ROMANTIC VIBRATO

posted by James Reel

    David Hurwitz, of Classics Today, has posted a 115-page essay denouncing the claims of certain period-performance-practice specialists—mainly Roger Norrington—that continuous vibrato was rare in orchestral string playing before World War II. Hurwitz has had enough of Norrington’s terminally dull forays into Romantic music (I’ve always thought of the man as Roger Borington, myself), but it’s only well into the essay that Hurwitz fully vents his frustration with this over-hyped (that is, British) hack: “In my view, Norrington is simply cynically exploiting a phenomenon all too common in the world of classical music: people would rather talk about it than listen to it. When a supposed ‘authority’ makes an oracular pronouncement seeking to justify his interpretive biases, it’s much easier to just accept the result at face value, even if the music sounds awful.”
    Hurwitz’s position is that “continuous vibrato arises naturally out of the demand for continuous expression.” He’s writing mainly about music from the early 19th century forward, but he also finds some precedents for this idea in earlier treatises, notably that of Leopold Mozart, which is often used as a justification for eschewing vibrato almost entirely in pre-Romantic music. But, as Hurwitz points out, Leopold Mozart doesn’t banish vibrato at all, which is clear if you bother to read him carefully (which I have). Leopold rails against excessive vibrato, applied indiscriminately. You also have to keep in mind that Leopold’s treatise reflects the taste of one man living north of the Alps; you can’t really generalize about pan-European performance practice circa 1756 from his writings—indeed, if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that Leopold was going against the grain to some degree, because he implies that vibrato was rampant among Italian violinists of his time, much to his distaste.
    Writes Hurwitz: “Interestingly, many of the historical naysayers present their arguments as a protest against a pernicious trend already rampant, indeed out of control. This fact alone tends to favor the pro-vibrato faction as evidence that, irrespective of what various musical eminences may have said, the free use of vibrato has always been the rule rather than the exception when it comes to what players actually did.”
    Hurwitz makes a useful distinction between vibrato in orchestral playing and its employment in solo playing, and he sifts through dozens of 19th- and 20th-century scores looking for evidence that some degree of baseline vibrato was in common orchestral use. Now, much of this depends on accepting Hurwitz’s contention that certain expressive markings themselves implied the presence of vibrato, and his long argument is not entirely free of unsupported generalization. In the end, though, he makes a good contextual case for vibrato as standard orchestral practice during the past 200 years. Curiously, though, for somebody who runs a Web site devoted to classical CD reviews, he refers to very few recordings made before World War II in support of his thesis. Now, any orchestral recording made before about 1928 is going to be too primitive and involve too many compromises of instrumentation and performance to be of any value in the vibrato debate, but anything professionally recorded since the invention of the electric microphone will have sufficient fidelity to be used as evidence, pro or con. So why did Hurwitz sidestep all this potential evidence?