Catgut and Candlelight: London, 1973
The air in St John’s Smith Square shivered with anticipation. On a February evening in 1973, Christopher Hogwood raised his baton before a wall of gut-stringed violins and valveless horns. The Academy of Ancient Music, then newly formed, had assembled to record Handel’s Water Music (Oiseau-Lyre L’Oiseau-Lyre DSLO 511, recorded 1977). The sound—lithe, slightly rough, thrillingly direct—broke with a century’s worth of orchestral sheen. This was not nostalgia. It was, quite pointedly, a demand to listen differently: to ask what had been lost, and what might be rekindled, in Britain’s own musical heritage.
Why “Authentic”? Shifting Paradigms in Performance Practice
The phrase “authentic performance” (also known as historically informed performance, or HIP) has acquired a certain notoriety, often misused to imply antiquarianism or even dogmatism. Its real import is far subtler: a scholarly and artistic movement, flourishing since the 1970s in the UK, that interrogates every aspect of how music was played, heard, and understood in its own era. From instrument construction to articulation (how notes are begun and ended), from pitch standards (A=415Hz for Baroque versus today’s A=440Hz) to ensemble placement, the movement seeks not to reconstruct the past but to render it audible and vital.
British musicians and researchers—Hogwood, Sir Roger Norrington, Emma Kirkby, and ensembles like The English Concert—have driven this search, blending musicology with onstage pragmatism. Archival work in libraries from the British Library to the Gerald Coke Handel Collection (Foundling Museum, London) has restored technical knowledge that had vanished from “conservatoire” technique: bow holds, fingerings, vibrato use, and more (Butt, Playing with History, 2002).
Technique Re-found: What Has Actually Changed?
1. Bows, Guts, and Breaths: Instruments as Archaeology
- Stringed Instruments: Period orchestras use gut strings—sheep intestines rather than steel-wound—producing a softer, more transparent sound. The Baroque bow, convex rather than concave, shapes phrasings into “sighs” (più dolce) and dancing articulations (spiccato, détaché) quite alien to post-Romantic smoothness.
- Wind and Brass: Valveless trumpets, wooden flutes, and reedier oboes challenge players to revise their embouchures (mouth position), air support, and intonation strategies. Note, for example, The English Baroque Soloists’ take on Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Archiv 419 656-2, 1987), where ornamentation and pitch bends evoke 17th-century vocal manners described in The Gentleman’s Journal (1694).
- Keyboard Instruments: Instead of the modern Steinway, period ensembles employ fortepianos or harpsichords with vastly lighter actions and darker timbres. The Academy of Ancient Music’s Mozart piano concertos set an early standard for such practice (Decca 443 727-2, 1994).
Guide d’écoute :
- Handel’s Water Music (Academy of Ancient Music, 1978) — Listen at 4’03, where the natural horns’ clean attack, slightly “raw” blend, and avoidance of wide vibrato allow inner lines to emerge with unusual clarity.
- Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth” (Dido and Aeneas, English Baroque Soloists, 1987, 2’40-4’00) — Note the vocal ornamentations and the harpsichord’s crisp support that replaces Romantic legato with rhythmic emphasis.
2. Articulation and Phrasing: The British Dialogue
British sources—Walsh’s editions, the Geminiani “Treatise” (1751), Quantz’s letters to London patrons—describe a language of playing based on articulation: how notes are separated, accented, or subtly linked. In its historical guise this means:
- Shorter note values: Dance music, such as Purcell’s theatre airs, is played with a gentle inégalité (alternation of note lengths), rather than the flattened sound of later orchestras.
- Minimal vibrato: Victorian and post-Victorian British orchestral taste favoured a warm, continuous vibrato; earlier sources (Burney, A General History of Music, 1776–1789) imply vibrato as an ornament—intermittent, never ceaseless.
- Flexibility of tempo: Pre-1800 British playing assumed rubato (give-and-take of pulse) and “French” affect (changing tempi to suit emotional nuance), a practice reinstated by Norrington’s Beethoven (EMI-CDM 7 63026 2, 1987).
Case Study: The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s complete Haydn London Symphonies (Virgin VC 7 90722-2, 1993–1997) used variable bowings drawn directly from Parke’s and Salomon’s annotated parts. Reviews at the time—The Times, 6 March 1994—celebrated the “restored English taste, the phrasing playful but never mannered.”
3. Vocal Production: Speech, Song, and Accent
Authentic performance has also foregrounded the question of English vocal technique. In Purcell or Handel, soloists now heed prosody—rhythm and inflection of speech—and dig into native-language accentuation. Emma Kirkby’s iconic recordings (notably Handel: Messiah, Oiseau-Lyre, 1980) marked, as the Gramophone reviewer observed (June 1981), “a distinctively ‘English’ text delivery, clean yet moved, with every consonant and vowel shaped to the line.”
Similarly, Britten’s operas are now performed “on period” (see The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, 2021) with lighter vocal apparatus and less Italianate resonance, uncovering Britten’s own interest in Elizabethan declamation.
Archival Adventures: From Manuscript to Music Stand
The “authentic” revival draws not only from treatises but also from a quiet revolution in British librarianship and musicology in the 1970s–90s. The digitisation of the Royal College of Music’s early instrument collections, and access to annotated parts in the Bodleian (notably the Salomon Haydn parts, c.1791), has fed a steady stream of new urtexts and performance editions.
- Rediscovered bowings: Manuscripts show “down-bow” starts on strong beats and slurred runs on weak ones—patterns now observable in performances by the London Baroque (BIS-CD-515, 1993).
- Pitch standards: London in the 18th century tuned instruments around A=415Hz, but the Royal Philharmonic Society had shifted to A=438Hz by 1846 (Temperley, “The Pitch of Concerts in Eighteenth-Century England”, Early Music 1981).
- Notational quirks: Fagotti (bassoons) sometimes did not read from the complete orchestral score, but from “paroles”. Editorial work by Clive Brown and David Rowland continues to update our understanding of British notation and transcription practices (see Performing Beethoven, CUP, 1999).
Critical Reception: From Novelty to New Standard
British HIP went mainstream remarkably fast. The Proms in 1980 saw a surge in period-instrument concerts; by 1996, BBC Radio 3 routinely featured works by Tallis to Vaughan Williams “in period”. Some initial resistance—an infamous letter to The Musical Times (Jan 1975) decried “anarchy in string playing”—gave way to institutional acceptance.
By the late 1990s, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and even the London Symphony Orchestra were commissioning baroque specialists for “authentic” inflections in larger-scale works, as noted in BBC Music Magazine, May 1999. This cross-pollination continues: younger ensembles braid historical practice into contemporary commissions, with Tansy Davies and others working alongside the English Concert.
What Has Been Revived — And What Remains Elusive?
- Recovered: Transparent textures, nuanced bowing and articulation, historical instruments, repertory choices (restored Purcell and Croft symphonies), and pedagogical sources (Geminiani, Spohr).
- Ongoing challenges: Issues in reconstructing “lost rhythms” (e.g., the precise manner of Scottish snap in Burney’s accounts), and debates over improvisation in ornamentation—do we really know how Corelli was played in Covent Garden, 1710?
- Open dialogue: British HIP remains much less prescriptive than its continental counterparts. Where the Dutch or Germans might codify fingerings, the British scene thrives on a plurality of approaches, with a tendency towards gentle scepticism (“play it as you feel, provided you know why,” as Parrott wrote in Early Music Review, 2003).
Encart / French Summary : L’essor des mouvements d’interprétation « authentique » au Royaume-Uni a profondément renouvelé la technique instrumentale et vocale britannique. Recherche d’archives, restitution d’instruments anciens, et attention aux sources (traités, partitions annotées) ont permis de retrouver gestes, phrasés et sons que la tradition moderniste avait effacés. Mais la démarche reste vivante, ouverte, nourrie de débats nuancés plus que de dogmes.
Beyond the Score: Legacy and Looking Forward
Far from being a mere curatorial exercise, Britain’s authentic performance movement has broken open the idea that tradition is monolithic or “finished”. Each phrase reborn on gut strings, each line sung according to vernacular speech, is both a tribute and a question: what do we want to hear from our past?
The story is not over. As newly restored scores surface—see the recent discovery of Arne’s Judith fragments (British Library, 2018)—and as more musicians train in historical technique (the Royal Academy’s MA in Historical Performance launched 2014), the dialogue between scholarship and practice deepens. In the uniquely British pluralism of the HIP movement—a blend of rigour, irony, and warmth—echoes the city that shaped it: attentive, evolving, and never quite finished.
References / Discography:
- John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
- David Rowland (ed.), Performing Beethoven: History, Practice, Interpretation (CUP, 1999)
- Charles Burney, A General History of Music (1776–1789)
- Various CDs cited: Oiseau-Lyre, Archiv, BIS, EMI, Decca, Virgin, BBC (see above for exact catalogues)
- BBC Proms archives, bbc.co.uk/proms/archive
- Early music sources: The Gentleman’s Journal (London, 1694); Geminiani: The Art of Playing on the Violin (London, 1751); The Musical Times archives
Disclosure: Aucun des artistes cités n’a collaboré à ce texte.