The few examples of fingering that have come down to us from Bach himself show that
his style of playing was considerably more detached and highly articulated than what we
are used to today.
So far as Haydn and Mozart are concerned, my own taste goes to a performance that
preserves the detached articulation intended. The quality of the music is enhanced by this
fidelity to the phrasing.
Historical purity is not the most important goal of a performance, particularly when we
consider that we can never be sure we are getting it right.
The rule of eighteenth-century notation, still valid in Beethoven’s time, was that a note
before a rest was generally played with less than its written value, never more.
It is evident that each historical change of style brings with it a change in piano technique.
Sergei Prokofiev exploited the dry percussive sonorities of the instrument as no one had
done before. His most remarkable work consists of his earliest pieces especially those
that combine dry attacks with a delicate lyricism. If the invention of a new and original
style of pianism is the criterion, Prokofiev’s masterpiece is the Visions Fugitives, a cycle
of twenty miniatures.
Taste is a matter of will power. To appreciate a new and difficult style takes an act of
will, a decision to experience it again.
Postlude
Equal temperament obliterated the sense of the direction of modulation. The dominant
was a source of drama and of raised tension. The subdominant was a resolving force and
a potential source of lyricism. The piano helped to confirm the full hierarchical system of
tonality in the late eighteenth century and conspired to destroy authentic classical tonality
chromatically from 1830 to the first decades of the twentieth.’
ROSENTHAL
Life
Moriz Rosenthal (1862-1946) was born in Lemburg, now Lwow, in Poland, on 18
December 1862 and died in New York on 3 September 1946. At the age of eight he
commenced his piano studies under Galoth who did not pay much attention to technical
ability but allowed his pupil the greatest freedom in sight reading, transposition and
modulation. In 1872 Rosenthal became a pupil of Karol Mikuli who trained him along
more academic lines. Mikuli had been a pupil of Chopin and had edited his piano music.
On the advice of Rafael Joseffy, Rosenthal was sent to Vienna where he became a pupil
of Joseffy who gave him a thorough grounding in Mendelssohn and Liszt. A tour
through Romania followed when he was fourteen.