We demand note-perfect renditions from the musicians we hear, but do the right notes really matter in a great performance?
Daniel Barenboim rarely plays all of the right notes. He certainly didn't get everything right a couple of nights ago at the Royal Festival Hall as the soloist playing Liszt's two piano concertos with his orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, conducted by Pierre Boulez. But as Andrew Clements says in his review, thanks partly to the mistake-swallowing powers of the sustaining pedal but mostly to the brilliance of Barenboim's musical imagination, that didn't matter. And it won't on Tuesday night, either, when Barenboim plays two of Schubert's late, great sonatas at London's Wigmore Hall (do what you must to get a ticket; and while you're at it, see if you can find one for me!) and in which he almost certainly won't play all of the right notes, either.
And yet he will almost certainly give a performance for the lucky few that will be seared on their collective memory. Today, we often expect musicians to give us note-perfect performances, and any deviations from what we're used to hearing on perfectly polished recordings of Beethoven or Brahms or Bruckner ? a cracked horn note, a fumbled left-hand figuration, a memory lapse of a few bars ? is a like a scar across our memory of a favourite sonata or symphony, as if someone had taken a knife to Las Meninas or the Mona Lisa. That's why we can all understand and sympathise with Hannibal Lecter, surely, when he has to eat the flute player of the orchestra after he messes up Mendelssohn at the start of The Red Dragon, thereby improving the quality of the orchestra, and making everyone's lives better. That's taking it to extremes ? er, of course ... ? but there's a little bit of Lecter in all of us in our demands for perfection from the musicians we hear, and our wincing at a moment that's out of tune or out of time, even if we don't have to actually serve up the hapless musician with chianti and fava beans.
The point is, we actually have an incredibly narrow calculus of perfection when it comes to judging musical performances, if we take as an axiom the idea that every note should be played at the right time and at the right pitch. If you continue in that vein, you wind up in a weird philosophical place where any performance that doesn't play all of the right notes cannot, strictly speaking, be considered a real performance of the work. That's the consequence of arguments put forward by Nelson Goodman, the niceties of which you'll have to explore yourself, but whose implications are clearly bonkers in an almost Lecterian sense.
As Robert Philip points out in his book, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, it wasn't always like this. Earlier generations of musicians maintained a different kind of fidelity to the musical work. The ideal was to communicate the expressive, emotional, and structural content of a piece of music, not just to get the notes right. That's why if you listen to Artur Schnabel's Beethoven or Alfred Cortot's Chopin, you might be appalled at the fistfuls of wrong notes they play ? if you bring a note-perfect mindset to your listening. But what "mistakes" are these two masters really making? They're going for a poetic idea in their performances, trying to communicate what they feel to be the expressive truth of the music. That's a higher goal, in their minds, than merely playing accurately and spotlessly, and their recordings speak directly to your imagination with blazing intensity, even when they're not getting the notes right. Instead, like Barenboim on Monday, the wrong notes, in other words, can be the right notes so long as the "idea" of the music is right.
Yet both the "note-perfect" and "poetic truth" conceptions of musical performance share something. They're both inherently unrealisable. No live performance will ever truly be note-perfect, and no single interpretation can ever be the only realisation of the poetic possibilities of a Beethoven sonata or a Mozart concerto. And it's in that difference from the ideal and the reality where the humanity of musical performance lies. Daniel Barenboim will go on to the Wigmore Hall stage tonight trying to reach that parnassus where his vision of the music precisely corresponds to what his fingers and feet do at the keyboard and what the audience will hear. Thankfully, he won't get there, so like every other great performer, he'll keep on trying and keep on failing, magnificently and shatteringly.
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