December 2008

The best in this kind are but shadows.

Roland Barthes put a lot of impressionable people off realistic art by announcing that signs that pretended to be natural were very wicked indeed. Bourgeois. The only ethically OK sign was the one that called attention to itself as sign. (The period was big on portentous italics.) The stage, for example should never try to look like bits of the world. It should emulate the Brechtian theatre, where the stage is a stage, people, and Stop gawping! (Glotz nicht!)

Oh what a fuss. Later, Barthes said he actually rather liked reading realistic novels.

But enough of these lavender-scented memories. In recent years, I find myself vastly enjoying certain kinds of performance, broad, shamelessly manipulative and completely conventional, which in my youth I considered the work of the devil. I like hokum: Godzilla movies for example – apart from the one with Matthew Broderick – the anim? series R.O.D. (Read or Die), best of all Italian blood-and-thunder opera. It’s not that I’ve forgotten or no longer register the difference between Adriana Lecouvreur and The Marriage of Figaro. But age (I find) brings a perspective from which the experiences of masterpiece and hokum can peaceably coexist.

Sometimes, especially in performance, it is difficult to tell them apart. Here’s an aria from Adriana Lecouvreur. I probably should have chosen something from La Gioconda, one of the hokiest of operas, but I think this one will do (“I am but a humble handmaiden of the arts”.) The first version, on mp3, is from a 1959 live recording and includes a brief ensemble; the YouTube version is from 1993 and includes the recitative beforehand; the soprano in both performances is Magda Olivero (b. 1910). Warning: lousy sound.

Olivero_1959.mp3

Olivero_1993

No soprano today could get away with the liberties Olivero took in 1959 on the last two notes of the aria. But the Italian audience didn’t care, and neither do I. And the way she sings them at the age of 83 is a miracle of vocal husbandry.

Garry, commenting on the Hatto business, wonders if record producers will eventually eliminate the live performer altogether and just splice notes into a completely synthetic performance. Let me take that straight and see where it goes. I guess there are approximations already in those eerily perfect studio recordings based on numerous takes and lots of editing. These don’t correspond to any one performance. But yes, eliminating the original performer altogether – and calling the product a performance – that would be a step beyond.

Would it work? Would people respond to such ‘recordings’ as if they were recordings? Maybe not. In the very early days of CD some people complained about the complete silence between tracks. It sounded weird to them. In response, the studios mixed in a little barely perceptible dirt, and suddenly the CD sounded normal, i.e. more like an LP or a live venue. To get away with a synthetic performance, the studio would have to build in similar marks of plausibility, concessions to psychoacoustics, and these can be subtle indeed.

Two pianists who record the same passage of rapid, apparently even semi-quavers from a Beethoven sonata will show up as different in micro-analysis of wave patterns. The irregularities are not a failure of technique but a sonic signature, a bit like a painter’s brush-strokes. On Gestalt principles, listeners smooth them out into what they hear as notes of exactly the same length. Stravinsky complained that nobody played triplets exactly in time: everybody played the last of the three too short and prolonged the first two. But maybe everybody somehow got something right. The commonest complaint people made about Stravinsky’s conducting was that the music sounded lifeless and metronomic.

So (I suspect) our machine-recordings would have to be cannily programmed. All in all, it might be cheaper to hire a piano-player.