Half a century of interpretation of baroque music seen by Renaud Machart

Renaud Machart paints a picture of the interpretation of early music through a succession of “revealing moments” which have marked its history, from Alfred Deller’s first recording in 1949 to pianist Alexandre Tharaud’s Rameau disc in 2001.

Before becoming a journalist, Renaud Machart was a singer at the Chapelle Royale and at Philippe Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale de Ghent. He has therefore rubbed shoulders with many “baroque people” since the beginning of the 1980s until today. Regarding this term which gives its title to the work, the author recalls that its initially deliberately pejorative connotation has evolved over time to the point of being trivialized today, like the term “impressionism” at another time. For his series of portraits of notable figures of the baroque revival, Machart goes back to the early 1950s, not without having previously evoked the work of musicologists from the beginning of the century. The debates around the interpretation of early music in the second half of the 20th century did not go smoothly, between the proponents of an interpretation that was not yet called “historically informed” and the supporters of the romantic tradition. This aesthetic battle began at the beginning of the century, but it took a new turn with the evolution of instrumental manufacturing which faithfully copied period instruments, as well as with the increase in the discographic offering.

Each of the eighteen chapters is devoted to a recording event which marked the history of the baroque revival, pretexts for so many often hagiographic portraits of their performers, including Alfred Deller, Michel Chapuis, Blandine Verlet, Frans Brüggen, Anner Bylsma, René Jacobs, Scott Ross, William Christie… Much space is given to Gustav Leonhardt, whose austere personality was in complete opposition to that of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, which did not prevent them from joining forces for the first major recording project of the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. A fine example of the evolution of interpretation: the different versions of the now famous God bless you by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, stripped in 1979 by Jean-Claude Malgoire of the symphonic dressing, immortalized by Eurovision, thanks to the dotted rhythms. Renaud Machart specifies: “When we listen to it again today, comparing it to what came before, Malgoire’s version seems like a bath of youth; but by comparing it with that of William Christie, published exactly ten years later (…), a gulf seems to separate the two recordings.” He thus points out that many records which once seemed foundational to us have become inaudible today (taking for example the Lessons of Darkness de Couperin by Emma Kirkby and Judith Nelson in 1977).

This review gives an important place to the early 1980s, a period particularly rich in recordings which will be a landmark in the history of the Baroque revival, such as that of the Passion according to Saint Matthew by Herreweghe in 1980. Renaud Machart is very well documented on the history of record labels. The numerous footnotes also refer to specialized articles and works on the subject. A foray into cinema allows us to recall the importance of film Every morning in the world by Alain Corneau for the discovery by a new audience of the viola da gamba and, more broadly, of the music of the era of Marin Marais, music treated “as a character in its own right”. Finally, as an epilogue, the author evokes the versions of Bach or Rameau recorded on a modern piano by pianists whom he describes as “postbaroque”, uninhibited but informed, like Alexandre Tharaud in 2001. And to conclude, with Jordi Savall, that we must recognize in music a “share of immortality, beyond eras and genres”.

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