1. Peres Da Costa, Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing, x.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. See also, Max Pauer, “Modern Pianistic Problems,” in James F. Cooke, Great Pianists on Piano Playing: Study Talks with Foremost Virtuosos (1913, reprint, Philadelphia: Theodor Presser, 1917), 201-2.
4. Ibid.
5. Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38.
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Clive Brown pointed out in the Foreword to Neal Peres Da Costa’s book Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing that the invention of recording “made
musicians self-conscious about discrepancies between the musical notation and what they actually played.”1 Before the invention, live performance was the only way to listen to
music, and it was a far cry from recordings, which require quality and interpretation that can stand up to repeated listening. He describes the process of losing improvisation from the
performance:
[...] In a recording, these creative nuances and gestures become fossilized, resulting in the loss of their essential spontaneity. As techniques of mechanical reproduction improved
and recordings assumed an increasingly important role in the dissemination of music, recording artists, aware that they would be permanently represented by a single
performance, became ever more concerned to avoid the potential charge of disrespect for the composer's text, particularly with respect to note values, tempo flexibility, and
vertical precision.2
It is also highly intriguing to read that Max Pauer (1866-1945) described his shock when he first heard a recording of his own performance.3 It is difficult to imagine the impact of
early recordings on us, as we are so used to listening to our own recordings, which we can record as many times as we like in the practice room with our iPhones:
When I listened to the first record of my own playing, I heard things which seemed unbelievable to me. Was I, after years of public playing, actually making mistakes that I would
be the first to condemn in any one of my pupils? I could hardly believe my ears, and yet the unrelenting machine showed that in some places, I had failed to play both hands
exactly together and had been guilty of other errors no less heinous because they were trifling. I also learned in listening to my own playing, as reproduced, that I had
unconsciously brought out certain nuances, emphasized different voices, and employed special accents without the consciousness of having done so. Altogether, it made a most
interesting study for me, and it became very clear that the personality of the artist must permeate everything that he does.4
The great pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982), half a century after the era of piano rolls (and other recording formats: acoustic and electrical), observes sharply and describes aptly
the features of those performances:
When we listen to the early phonograph recordings by artists reared in the latter half of the 19th century, we are struck not by the felicities or the gaucheries of their artistry but
by how very different the performing premise seems to have been from that to which we are now accustomed--how very high the level of whimsicality and caprice, how very
flirtatious and extravagant the range of dynamics...to what a very large extent they must have depended on the visual connection, on the supplemental choreography of
movement and gesture.5
As is evident here, performance aesthetics have changed dramatically over the past decades.