On guardian.co.uk, on Saturday the 13 August 2011, Nigel Kennedy accuses fellow violinists of destroying Bach’s legacy, claiming that most performances are stripped of passion by musicians who can’t play the master’s works properly.
I remember back in the eighties, when Kennedy shocked the classical world with his radical interpretation of Vivaldi’s “seasons”, dressed in a provocative (but really just a contemporary) outfit: jeans and leather jacket. This enfant terrible was celebrated for his radical appearance, and we all got our hopes that he would be the one who would free us from the formalism of the old, stuck-up nineteenth-century classical tradition, that wearing tails would soon be history, that the classical tradition would finally move on, being stuck for almost a century. After that, he has shown himself as a true crossover performer, always controversial and with a strong anti-establishment image.
Though, in his recent rant over the current establishment’s shortcomings, particularly in his complaints over the early music movement, he reveals himself as one of the most conservative, conformist and reactionary classical performers around, which is a remarkable contrast to his “rogue violinist” image 25 years ago. How can that be?
First, he refers to Bach’s ”legacy”. Yes, there is a Bach legacy, but it strictly doesn’t have much to do with Bach. ”Legacy” is synonymous with “performing tradition”, usually formed long after the composer’s death, in this case with Mendelssohn’s Bach revival in the 1840-ies. A legacy is dictated by an establishment, typically by the kind of establishment that Kennedy presumably opposed twenty-five years ago. Obviously, no artist (except for a few megalomaniacs, like Wagner) designs his own legacy and creates his works to fit into it like into a canon. Bach certainly didn’t, as he would rather have been composing to God’s honour than to his own post mortem fame. So if the composer’s intentions or his aesthetic environment still count as main guidelines for a performance of historical music, one should shut up about legacy.
Secondly, speaking of Bach’s violin music, Kennedy neglects the very function the music had in Bach’s time. He doesn’t consider why Bach wrote his pieces, and thus he’s giving them a different significance than Bach probably did. Bach never wrote pieces as vehicles for far distant future performers to expose their inner feelings. They were contemporary dance music, highly dated entertainment music or liturgical music with representative functions, just like the rest of the inventory of a palace or a church. Undoubtedly frequently religiously inspired, but hardly philosophical. And for the passion bit: expression in musical performance was the realm of the performer, not of the composer. So for a performance to be passionate, fiery and dynamic there would be nothing Bach could do about it unless he performed it himself. And this he knew. Besides, from what we know of Bach’s taste, he would probably have hated it.
Obviously, Kennedy hasn’t paid much attention to what has been going on on the early music scene over the past decades. Since Taruskin came along with his collection “Text and Act”, the usage of the term “authenticity” seized almost overnight (Taruskin, 1995). No one claims to play “authentically” anymore. Nigel, where have you been since 1991?
The statement that “four melodic notes from Yehudi are worth more than a thousand from any of our living violinists” is as provoking today as Kennedy’s hairdo was in 1989. Though, celebrating Menuhin seems some sort of English thing, a bit strange for us today since the old man had his peak about 80 years ago. On the other hand, Kennedy’s description of the English early music style might not be unjust.
What really gets up my nose is Kennedy’s chronocentric view on performing old music. (Chronocentrism and its trapping pits have been explained by Bruce Haynes in “The End of Early Music”, 2007.) Kennedy seems unable to identify which elements in his performance belong to Bach, to himself, to his contemporary environment or to the traditions that have evolved since Bach’s death. For Kennedy, there is only Bach and himself. That makes his performances short of some essentials, and in 2011 that will no longer pass, no matter how strong one’s emotions are on stage. Let us appreciate Kennedy for what he does best, crossover and jazz.
