Raymond Leppard (1927–2019)

A fun little extended essay — the length and tone makes it look as though it might have been originally written as a short lecture series — in which Leppard sets out his views on the thorny question of “authenticity”. How should music from before 1800 be performed? Are we required to recreate in as much detail as possible the conditions under which it was originally performed, or can we use our own judgment to create a performance that reflects as closely as possible the composer’s show more artistic intentions?

Of course, Leppard is not a fan of trying to recreate the sounds and smells of seventeenth century Venice in a modern concert hall. This is all about justifying his own more liberal approach, where you have to understand the resources available to the composer and the technical limitations of singers and instruments, but you also have some licence to consider the difference between the audience the composer was writing for and the people who will b attending a modern performance. He reminds us that composers like Gluck, Monteverdi and Handel were quite happy to rearrange their operas for larger or smaller forces as opportunities arose, and that it’s usually wrong to think of any one version of a piece as completely definitive.

Leppard doesn’t hold back when he’s criticising his colleagues, so there’s a lot of innocent fun in this little monograph, and there’s also an interesting “worked example” of realising a scene from the manuscript score of L’incoronazione di Poppea for modern performance, but of course the world of early music has moved on quite a bit in the decades since this was written, so it is probably more a curiosity than a reliable textbook. show less