssohn’s cantabile markings with either dolce or espressivo, and in his six-volume transcription of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte, nearly every section of every melody is marked with one of these. We can therefore think of them as representing the ebb and flow of a classical cantilena. Espressivo is characterized by its diversity of accent types: accent, hairpin, sf, fz, tenuto, messa di voce (small diamond-shaped hairpin pair), and even various combinations of these on a single note. This ties in with Muzio Clementi’s advice, as far back as 1801, that within espressivo ‘every note has its peculiar force and energy’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Dolce, meanwhile, is the richest in hairpins pairs, allowing the bow to smooth over moments of emphasis by dwelling on the connective tissue between emphatic and unemphatic notes.

Grützmacher’s pedagogical editions are especially helpful in showing how his use of the bow could change from phrase to phrase, and even from motive to motive, all within a framework he intended not as a personal interpretation, but simply as the proper response to the character of the music. This aspect of bowing technique – highlighting the correct accents, in ways that respond to musical character – lies at the very heart of the ‘richtiger Vortrag’ Grützmacher wished to set down.

It also has a crucial role in relation to the other classical performance features discussed above. If the disciplined management of time and of physical motion create a sense of sculptural repose, then character-led bowing provides an animating fire, so that music’s power to move its listeners is assured. In Grützmacher’s classicity, music exists not to be coolly admired, but rather to convey the full range of human emotions.

Conclusion: Grützmacher and Today’s Musicianship

In 2014, the charismatic celebrity-pianist, Lang Lang, published an annotated collection of piano works called The Lang Lang Piano Book.Footnote ⁹⁷ This collection intersperses glossy photos of Lang Lang with short, personal introductions to the pieces, highlighting his own relationship to the music. The scores themselves are then lightly annotated, with occasional verbal suggestions such as ‘play from your heart’ and ‘careful with the pedal’. Sold with an accompanying CD, and marketed with a clever photo of Lang Lang sitting at a piano made to resemble a half-open book, The Lang Lang Piano Book steers into his celebrity status, openly inviting readers to bask in the glow of his personality. A review in Gramophone Magazine, dripping with urbane hostility, refers to the book as ‘Lang Lang’s latest branding exercise’, underscoring the tension between Lang Lang’s approach to a solo piano career and the high seriousness normally required by that office.Footnote ⁹⁸

Diametrically opposed to Lang Lang’s public image is the cerebral gravitas of Richard Goode, one of the few musicians today whose concert reviews frequently invoke the old concept of classical musicianship (or at least, musicianly classicism). A concert review in the Financial Times instructs us that ‘his favoured area of the repertoire is the classical era, where he is regarded especially highly as a Beethoven interpreter, and when he ventures further afield, he takes the mantle of a serious classicist with him’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The reviewer goes on to set these two pianists’ personalities side by side, since both had performed Schumann’s solo piano music in London’s enormous Royal Festival Hall.

It can be difficult to imagine classical musicianship coexisting with annotated editions, in an age that associates the one with self-abnegation, and the other with blatant egotism. As we have seen, however, Grützmacher’s public musical persona was a great deal closer to Richard Goode’s, and he intended his editions not as celebrity exhibitionism, but as a guideline to the same serious good taste that he brought to the stage.

While his critical reception might speak directly across the centuries to Richard Goode’s, it is also clear that Grützmacher’s ‘thoughtful playing style’ would have sounded nothing like Goode’s ‘clear-headed intellect’. One reason for this is that the concept of classicity has undergone the unavoidable semantic shift born of the twentieth century’s anti-Romantic movements such as Neoclassicism, Modernism, and Neue Sachlichkeit. Classicity, or ‘classicism’, comes down to us as a rebuke of the emotional excesses of late Romanticism, rather than an inherently Romantic longing for the lost perfection of Antiquity.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The other reason is that elements of music-making undergo their own semantic shifts over time. Grützmacher’s artful inflections of pitch and tempo, as well as his colourful delineation of character through the bow, might strike us today as more Lang-Lang-ish, due to the sentimental or melodramatic qualities these techniques took on in the twentieth century. These semantic shifts, both verbal and musical – together with a level of editorial intervention that would make Lang Lang blush – make it difficult to think ourselves back into a time when both Grützmacher’s style of playing and his style of editing could exist in perfect harmony with the deep seriousness of his approach to music-making.

However, there are rich rewards to be had from taking nineteenth-century annotated editions seriously as exemplars of good taste from another time period. For those of us with an interest in historical performing practices, the advantages are obvious enough – although we will need to grapple with a different semantic shift, as the words ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ tend to be used as a shorthand for the playing styles of music history’s Classical and Romantic periods, rather than as timeless artistic abstractions drawn from our ancestors’ own imagined pasts.Footnote ¹⁰² Annotated editions offer certain types of musical information that are scarce or inaccessible within the more traditional study of written sources, or even through the rapidly growing field of early recording studies. There is no need to speculate, for example, whether Grützmacher’s classical bowing advice aligned perfectly with the ‘sculptural’ playing of Edmund Singer, because Singer himself produced a large number of very detailed performing editions, which have yet to be closely studied in their own right.Footnote ¹⁰³ Meanwhile, the score annotations of early Romantic French string players such as Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) can shed light on the mysterious transitions and connections between the period we now call Classical and the period that increasingly spoke of classicity.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

More broadly, nineteenth-century annotations have the power to enrich our relationship with musical text. Many scholars and performers have already commented on the poverty of musical notation when it is taken as a set of strict instructions left by the composer,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ rather than, as Ranken puts it, a shadow of something, to be met on its own terms and shared between performers and listeners. Accepting the testimony of a musician like Grützmacher, rather than dismissing it as vandalism, requires that we imagine a more symbiotic relationship linking together the composer, the performer, and the listener. With his guidance, all three groups might learn again to be co-creators, translating the human experience into writing, and then back again into experience.