56. Plucky and adventury

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a recording of Handel’s op. 4 concerti featuring organist Ottavio Dantone directing the Accademia Bizantina.  I admire this recording a lot and encourage you to give it a listen.  (At the moment, at least, it is freely available as youtube playlist).  As the soloist, Dantone takes pleasing liberties in embellishing the notated text, and his playing has opened these works to me anew—works I thought I knew pretty well since my teenage years.  The musicality of Dantone’s interpretations is inspiring, especially the insouciance with which he takes the Andante of op. 4 no. 4:  I would never have had the courage to take it that slowly until hearing him do it.

But I was totally unprepared for one particular Dantone liberty:  as the B section repeats in the Gigue that finishes up Op. 4 no. 5, suddenly the strings of the orchestra are plucking away (at 01:24 on this video).

  Here’s an attempt at capturing what is going on at this moment of the performance:

SOURCE:  Handel Op. 4 no. 5, mvt. IV, bb. 11–16, as given in the Deutsche Händelgesellschaft edition, v. 28 (1868); in red-ink, I have notated my guess at what Dantone has interpolated; it is derived wholly from bb. 1–2 of the movement (not shown); it ignores the 4/2 harmony of the figured bass, but as Dantone is not realizing any figures anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter.

This is a textual interpolation that has no basis in any of the sources; it is entirely the fabrication of Dantone or someone involved in his recording.  Effective though it may be (and I am not convinced that it is), it arrested my attention because I don’t associate Handel with such use of a pizzicato tutti.  I don't know enough Handel to know how characteristic pizzicato is in his music—as an orchestral effect, I mean—but I dare say there must be some moments in the operas.  [See ADDENDUM.]  In any case, this stands out to my ears.  I have written previously of an interpolation that leans on the side of “too clever by half,” and this one goes in that category.  

But hearing it reminded of another pizzicato example that I had meant to track down:

Once again, this was music I thought I knew.  I have known Trevor Pinnock’s recordings of the Bach harpsichord concertos for a long time, first on audiocassette and then on CD.  The credits on that recording indicate that it employed the BG edition (1869), and in the late 1980s that was what was available to me through the Dover reprint.  I got to know those works very well, and had never heard or seen any pizzicato at this point until I was given the Rousset/Hogwood recordings many years later .  I was puzzled when I pored over the Bärenreiter facsimile of the autograph (which is somehow more inviting than the same scans available on Bach Digital): again there was no sign of pizzicato at this point.  But I guess I had not ever looked carefully enough at the NBA, because there it is all for all to see:

SOURCE:  composite of marked-up scans showing portions of pp. 208 and 209 of NBA Ser. VII bd. 4 (1999), showing BWV 1056/iii bb. 1–16.

I will grant that I associate a pizzicato orchestral texture more readily with Bach than with Handel.  Two examples that came immediately to mind are the knocking-on-the-door recitative from BWV 61 (which Bach marks as “senza l’arco” [“without the bow”]—the effect if not the term “pizzicato” [literally “pinched”]) and the gorgeous Adagio from this very concerto, BWV 1056.  Incidentally,  the NBA score erroneously lacks the instruction that the accompaniment in that movement is pizzicato (corrected on in an erratum on p. 214 of the corresponding Kritische Bericht volume).  The autograph has the instruction “pizzicato” above the first violin staff, and we may reasonably apply that instruction to the whole ensemble, but there is no true confirmation without the original string parts, which seem not to have survived.

SOURCE:  scan of p. 13 of Schulze’s Peters edition of
BWV 1056, showing the opening of the Largo.

All of this leads nicely to my theme, which regards moments of which there is some confusion in editions about whether the orchestra is arco or pizzicato; but as this particular example led me down a rabbit hole, I want to digress for just a moment to comment on the NBA text for this concerto—which is really a conflation of two sources: Bach’s autograph and a curious manuscript copy by J. N. Forkel in which the work is transposed up a tone.  It is too much to detail here, but peculiarities both of notation and readings in Forkel’s copy make it unlikely that it is connected to the hypothetical earlier version of this piece, often presumed to be a violin concerto in G Minor.  It is Forkel’s copy, apparently, that introduces those pizzicato echoes in the last movement, heard in the video performance above.  Perhaps it was not just the novelty of that instruction that caused the NBA editor, Werner Breig, to incorporate it into the new text; in any case, the NBA largely agrees with an edition from 1976 edited by another great Bach authority, Hans-Joachim Schulze.  Schulze, it seems, was the one who reassessed the value of Forkel’s copy, and the highly ornamented version of the melody of the slow movement has become the standard text for the work directly because of Schulze’s digging and advocacy.  Because the NBA essentially transmits Forkel’s version, that has become the text to play; indeed, the NBA relegates the (it would seem deficient) final reading of the autograph of the Adagio to an appendix, and the reconstruction of the yet-earlier reading to the critical report.  This movement (also familiar in another version as the opening sinfonia to BWV 156) deserves a post of its own, especially in the light of revelations by Ian C. Payne and Steve Zohn that it is actually Bach’s parody of a work by Telemann.

Here endeth the digression.  The other examples I want to consider involve instances of confusion about whether something should be bowed or plucked.  Both textures are effective in themselves:  part of the strength of the passage near the end of the scherzo of Beethoven’s fifth symphony when the texture tapers into almost-all-pizzicato is that we've already heard those same musical ideas in a more robust arco.  It is a thrilling moment.  

That is a justly celebrated example, of course, and even the worst editions are clear about Beethoven’s instructions.  But what of this moment at the end of the slow movement of his seventh symphony?

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 54 of Beethoven, Sym. no. 7, op. 92 (Mvt. II, bb. 265–278), ed. J. Del Mar (Bärenreiter 9007, 2000).

The surprise here is the first violins, specifically that last e, which is a canonic imitation that starts in the basses and cellos, quickly working its way up through the strings.  Jonathan Del Mar’s edition, reproduced above, indicates that that e is still pizzicato, and that the arco does not start until the f-sharp, already in the middle of this motif.  (Note that the second violins are the only ones to present this motif here arco—the lower strings are still pizz.)  Crazy?  Absurd?  Bizarre, certainly.  But, as Del Mar takes pains to point out, the autograph here is not at all ambiguous:

SOURCE:  corresponding page from Beethoven’s autograph, as reproduced and captioned in Del Mar’s critical commentary, p.14; I have added the red arrow.

He notes in the critical commentary that all authoritative sources agree on this, including the first edition, remarking:

“However felicitous this [change to one beat earlier] seemed to 20th-century ears (so that it is even perpetuated in Ub [=1994 Breitkopf Urtext]), it is important (a) to remember that it has nothing to do with Beethoven, nor is there any reason to suspect an error (b) to take account of the fact that it relied for its effect on a wholly spurious hairpin crescendo added to both Vl 1 and Vl 2 Br [=1863 Breitkopf] parts (though not the score) in 275.”

And indeed, here is a comparison of this moment in the old Breitkopf score and parts, using the scans available on IMSLP (which, for the parts, come from 20th century reprints of the 1864 parts):

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of details from scans of 1863 Breitkopf score p. 44 (from IMSLP #57874) with
 Vl. 1 (IMSLP #19906) and Vl. 2 (IMSLP #19907) parts, showing bb. 273–78.

Even those performers who are aware of what Beethoven wrote (not just what Breitkopf printed) may shy away from his instructions.  David Zinman, for example, whose recordings proclaimed their use of the new Del Mar / Bärenreiter edition, opts to let everything remain pizzicato to the end of the movement:

Perhaps a justification here is that the arco markings are in pencil, and thus written in at some point after the initial notation of the notes:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 126 of Beethoven's autograph, PL-Kj Mus. Ms. Beethoven Mendelssohn-Stiftung 9, available as IMSLP #888719 (scan p. 132).

This is actually a pervasive occurrence throughout this manuscript, as Del Mar observes:  “Unusually for a Beethoven autograph, many essential features of the music (e.g., almost all II 110–34 Fls, Obs, Cors) were written first in pencil, then (mostly) inked over; these are obviously contemporaneous with much of the ink composition, perhaps when for some reason Beethoven simply did not have a pen with him” (Critical Commentary, p. 21f.).

Claudio Abbado, however, obeys the arco instruction exactly as written in this 1999 recording:

Simon Rattle does the same, in this recording from 2002:

To my ear, the effect of delaying the arco is to heighten the dissonant clash of the f-sharp in the first violins against the a-minor triad in the winds, and to downplay the contrapuntal element:  yes, the motif is still presented in canon, but it sounds less so.  It sounds perfectly musical to me either way.  I suspect I prefer the delayed arco for the wrong reason:  that everyone has been doing it the other way.  But this isn’t just a case of rooting for the textual underdog.  It is just what Beethoven wrote.

And I understand why the consistent reading has lasted.  It seems odd—and without the scrawl on the autograph manuscript, we’d put it down to some error in transmission.  Here’s a case in Mozart where without the autograph we might also question the reading:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Mozart, K. 488/ii bb. 84–87 as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Werke, XVI/4 (Breitkopf 1879), scanned from Dover reprint.

That is the way the old Mozart edition prints it.  And this is a famous moment in this movement, a place that seems to be crying out for the pianist to embellish the solo line, and that is what usually attracts my attention in a performance of it.  But underneath the solo, what the autograph reveals is that the violins are not pizzicato, though the rest of the strings are.  (In the autograph, the violins lack the pizzicato instruction in b. 84, and the consequent return to arco in b. 92.  I’m not going to use up the space to illustrate that here, but you can check it out for yourself, as a scan of the autograph is available as IMSLP #293132—see pp. 52 and 54 of the pdf.)  It is an odd effect, and the reading of the old edition is more what one would expect.  But, as Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.... To be great is to be misunderstood.”  And of course there are people still playing it in that misunderstood, nevertheless consistent, way—with everybody pizzicato:

But there are also plenty of orchestras who play the accompaniment that Mozart actually wrote and as printed in the NMA, and I find that effect a little thrilling even, although I admit that now I don’t pay as much attention to the soloist:

For what it is worth, there is a similar texture in the finale of the Mozart piano concerto that immediately preceded this one, K. 482.  In that instance, all the strings play the eighth notes pizzicato, and the solo piano has the syncopated figure:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Mozart's autograph of K. 482/iii from IMSLP #384760, showing bb. 252–60.  Strings are on the top three staves and the very bottom, with the solo piano right hand on the third stave from the bottom.

This texture is much more straightforward—all strings pizzicato—so I would be surprised if any edition got it wrong.  If you want to hear it:

But I will close today with one of my favorite early eighteenth-century moments of orchestral pizzicato—this charming movement by J. S. Bach’s contemporary Johann David Heinichen (1683–1729).  It is an intriguing and adventurous texture, as the score instructs that the pizzicato violins are doubled by both flutes and recorders (two of each on both the violin lines are requested):

SOURCE:  cropped scan from IMSLP #401983 p. 22, showing the beginning of the third movement, alla breve, of Heinichen's F Major concerto, S. 235.

And here’s a performance which should brighten anyone’s new year:

ADDENDUM 02 January 2025

I am grateful to Byron Adams for immediately pointing out a Handel tutti pizzicato example: “Tune your harps to cheerful strains” in Esther.  It was exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for.