Chapter Sixteen

Private Virtue and Public

Vice in the Performance

of “Early Music”

The ambiguities of our title were deliberately intended to be provocative. I
have forgotten whether, when I originally planned this title, I referred to pub-
lic virtues and private vices or the other way around. It makes little difference
either way. But when I use the terminology of morality, I am applying it to
values of scientifi c investigation and artistic endeavor. I do not mean to apply
moral values to any works of art. Attempts from Plato onward to ascribe such
values to art have been distinguished mainly by their ineptitude.
First let us have a look at some constant themes in the nineteenth-century
background that determined much twentieth-century treatment of old music.
With the nineteenth century, an unprecedented awareness of history and of
documents came to the Western world. This coincided with a vast increase in
communication with other parts of the world, and produced an eclecticism
that is the natural result of widespread contacts and acquaintances in histori-
cal time and geographical space. But most striking in this background are cer-
tain antitheses. The eighteenth-century antithesis between the life of reason
and the life of sentiment leads to a confl ict all through the nineteenth century
between rational social planning and Romantic individualism, and, in a way,
to the contrast between the results of the Industrial Revolution and the revival
of handcrafts. The notion of progress that dominated the last half of the nine-
teenth century is almost always counterbalanced by a nostalgia for the past. All
of this we can easily connect with the coming revival of early music.
Also important is the enormous infl uence of science, of so-called scientifi c
thinking, and the inroads it has made ever since the mid-nineteenth century
on social, psychological, and artistic values, and most especially its infl uence
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