Brahms in der Meininger Tradition. Seine Sinfonien in der Bezeichnung von Fritz Steinbach ed. by Walter Blume (review)

Walter Blume’s detailed account of the Brahms conducting of Fritz Steinbach (1855–1916) occupies a unique position in records of performance style. Before the era of recordings, written accounts of performance, as opposed to treatises on technique, were necessarily partial. Although Steinbach lived into the era of recordings he made none, so this account is a considerable compensation for that lack—and it also includes the written intentions that lay behind the finished performances.

Steinbach came quickly to be regarded as embodying a definitive Brahms performance style through his connection with the ducal court orchestra of Meiningen in Thuringia in 1886–1902. Its fame went back to the early 1880s, when Hans von Bülow was appointed to create a world-class orchestra by the art-loving Duke Georg II, and it was von Bülow who placed the orchestra at Brahms’s disposal for the rehearsal of the Fourth Symphony and premiere, and thus laid the foundation of a Brahms tradition there (the principal clarinettist, Richard Mühlfeld, was to be the inspiration for the late clarinet works).

Steinbach thus inherited an intimate connection with Brahms from von Bülow and performed his music to the composer’s admiration, and that of many later musicians including his pupil Fritz Busch (to whom the book is dedicated) and, among English observers, Donald Francis Tovey (whose notes for Symphonies nos. 1–3 in the Essays are based on the Meiningen performances under Steinbach in London in 1902) and Adrian Boult, who recalled Steinbach as pre-eminent in Brahms, after hearing him in Cologne. Written in the Brahms centenary year of 1933, Blume was thus preserving the precious evidence of a tradition that he saw as having vanished with his mentor, with whom he studied as a young Kapellmeister in Munich in 1914/15, where Steinbach had moved, having served in Cologne from 1903 (Blume did not know his performances from Meiningen).

Blume’s original text consists of eighty sides of typescript musical commentary, with copious manuscript music examples set continuously in the text and an Introduction of six sides, published by Ernst Surkamp in Stuttgart as a photocopy. The typescript is clear, though the examples are sometimes cramped. The nature of the Blume text is that of a detailed commentary based on Steinbach’s scores, intimately relating musical content and performance, and written as if in a conductor’s voice, rather than through quotations. Blume’s opening point is clear: that music-making had changed radically since Brahms’s time and, most notably, speeds were now too fast and metronomic (which, interestingly, he attributes to the influence of jazz rather than orchestral music). In stressing Brahms’s total approval of Steinbach’s readings, he argues that the markings he describes and the interpretations he commends are absolutely authentic: above all the sense of rhythmic continuity, yet with an elasticity of tempo and phrasing, with feeling for the slightest tempo modification to bring out detail.

His values are immediately apparent in his comments on the introductory section of the First Symphony in C minor Op. 68: that ‘a conductor reveals his artistry inasmuch as he understands how to make sense of markings in a score’. Thus, at the opening—with its famously unprepared ‘un poco sostenuto’—the tempo should rather be taken from the oboe passage at bar 29, so that the opening tempo can be intensified and conducted in quavers, though not too slowly, to allow free execution of the oboe passage. To this he adds bowing advice: the violas changing with each bar, the basses with each note but always pesante and tenuto, the contrabassoon portamento, and the timpani played with a mallet that is not too soft. Blume’s comments are always wedded to the musical substance...