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Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna
and the Early Music Revival
Peter
WatchornAshgate
Press, 2007
247 pp. £55 [ISBN 978-0-7546-5787-3]
Today
virtually a forgotten name, the Viennese harpsichordist and fortepianist Isolde Ahlgrimm played a major role in the early
music revival alongside such seminal figures as Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt. Yet you will seek in vain to find
mention of Ahlgrimm, let alone an appreciation, in any book devoted to the early music revival, while the current edition
of New Grove devotes a mere twelve lines to her, without mention of her pioneering role. Ahlgrimm
was born into a musical family in Vienna in July 1914, pursuing an orthodox education as a piano pupil at the Vienna Academy.
In 1930 the young musician came to England on vacation, where she met Juliette Matton, a Belgian music teacher involved with
the Dolmetsch circle, who introduced a captivated Isolde to the harpsichord. But it was her meeting with the wealthy and eccentric
young Viennese collector Erich Fiala that both personally and professionally was to prove the catalyst for Ahlgrimm. Fiala
already had the foundation of a collection of old instruments that after his marriage to Ahlgrimm would grow to a staggering
600 or more items, including keyboard, string and wind instruments. Fiala was not content just to collect instruments, but
he also had them restored to a playable condition and original state. Commencing on the fortepiano, Ahlgrimm soon came to
the decision that her future lay not with the modern piano, but its forbears. With a pioneering spirit some years ahead of
her time, she set out to master the secrets of the fortepiano and later the harpsichord by means of the study of old treatises.
In February 1937, Ahlgrimm and Fiala commenced a remarkable series of concerts entitled ‘für Kenner und
Liebhaber’ (for connoisseurs and amateur music lovers), originally presented in the couple’s
large Vienna house but later spreading to larger venues for orchestral concerts. The series would run almost without interruption
throughout the war years, a period during which Fiala was sent for a time to Berlin, where, never the most tactful of men,
he managed to run foul of the Nazis. Included in the ‘Kenner und Liebhaber’ concerts were complete cycles of Bach’s
keyboard works played on the harpsichord and Mozart’s solo piano music on the fortepiano, both played from memory, the
latter so successful that each concert was given four times. But it was for her Bach that Ahlgrimm would become better known
to the outside world. In August 1951 Ahlgrimm signed a contract with the recently established Dutch record company Philips
to record for the first time the entire Bach keyboard works (including ‘orchestral’ and chamber works) on the
harpsichord, the instrumental works played on historic instruments from the Fiala collection, the performers including the
youthful Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his future wife Alice. This was probably the high point of Ahlgrimm’s playing career,
for divorce from the apparently increasingly manipulative Fiala parted her from many of the historic instruments on which
she had relied. Although further recordings and performances were undertaken, and Ahlgrimm became a noted pedagogue and harpsichord
professor at the Vienna Academy, there is the distinct impression that her professional career to some extent stalled at just
about the time the likes of Harnoncourt and Leonhardt started to establish Vienna as a centre of the early music revival,
a curious paradox to which we’ll return below. Although I was involved with the record industry
at the time many of Ahlgrimm’s Bach recordings were issued, sadly I don’t recall ever hearing any of them, my
own interest in early music being then only in its infancy. Her performances were particularly notable for their use of harpsichords
that although not historic instruments were infinitely more rooted in originals than the monster Pleyels employed by Wanda
Landowska, instruments that had no more concern with historicism than did their player. Ahlgrimm sought above all, so it seems,
not to translate the sounds of the instruments she played, but realise their original sonorities and place them at the service
of music. In other ways, too, Ahlgrimm both practically and aesthetically presaged the modern ‘authentic’ movement
to a remarkable degree, for instance, in such matters as registration, which having set she rarely changed, a direct contrast
to the colourful approach of a Landowska and her contemporaries. Her recognition of the importance of rhetoric reads with
astonishing percipience considering the period during which she developed her ideas on performance practice, which, years
before their time, also addressed the question of the ‘authentic listener’: The
respect that we give to the name Bach leads us rather easily to listen to all his works with equal seriousness… They
[the harpsichord concertos] might be played in the company of a music-loving prince, or in the coffee houses of Leipzig. A
highly spiced roast boar with a glass of good red wine certainly makes a different basis for listening than “Stalls
left, row 17, seat 20” in a modern concert hall! If we must wish in vain to have supper served with the concert one
request need not remain unfulfilled. Hear these concertos merrily among a circle of good friends. Even if a cheerful word
or two may make you on occasion miss the counterpoint of a violin part (or a wrong note!), you will surely receive what Bach
meant to give you: Pleasure. [p.129]. More than a half a century later we have still not taken such wise
words on board. The Ahlgrimm story is therefore not only intriguing in its own right, but also incorporates a record to be set straight,
an apparent injustice to be righted. For that alone thanks are due to the Australian harpsichordist Peter Watchorn, himself
a sometime pupil of Ahlgrimm’s and a long-standing admirer whose work on the artist has been in gestation for many years,
for many of which his subject was something of a reluctant collaborator, although later she apparently warmed to the project.
Watchorn is especially to be commended for his painstaking assembly of so much documentary material, in particular Ahlgrimm’s
own notes on the ‘Kenner und Liebhaber’ and other concerts, a comprehensive (if not complete) listing of the instruments
collected by Fiala and Ahlgrimm and a detailed commentary on the Philips intégral of the Bach keyboard works.
Ahlgrimm’s notes frequently reveal the startlingly modern approach to authenticity, as in the case of this radio broadcast
given on 19 November 1940: Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet.
The violin was played on an instrument from Dr Fiala’s collection, one that Schubert had owned as a schoolboy in a Viennese
church (school). He had engraved his name on it. This violin was donated by Dr Fiala to the City Museum. All the remaining
string instruments were from the same maker, drawn from both Dr Fiala’s collection and the collection of the Vienna
Court Chapel. Isolde Ahlgrimm played a fortepiano from the time when the “Trout” was composed [p. 190]. While
today we might expect more specific detail on the instruments – I suspect the fortepiano may have been the 1819 André
Stein listed in the Fiala collection – it still comes as something of a jolt to realise that these words relate to an
event given in wartime Vienna. It
should by this point be apparent that this is a book that should interest anyone with an interest in the history of the modern
early music revival, but unfortunately those who do investigate it are unlikely to find it an easy read. I suspect that Watchorn
is happier with the keys of a harpsichord than he is those of a computer or typewriter; his writing style is wooden and he
has made the curious choice of dividing his narrative into frequent sub-headings, thus continually disrupting the establishment
of any real sense of style or flow. Annoyingly, repetition is rife, too frequent to even make it worth quoting an example,
and there are other curiosities of style that suggest Watchorn was much in need of a good copy editor. I cannot recall, for
example, another book written by an English-speaking author and published in the UK that
consistently renders Handel’s name as ‘Händel’, an affectation that might annoy others less than it
does me, while the pedantic translation of every German term – ‘Gasthof (hotel)’ – also served
to leave me feeling distinctly spiky every time I put the book down. The index is a mess. Quite as
significant are the questions Watchorn leaves unanswered. That he should have trodden fairly delicately over the question
of the breakdown of Ahlgrimm’s marriage is understandable, her own reluctance to be forthcoming on the matter reasonably
honoured by her biographer. Nevertheless, his reticence and failure to investigate further the highly pertinent question of
just why Ahlgrimm’s name sank into near-total oblivion is less forgivable and especially so in the case of the role
played by the Harnoncourts. In their young days, before the foundation of either Concentus Musicus or the Leonhardt Consort,
both Alice and Nikolaus played in Ahlgrimm and Fiala’s Amati Orchestra, Nikolaus playing as gambist or cellist in four
of the Philips Bach cycle LPs. Yet Watchorn tells that us that after these recordings he and Ahlgrimm went their ‘separate
ways’, that the Harnoncourts never acknowledged or mentioned Ahlgrimm in later life and refused to be interviewed for
this book (unlike Leonhardt). In 1990, Watchorn records, Alice Harnoncourt expressed surprise that Isolde Ahlgrimm was still
alive, ‘with no acknowledgment that they had ever had more than a passing association’ [p. 128]. Yet Ahlgrimm
retired from teaching at the Wiener Hochscule für Musik only in 1984 and the following year was honoured by her native
city with its highest civilian award. Why do the Harnoncourts give every indication that they wish to airbrush their association
with Ahlgrimm out of their lives? Crucially, why was such a curious set of circumstances not further investigated by Watchorn
and what (if any) bearing do they have on the veil of secrecy drawn over Ahlgrimm’s seemingly rightful place in the
story of the early music movement? Yet despite its shortcomings, Isolde Ahlgrimm makes an
important contribution to our understanding of the 20th century early music revival, the story of a woman whose role as both
artist and pedagogue is in need of serious re-evaluation.
HANDEL’S
OPERAS 1726–1741
Winton Dean
Boydell, 2006 565 pp. [ISBN 10 1-84383-268-2] £49.85 $85.00
When Winton Dean, the doyen of Handel scholars, first started thinking about a survey of the operas some forty years
ago, he could hardly have envisaged in his wildest dreams that by the time the project was complete every one would have been
commercially recorded. Equally as remarkable in this context is the fact that between 1754, when Admeto became the last Handel
opera to be given in the composer’s lifetime, and the start of the modern revival in 1920 with Rodelinda at Göttingen,
not a single Handel opera was given complete.
Although not announced as such, the
present survey amounts to a volume 2, the first having been published by Oxford University Press as Handel’s Operas
1704-1726 in 1987. The earlier volume was written in association with John Merrill Knapp, although there had been a parting
of the ways some time before the book was completed. For some reason, the imprint of this long and eagerly anticipated sequel
has passed from OUP to Boydell, who are to be congratulated on a handsome publication that includes 16 black and white illustrations,
cleanly produced music examples and a near absence of errors. Although statistics imply greater concision (the earlier book
dealt with 17 operas over 751 pages against the 22 dealt with here), there is no sense of being short–changed, with
the arguable exception of the final opera, Deidamia.
The
scheme of the book follows the same pattern as the earlier volume – and indeed Dean’s even earlier Handel’s
Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959) – with a chapter devoted to each opera in order of composition, itself divided
into sections that start with a synopsis of the plot before proceeding to the background of the opera, a general survey of
the work and a character by character (rather then chronological) analysis of each number. Each chapter concludes with an
admirably up-to-date performance history, including a non-evaluative note of recordings, and sub–sections on the autograph
scores, librettos and the various performing editions. These last, although perhaps of less interest to general readers, will
henceforth form an indispensable reference tool for conductors, researchers, and, more in hope than expectation, stage producers.
Punctuating the chapters devoted to individual operas are those that link the various stages of Handel’s operatic career,
the chapter devoted to “The Rival Queens 1726-1728” being particularly valuable for its concise account of the
rivalry between Handel’s two great prima donnas, Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, a rivalry that played no small
part in the demise of the Royal Academy of Music, the opera company that had supported Handel since 1719. In his consideration
of the five operas in which they appeared together with Senesino, Dean also clearly shows that Handel’s attempts to
accommodate his three superstars on terms of equality seriously affected the balance of the operas concerned (Admeto, Alessandro,
Riccardo Primo, Siroe, and Tolomeo), none of which would be likely to enter a list of “Handel’s greatest operas”.
In the second of two Epilogues, Dean charts the modern
revival of Handel’s operas from the beginnings in Germany, when, among many acts of butchery, opposition to high–voiced
male singers resulted in widespread downward octave transposition. He cites the example of “Qual torrente”, the
brilliant coloratura aria for Caesar in Giulio Cesare, which in transposition when sung “even by a world–famous
baritone [suggests] not so much a summons to battle as a man with a sore throat gargling in his bathroom”. That phase
is largely over, but Dean is also concerned with the modern phenomenon of the omnipotent opera producer, at whom he directs
a few well-aimed and well-deserved kicks for not infrequently bypassing Handel in favour of bolstering his or her own ego.
Finally, there are five appendices, the most valuable of which will probably be that devoted to Handel’s borrowings,
a godsend for lesser mortals plagued by “where have I heard that before?” syndrome. (I’ve consulted the
analogous appendix in the earlier book more times than I care to confess.)
The quotation included in the foregoing paragraph also serves to illustrate one of the great pleasures of Dean’s
writing, for notwithstanding the awesome learning and insight he brings to his books, this is academism worn with the lightest
of touches, with an apt turn of colloquial phrase never far away. The description of the eponymous character in Faramondo
as a “half–witted hero with more than a tendency to cut off his nose to spite his face” is just one of many
felicitous descriptions with which the book abounds. The writing is in fact throughout an object lesson to those who with
half (or less) of Dean’s scholarly knowledge would blind us with obtuse and convoluted language. It is this above all
that will surely ensure Handel’s Operas a place on the shelves of the general enthusiast in addition to specialists.
Those enthusiasts who do turn to Dean will find him in
the main a reliable guide capable of stepping outside academic caution to provide pithily subjective analysis. Not surprisingly
he reserves his strongest endorsement for those operas universally acknowledged as masterpieces, in this period Orlando, Ariodante,
Alcina, the three operas drawn from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. But it is also rewarding to find Dean not only rating
Serse and Partenope (surprisingly revealed in the appendix devoted to modern productions of the operas as one of the least
frequently staged) so highly, but also having no time for the equivocation of commentators embarrassed by the fact that Handel
stooped to writing “comic” operas. As Dean sagely notes of Partenope, Handel shares with Mozart a “comprehensive
vision of human nature as matter for laughter and tears, often in the same situation”. Much the same goes for Serse,
accorded what is arguably the most compelling chapter in an endlessly compelling book. Here Dean not only gives full weight
to earlier versions by Cavalli (Xerses), which he justly praises, and Bononcini, from whom Handel’s many borrowings
are justly set in context as “not so much theft as a strange form of re–creation”, as is Burney’s
excoriation of the libretto as “one of the worst that Handel ever set to Music”. Needless to
say, those who know the operas will not agree with all Dean’s assessments, and his dismissal of Deidamia is surely wide
of the mark in the light of Alan Curtis’ revelatory recording. Indeed his verdict – “a sad culmination of
[Handel’s] long and glorious career in the theatre” – might equally be adapted to his own rather peremptory
final chapter.
Looking back over the book as a whole, certain questions
arise, not all of them comfortable. One that has exercised me considerably is that of Handel’s librettos and Dean’s
views on them. Virtually all are drawn from earlier books, the source often dating back to the 17th or very early 18th century,
when the requirements for extensive stretches of narrative recitative and much shorter arias were very different to those
of Handel’s day. Such librettos required extensive adaptation and, above all, pruning, a process to which Handel became
increasingly prone in his later operas to accommodate London audiences no longer prepared to accept wordy texts in a foreign
language. Why was Handel so wedded to such old sources? As Dean shows time and again in castigating the cut–and–paste
jobs of Handel and his collaborators (where he had one), the results invariably left gaping holes in the plot. How could Handel
the dramatist have moved from an outstanding libretto like Orlando to that of Arianna in Creta, the libretto of which Dean
calls “a wretched affair”, in the space of less than a year? Attempts to find answers beg further questions. How
deeply did Handel and his audiences actually care about the dramatic veracity of the plot and the motivations of the characters
that people them? If the answer is, as I suspect, not much (the operas we especially value today are not always contiguous
with those admired by Handel’s contemporaries), then is Dean applying modern taste and thinking to his excoriation of
so many of the librettos?
By the time Winton Dean had concluded this book he had attained the age of 90,
in itself an extraordinary fact. More astonishing still is the achievement enshrined within the two volumes of Handel’s
Operas, one that will not only stand as a monument to scholarship but is also a legacy that ensures its author an honoured
place in posterity. The completion of a near-lifetime of scholarship, it is a cause for profound gratitude
and the heartiest of congratulations. This
review first appeared in Goldberg Early Music Magazine.
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