There are basically two kinds of writing about music in the mainstream media: ones that are not about the music and ones that are. The first group includes hagiographies of pop musicians in which the writer marvels at how wonderful and successful and beautiful or, if older, how enduring the artist is. The second group, fewer and far between these days, includes writing about the music. In that category we have an interesting piece about the performance traditions associated with Handel's Messiah, one of the biggest hits in the classical music repertory: Handel’s ‘Messiah’ Teaches Us a Surprising Lesson About Tradition. The writer, Matthew Walther, begins with the accretions that have grown up around the piece:
Many of the most popular recorded versions of “Messiah” emerged along with the rise of stereo in the 1950s. By that time performers and audiences alike accepted that the orchestration of the oratorio would be tinkered with and that the number of singers would be doubled or tripled or multiplied a hundredfold. The default idiom for Handel’s work was romantic, the proper mood regal rather than somber.
For my money, the best example of this kind of “Messiah” is a recording made by the British conductor Leopold Stokowski in 1966 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Stokowski was an artist incapable of embarrassment, a textually heedless showman known for his contributions to Disney’s musical “Fantasia” and his wonderfully lush orchestral arrangements of piano works such as Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque.” His “Messiah,” which features only 16 of the work’s movements, is not a sensitive interpretation. Listening to it with my head three feet away from my ancient Dahlquist speakers is the closest thing I can imagine to finding myself in the position of the shepherds in St. Luke’s Gospel, when “the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.”
But then he goes on to relate how the early music movement has influenced performances:
But this purist view was always dubious. It assumes that the correct approach to performing a piece of music can be “unearthed” in a straightforward archaeological sense. This understanding of authenticity — as something that requires discarding a tradition that evolved organically over time — has been influential, and not only in the world of classical music. It is of a piece, for example, with the 1986 edition of the Oxford Shakespeare, whose editors changed the name “Falstaff” to “Oldcastle” in “Henry IV, Part 1,” as its author may well have written in a manuscript that does not, alas, exist. In doing so they made a speculative attempt at recovering “history” but erased one of the most famous literary creations of all time.
Despite its reverence for the music of earlier eras (and its commendable rediscovery of countless works that had not been performed for centuries), the historically informed performance movement can be seen as a fundamentally modern project, one that unwittingly destroys the past — the actual performance tradition handed down to us by generations of conductors and musicians — in the name of reclaiming it.
And this was very much the point of Richard Taruskin's numerous discussions of the historically-informed performance trend which in his view was really as much or more about 20th century tastes as it was about Baroque tastes.
Let's have a couple of samples. Here is Leopold Stokowski conducting the Hallelujah chorus in 1966, the heyday of romantic excess in recording:
And here is the much tidier and restrained version by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient music in 1980:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUPzC3dUSg0
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