Review: The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style

Reviewed Work(s):
The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style
by George Barth
Review by: Brian Vickers
Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter 1995), pp.
98-101
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the International Society for the
History of Rhetoric
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.1995.13.1.98
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98 RHETORICA

George Barth, The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation

of Keyboard Style (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1992), viii + 190 pp.

Students of the possible relationships between music and

rhetoric will be atfracted by the idea of this book, but rather disap-
pointed by its exécution. It consists of an infroduction sketching
the State of musical aesthetics in late eighteenth-eentury Germany,
followed by five chapters of uneven length. The first discusses the
notion of time in music (pp. 11-21); the second freats "Character:
The Spirit" (pp. 22-37), in which most of the material pertinent to
rhetoric can be found; the third discusses "Inflection: The
'Speaking Style' T r a n s f o r m e d " ( p p . 38-131); the fourth,
"Applications, Both 'Modem' and 'Translated'," analyses sections
of two of Beethoven's works in modem performances, the Adagio
opening the Cello and Piano Sonata, op. 5 no. 1, and the Variations
on an Original Thème, op. 34 (pp. 132-53); the last chapter is called
"Imagining More Vivid 'Modem' Performances" (pp. 154-62). The
author "is Associate Professor of Music (Performance) at Stanford
University and an award-wiiming pianist," the dust jacket tells us,
and he is very knowledgeable about performance practice. The
sfrongest parts of his book will be of great interest to musicologists
and performers, who ought to be sHmulated by his analysis of the
editorial i n t e r v e n t i o n s of C z e r n y a n d o t h e r s to r e t u r n to
Beethoven's original manuscripts and to reconsfruct a style of play-
ing more faithful to the articulation of phrases in the way the com-
poser intended. Professor Barth draws on the vigorous fradition of
modem Beethoven studies to distinguish relevant historical testi-
mony from the garbled accounts of Schindler (now known to hâve
perpetrated over two h u n d r e d forgeries in his testimonia of
Beethoven's theory and practice), and the superimposition of a
later aesthetic by Czerny and others. This part of his book seemed
to me satisfyingly conclusive: only the freatment of rhetoric is less
successful.
The fault Ues not in Barth's scholarly knowledge but in the fra-
dition itself linking music and rhetoric. The introduction shows
how the "passion for codifying musical figures and applying

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Reviews 99

rhetorical devices in composition reached its height in the Baroque

era," and how, with the fading of the high Baroque style, "interest
in the art of rhetoric began to wane also" (pp. 2-3). But in the 1750s
there occurred what Barth describes as "a sudden résurgence of
interest in the art of delivery," according to some passages quoted
from Quantz's Versuch einer Anweisung die Flôte traversiere zu spielen
(1752), C. P. E. Bach's similar freatise on the Clavier (1753), and the
earUer freatise by Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister
(1739). Barth claims that thèse theoreticians "used the terminology
of classical oratory to describe music as gestural art," and that they
"consciously cultivated the art of musical déclamation" (p. 7). This
is certainly true in historical terms, for in the next century Czerny
continued to talk of "declamatory" éléments in Beethoven's music:
but my complaint is that neither eighteenth-centiuy theorists nor
modem scholars succeeded in using thèse terms with any mean-
ingful content. Many of the pronouncements quoted continue to
invoke such fraditional topics in musical rhetoric as the affects, the
concept of movere, arousing the auditor's feeUngs, the communica-
tion of feeUng, and so forth. But the crucial problem, as I pointed
out in this journal some years ago ("Figures of rhetoric/ figures of
music?" Rhetorica 2 (1984): 1-44) remains the inabiUty of music to
convey the semantic élément of language, those properties of référ-
ence or denotation by which we can consfruct in endless détail pré-
cise analyses of feeUng, or rationaUzation, or whatever else. Much
as we would Uke to join thèse sister arts more closely, we hâve to
agrée with such dissentient opinions as Charles Burney's, that
"music has never had the power, without vocal articulation, to nar-
rate, or insfruct; it can excite, paint, and soothe our passions; but it
is utterly incapable of reasoning, or conversing, to any reasonable
purpose" (quoted, p. 31).
If we look at the arguments made by proponents of musical
rhetoric in the "surge of interest" that Barth locales (to me it seems
rather the fag-end of an exhausted fradition), we find irredeemably
vague analogies b e t w e e n the two arts. M a t t h e s o n cites
Cassiodorus, of ail people, for the sfrange argument that gesticula-
tion is an essential élément in music, and he then expounds what
Barth calls "an art of evocative gesture . .. served by the science of
chironomy, which was in essence a science of rhythm," apparently
able to combine "oratorical.. . histrionic . .. and saltatorial" move-

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100 RHETORICA

ment. As Barth summarizes Mattheson's argument, "through chi-

ronomy the h a n d s of the keyboard player attained musical
'speech,' the cohérence of which depended in part, just as in
speech, on the correct articulation of properly formed syntactical
units" (pp. 22-23). The inverted commas around "speech," telling-
ly enough, are Barth's: just so, one can call music "speech," or
speech "music," but to develop the identification so that it can bear
any weight of argument—hoc opus, hic labor est. Mattheson goes on
to develop the analogy with syntax, talking of musical phrases and
paragraphs, and élaborâtes an application of the Greek notion of
"diastolica," the theory "which explains how speech is made intelli-
gible by the modulating influence of punctuation." Mattheson
suggests that in music we can identify not only the comma, colon
and period, but also the question mark, the exclamation mark (our
old rhetorical friend vehementia), and the parenthesis (pp. 24-26).
This is ail impressively scholarly, but throughout Mattheson has
simply begged the question implied in his confident assertion that,
once the composer has mastered thèse grammatical skills, he will
"know how without the words to express sincerely ail the émo-
tions of the heart through selected sounds and their skillful combi-
nation in such a way that the auditor might fully grasp and clearly
understand therefrom, as if it were actual speech, the impetus, the
sensé, the meaning, and the expression . . ." (p. 26; my itaUcs). But
the pfirase I hâve italicized shows just how wide the gap remains
between the two arts, and how little has been achieved by
Mattheson's learned discourse on punctuation theory ("Pause and
Affect," we might call it, borrowing a pun from Malcolm Parkes).
Modem musicologists who simply endorse the unsupported
analogies and begged questions of their eighteenth-eentury prede-
cessors build on equally flimsy foundations. Barth claims that
what Mattheson and two other German theorists "contributed to
Beethoven's héritage" was "a rhetoric of gesture . . . and a rhetoric
of deep form" (p. 37). With the greatest respect I find neither
claim justified. Rhetorical gesture is a corporeal resource used in
tandem with the communication of meaning, feelings, ethical atti-
tude, and so on; where are thèse in music? I do not think Professor
Barth is recommending modem performers to emulate Quintilian's
teachings on actio, which would be ludicrous; indeed any excessive
movements by performers seem merely distracting. (I find myself

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Reviews 101

irritated by Gideon Kremer's habit of bending and sfretching his

knees when negotiating a cadence or other meaningful fransition,
while Alfred Brendel's anguished grimaces may well convey his
feeUngs about the music he is performing but make me want to sit
where I can only see his hands, not his face.) But in his own analy-
ses Barth is guilty of similarly begging the question. Beethoven, he
writes, was "temperamentally suited to soliloquy and the other
dramatic stances of an orator" (p. 40): but orators never soliloquize.
His attempt to Unk "rhetorical theory" with Beethoven's use of the
mefronome to indicate tempi—"it provides no simple answer," he
writes (p. 78)—seems to me not even to engage with rhetoric.
Professor Barth can make suggestive analogies, as on the Piano
Sonata op. 101, where Beethoven uses "a rhetoric of élisions, of
unfinished gestures . . ail very speechlike" (p. 117), and can
invoke Beethoven's "fragmentary mélodie rhetoric" (p. 119), but he
would find it hard to illustrate them by extended analysis. The
spécimen analysis that he does offer (pp. 132ff.) treats the Adagio
opening of the Cello Sonata in A (op. 5, no. 1) as comprising "two
principal figures . . . the first a 'question' and the second an
'answer'" (p. 133). He then gives an analysis of the first thirty-four
bars in standard musicological terms, identifying only one rhetori-
cal device ("dubitatio"), and reprints the score with annotations set-
ting out his analysis in détail. Listening to this music in the record-
ing suggested, by Rostropovich and Richter (1961)—which he
accuses of being anachronistically m o d e m in its strict tempo
earnestness (the old Casals-Horzowski version is much more flexi-
ble)—I can only say that while I appreciate ail the points he makes
about the importance of articulation, and the structural effects of
Beethoven's confrasts between cantabile and staccato, I was com-
pletely unenlightened by any claims made for rhetoric.
This lucidly written, well-documented book will be of great
interest to anyone who wants to recreate a performing style doser
to Beethoven's idiosyncratic and expressive use of phrasing and
articulation. But the gap between music and rhetoric remains, as
ever, tantalizingly wide.

BRIAN VICKERS

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ADDRESSES OF CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

Rita Copeland, Department of English, University of Minnesota,

207 Lind Hall, 207 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA

Marcelle Laplace, 60, rue Cambronne, 75015 Paris, France

Richard Marback, Department of English, Wayne State University,

51 W. Warren, Defroit, MI 48202, USA

Alfonso Martin Jiménez, Facultad de Humanidades, Urùversidad

de Santiago de Compostela, Campus de Lugo, 27002 Lugo, Espafia

John Monfasani, Department of History, State University of New

York at Albany, Ten Broeck 105, Albany, NY 12222, USA

Brian Vickers, Cenfre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zentrvmi,

Ramisfrasse 101, CH-8092 Zurich, Die Schweiz

John W. Watt, Department of ReUgious and Theological Studies,

University of Wales Collège of Cardiff, 52 Park Place, Cardiff CFl
3AT, Wales (United Kingdom)

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