‘String-Song’: The Discursive Construction of Violin Playing in the Early-Twentieth Century

Stefan Knapik, University of Oxford

Although the scope of this article is modest, my purpose is to begin to map out the terrain of an early twentieth-century culture of musical performance. In this article I take an historical-discursive approach to the pedagogical treatises of the practicing violinists Andreas Moser (1859 – 1925) and Leopold Auer (1845 - 1930). The aim is to begin to deconstruct some of the ideologies that make up – or perhaps circumscribe – what at some point in the twentieth century came to be called ‘classical’ performance. I wish to present early twentieth-century string performance not as a roster of techniques fit for executing scores, but as a culture in its own right, and which is sprawling in its negotiation of both far-flung cultural ideas and more localized experiences of playing a stringed instrument. More specifically, I advance the case here for a model of string playing that has voice at its core, both as a model of subjectivity, laden with many of the Idealist and vitalist notions of the era, and embodied practice.

Musicology came to embrace critical theory at a relatively late stage, but the last twenty years have seen a steep rise in historical-discursive studies of texts related to music. The idea that music is autonomous from language is no longer a given among scholars, and the historical application of this idea has itself become an object of historical study. The cognitive sciences have done much to support the view that language plays an active and important role in the mind’s creation of meaning; Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980), for example, vouches for the centrality of metaphors based on familiar experiences (such as of physical space, and of the body) in everyday speech, and their crucial role in making sense of new experiences or concepts.

Historical texts on composition, theory and analysis have formed the focus of numerous studies to date, but it is fair to say that texts relating to musical performance is a territory explored less frequently. Texts dating from around 1890 onwards is a particularly neglected area. There have been excellent studies by Richard Leppert (The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body), Susan Bernstein (Virtuosity in the Nineteenth Century) and Laurence Kramer (‘Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment’, in Kramer, 2002) on nineteenth-century pianism, and Mary Hunter has also focused on early nineteenth-century string pedagogical treatises in her article “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics”. We have in our possession, however, a great number of documents surrounding musical performance from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which are deserving of in-depth study.

A genre that deserves renewed attention in particular is that of the pedagogical treatise, once the preserve of performance practice studies. Again, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a period which saw the proliferation of a great number of books on how to sing or play an instrument, remains unexplored territory for this branch of musicology. In Clive Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performance Practice, 1750-1900, Andreas Moser’s Violinschule (1905) appears as a kind of isolated outpost, coming as it does at the end of Brown’s proposed period of study. A critical study of pedagogical writings will also necessarily entail a consideration of genre; although this article primarily unfolds a set of culturally-received ideas on violin playing, I will also provide some comment on the implications of the pedagogical treatise, as a genre, for their discursive construction.

Whereas performance practice studies have largely ventured no further than the turn of the twentieth century, the burgeoning field of recordings analysis has lay claim to post-1900 texts, with Robert Philip’s Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900-1950 constituting a seminal study in this area. Philip’s approach, however, is similar to that of performance practice studies in that he remains closely tethered to musical scores; in other words, Philip interprets descriptions of performance devices found in pedagogical writings as directions for how their notated correlates were to be played. In addition, Philip occasionally looks further afield to the theoretical texts of the period (such as those of Hugo Riemann). It would be fair to say that Philip’s approach, like that of his performance practice predecessors, and indeed most analytical studies of sound recordings since, is markedly positivistic in flavor. There is distinct predilection for what is measurable; portamenti and vibrato become discrete performance devices and their frequency and duration are subsequently measured. For these and more nebulous features (such as dynamics) scores provide good fixed reference points. In terms of the literature, more exacting descriptions of practices are favored over more descriptive passages.

In this article, however, I propose that a consideration of early twentieth-century texts in the context of wider cultural trends will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of performance during the period. In Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, Lawrence Kramer draws attention to two contrasting concepts of music; an older view sees music as autonomous, immanent and the product of a single author (i.e. the composer); the second, favored by more recent musicologists, understands music to be contingent, performed and the product of potentially several forms of subjectivity (Kramer 2002, 2). Previous studies of pedagogical writings view them as directions for realizing all-time fixed scores, which subsequently leaves little room for the influence of external factors; at best we arrive at fairly simplistic classifications of style, constructed along the axes of nations and convenient chronological divisions (e.g. the nineteenth-century German style, and so on); in contrast, my intention here is to view pedagogical treatises as sites in which rich and complex cultures of musical performance thrive, allowing as they do for the extensive interaction of culturally-received ideas and musical practices. Style subsequently becomes a highly complex and fluid entity, induced into motion by a frequent relaying back and forth between ideas drawn from several experiential domains.

An obvious example of a subjectivity might be the performer or the listener, but there are also subjectivities at work in texts which are not embodied; does music involve a deity perhaps? Or a shared spirit? Although Adolf Weismann’s 1911 reminiscences of a concert given by Joseph Joachim presents us with bodies in a physical space, his metaphor of a religious ceremony, with Joachim as the high priest and the audience as the “believers” points to a deity to whom all subscribe:

A temple of art had arisen, and the believers flocked in droves to hear from the priest’s mouth the new teachings. I am speaking of the Joachim quartet evenings in the Singakademie. (Borchard 2005, 522.) [1]

In Andreas Moser’s Violinschule, which he wrote in conjunction with Joachim, we encounter tentative suggestions that composers, performers, and listeners participate in a shared Geist, although Moser never declares this belief outright. [2] Moser is certainly bold in his conviction that to perform is to “play in the spirit of the composer”. [3] There is also the suggestion that listeners join with performers in a shared spirit; in an introduction to an edited solo part to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Moser advocates “generating” (erzeugen) Stimmung (Joachim & Moser 1905, 182) a word that connotes a kind of consensus or harmony, possibly of a spiritual kind. Moser also suggests that communal harmony is of a spiritual kind in his closing remarks:

Merrily felt and spiritfully (geistvoll) represented (dargestellt), this exquisite piece will release happy contentment in the listener and in the shared enjoyment (Mitgeniessen) will it ignite its spirit. [4] (Joachim & Moser 1905, 184.)

Leopold Auer, eminent German violinist and pedagogue, and Joachim’s pupil in Hannover during the 1860s, incorporates a neo-Romantic supernaturalism into his philosophy of music:

True inspiration – the inspiration of a Bach or Beethoven – harks back to Nature the divine, to that Nature which, according to a great writer, “is the Art of God.” And this inspiration merely lies dormant in the printed page until we make it live and glow and radiate in tone. (Auer 1921, 160.)

The score is a gateway to a divinely-sustained natural order, and it the responsibility of performers to resurrect this; Auer’s language is notably vitalistic here (“live”) – the metaphor of performance is that of re-animation rather than joining in with a spirit (as it is with Moser). The question of whether we are dealing with spirit (and its opposite, matter), or a kind of vitalism is further unpacked below, and the significance of “tone” here forms a wider theme of this article.

Moser’s notion of spirit and Auer’s notion of a divine natural order suggests that we are dealing with neo-Idealist thought here. We know that Moser had attended Philipp Spitta’s lectures at the Hochschule in the 1870s, which is where he may have absorbed some of Spitta’s neo-Kantian spiritualism. [5] Auer also copied an extended passage from Spitta’s Bach biography of 1873 into his Violin Works and Their Interpretation (1925, 21-22). Prior to making his above comments in the 1920s Auer had spent fifty years living in St Petersburg, where he may have come into contact with the late flourishing of Idealism in late Imperial Russia. Vladmir Soloviev (1853 – 1900), a significant writer in the movement, held that the divine realm was more concrete than the natural world that we inhabit, and that it sustained the natural world (Bakhurst, 3); this widely-promoted idea may have provided Auer with his notion of “Nature the divine”.

Although the idea of Geist survived through these continuations of Idealism, Nietzsche, a significant figure in the evolution of Western thought from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, is often credited with having replaced the notion of a world-spirit with his partially-related notions of life and “will to power”. As Andrew Bowie has argued (1990), however, although Geist is an operative concept in earlier Romantic literature, these earlier writers in fact conceive of subjectivities operating within a shared Geist, which are multiple, embodied, and changeable. In contrast, Nietzsche’s model of a shared subjectivity actually strengthens the idea of an all-consuming subjectivity, in that it is singular, foundational, homogenizing, and predetermines its embodied subjects. Bowie draws attention to Nietzsche’s notion in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) of a primal, Dionysian force, which is prior to ethical consideration; this supports Nietzsche’s hope for the resurgence of a ‘splendid, internally healthy, age-old power.’(Bowie 1990, 225: Original taken from Nietzsche 1980, 146). Bowie continues, ‘unlike Schlegel and the Idealists, who wished to synthesise a new mythology out of cosmopolitan diversity, Nietzsche at this time sees the answer in terms of a ‘re-birth of German myth’ (Bowie 1990, 225; Nietzsche 1980, 147). Bowie remarks that ‘given his [Nietzsche’s] thoughts on the need for the special producers of art to be sustained by the suffering of the masses, this is highly politically suspect.’ (Bowie 1990, 225. Bowie is here referring to Nietzsche’s post-Darwinian concept of the strong which by their very nature gain their strength from exploiting the weak). What also becomes clear here is Nietzsche’s elitism, especially if we also bear in mind Nietzsche’s belief that life/will to power, especially in the form of art, manifests itself not in whole populations but in individual geniuses.

It is tempting to say that Nietzsche’s philosophy marks the cultural passage from a spiritual to physical model of foundational subjectivity; life/will to power certainly does have strong physiological overtones, aligned as it is with strength and health (Nietzsche’s “healthy” culture above, see below also). This would be too simplistic a statement however, since Nietzsche’s entire philosophical output is bound up with earlier metaphysical notions; what is important to appreciate, is that Nietzsche’s legacy for wider late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture, especially for notions of art, was a strengthening of a “philosophy of origins” (Bowie 1990, 225). Life, or the will to power, was prior, and superior, to any further attempts to mitigate it through ethics, aesthetic autonomy, or modification through political negotiation. As Ernst Behler has noted (1996), this idea caught the attention of many artistic figures, who drew strength from Nietzsche’s belief in the rectitude of an active, creative drive. Bowie, on the other hand, draws attention to the aridity of Nietzsche’s philosophy; his argument “precludes any consideration of aesthetic autonomy by reducing aesthetics to the ‘intoxication’ of the creative artist… It also dismisses the aesthetics of reception as ‘wench-aesthetics’, because it involves a passive relation to the object” (Bowie 1990, 251). Bowie wishes to draw attention to the arbitrariness and circularity of a theory of art that singularly reduces everything to the will to power.

In considering the implication of Nietzsche’s theory of art, as Bowie presents it, one is struck by its persuasiveness; it is very difficult to argue with the assertion that the artist’s creative output is solely the product of a primal and world-defining creative energy. The power of this idea is made manifest in Wagner’s 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, in which Wagner skillfully builds an argument for why German orchestras are in a state of decline and need to rediscover the true melos of music. Although Wagner appeals to an objective source, claiming that melos finds its true expression in an eighteenth-century Italian style of performance, the true appeal of melos is Wagner’s fashioning of it into a foundational principle, replete with many of the same qualities that define Nietzsche’s life/will to power. What really becomes clear in reading Wagner’s essay, however, is that melos is ultimately a tool designed to furnish Wagner’s essay with authority and credibility.

To begin with, what Wagner is looking for is the life (leben) of the music, something that the German orchestras of his youth failed to achieve:

What appeared to me on the piano, or from reading the score, to be so soulfully animated in expression, I hardly recognized again, as it largely passed, fleetingly and unnoticed, over the listeners. (Wagner 1873, 336, italics my own.) [6]

We can assume, then, that as the answer to Wagner’s perceived deficiency, melos is a life-like entity. Melos is also aligned with genius; Wagner makes no distinction between German orchestras’ neglect of melos and their lack of access to knowledge of the composer’s wishes. The reason why Wagner could not hear the music which he heard so vitally in his head he gives as follows:

Assuredly, the reasons lie in the want of a proper Conservatorium of German music – a Conservatory, in the strictest sense of the word, in which the traditions of the CLASSICAL MASTERS’ OWN style of execution are preserved in practice – which, of course, would imply that the masters should, once at least, have had a chance personally to supervise performances of their works in such a place. Unfortunately German culture has missed all such opportunities; and if we now wish to become acquainted with the spirit of a classical composer’s music we must rely on this or that conductor, and upon his notion of what may, or may not, be the proper tempo and style of execution. (Wagner 2003.) [7]

We notice here also the suggestion of a spiritual connection to the composer.

Another similarity between Nietzsche’s will to power and Wagner’s melos is the designation of both entities as healthy, and their anxiety over its succumbing to sickness. Nietzsche frequently uses the language of pathology to conceive of his notion of life/will to power. Mark Letteri has shown, however, that for Nietzsche the will to power had to overcome necessary obstacles in order to thrive, which is why, in the Gay Science (1882), he asks “whether we can dispense with sickness”, and “whether… the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.” (Letteri 1990, 411-412. Original found in Nietzsche 1974, 177) And again, “for a typically healthy person.. being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more” (Nietzsche 1967, 224). Wagner’s denigration of the “exhaustion” or “lassitude” (Mattigkeit) of a German orchestra’s playing of a Mozart “cantilena” (a singing melody), shows that he partially conceives of melos as a biological entity. As with Nietzsche, Wagner is as much concerned with sickness as he is with health, although he does not regard sickness as essential to the healthy functioning of melos. Wagner also considered physical health and strength to be essential to good performance; he refers to the “weakening” (Schwächen) (Wagner 1873, 328) of German orchestras, a word which connotes physical enfeeblement or enervation. One of the reasons for this was that German orchestras tended to rank players according to seniority, with the result that “men take first positions when their powers are on the wane, whilst younger and stronger men are relegated to the subordinate parts” (Wagner 2003) [8]. Another problem that Wagner identifies is that the viola tends to be played by “invalid” (invalid) violinists (Wagner 1873, 329).

Melos resembles Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power in that it is vital, the product of genius, and healthy; what is also clear from Wagner’s essay, is like, Nietzsche’s reductive, all-consuming notion of the will to power, Wagner reduces everything to melos. In his essay he goes on to show how various musical components are governed by uncovering the true melos of the piece of music in question; melos does, like the word suggests, correspond to melody, but it also incorporates tempo, among other things. Melos, as a concept which ticks most late nineteenth-century boxes, in terms of desirable attributes of a shared subjectivity, and a notion that resists critique, plays a crucial role in constructing an authoritative argument, and what I will show in the course of this article are similarities between it and Moser’s and Auer’s notion of ‘singing tone’. Furthermore, I will show that using the template of melos, Moser and Auer are able to write texts on how to play the violin which are authoritative. We know that Moser read Wagner essay because he quotes a lengthy section from it in the tenth section of his essay Vom Vortrag in the third volume of the Violinschule (3/31).

What we wish to find out below is how this metaphysical notion of melody is put to work, as an operative concept, in the discursive construction of string playing. The first section will consider how Moser’s and Auer’s notions of ‘singing tone’ borrow from notions of vitality and spirit (as well as spirit’s binaristic opposite, matter); the second section will consider the implications of the idea of melody as a healthy force, or perhaps more to the point, one at risk of disease; the final section takes up a question from the first section again, in asking whether melody was seen primarily as a philosophically-resonant concept or the human singing voice.

‘Singing Tone’: Sound or Idea? And Spirit or Vital Force?

Michael Spitzer (2004) argues that the primary metaphor of music in the nineteenth century, and moving into the early decades of the twentieth, was that of life; furthermore, Spitzer shows that melody, or song, is central to the cultural formation of this metaphor, and he draws attention to melody’s ambiguous status as both the literal singing of a phrase, and as a much larger, philosophically-resonant idea, which drew in notions of Geist and of a vital force or energy. Spitzer charts the long cultural life of this idea, from the writings of Romantics such as Wackenroder, to the early twentieth-century analyses of Ernst Kurth.

In early twentieth-century writings on string playing the idea of melody is brought into play extensively; its uncertain status as both literal singing and metaphor for life, however, results in a complex negotiation of its multiple meanings. In Violin Playing As I Teach It, Auer boldly declares melody to lie at the centre of violinistic practices, and we are also told what this sounds like:

The violin is.. a homophone instrument, a melody instrument, a singing instrument. Its chief beauty in expression is still the cantabile melody line.. and that is why the legato bow-stroke, which is the melody-producing stroke, will continue to be one of the strokes most used. (Auer 1921, 83.)

“Still” a cantabile melody line because this sentence comes at the end of a chapter in which Auer advises on various bow strokes; legato bowing, however, is the most important:

Legato.. is the realizing of an ideal – the ideal of a smooth, round, continuous flow of tone. Legato bowing, if developed as I have suggested, gives us the beautiful singing tone, which is the normal tone of the instrument. (Auer 1921, 80-81.)

Auer’s language suggests a possible difference between “melody” and “song”; one might take his thrice repeating of “instrument” to be a way of emphasizing his point that the violin is a melody/singing instrument, but Auer’s progressing through from “homophone” to “melody” to “singing” suggests a transition from the theoretical – or perhaps metaphysical – to the physical. The similarity of the violin to the singing voice has its roots in a more philosophically-resonant notion of voice. Another variant of ‘singing tone’, that Auer uses, is ‘string-song’ (Auer 1921, 83), a term which I have used in my title. Whether the distinction between a more and less tangible notion of voice itself holds any implications for ideas about violin playing is a question we will return to later. We also note for now the word ‘tone’, which as we will come to see, is a word which lies at the centre of the discursive construction of violin playing according to the idea of melody/song.

With regards to melody’s fluctuating status as both music and model of subjectivity, Spitzer makes an interesting observation regarding the musical implications of this scenario:

The point about metaphorical melody is that it operates beneath the level at which the literal distinction between rhythm and melody applies, a level denoting dynamic, energetic flow. Just as melody for Rousseau was a metaphor for expression, rather than the literal melodies of opera, romantic melody ultimately means “energy,” energeia. (Spitzer 2004, 281.)

Spitzer suggests that melody functions as a higher organizing principle for every other musical element, noting that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Novelist groups melody with pulse, meter and rhythm, rather than against them. Although Auer states plainly what singing tone sounds like, elsewhere he expands his concept of tone to cover a much wider range of musical elements:

In the orchestra, the great advantage the violin has over all the other orchestral instruments in expressiveness is due to the player’s control of tone production and tone inflection. He can make the violin speak, he can make it sing. He can run the whole gamut of emotions on its strings – if he can translate feeling into the expressional terms of dynamics and nuance, into tone graduation and tone inflection by means of rhythm, of stress, of musical shading. (Auer 1921, 144-145.)

Auer here treats dynamics, rhythms and metrical considerations not as separate elements to the legato singing tone, but folds them into the superior category of tone, and portrays them as ways of creating variation within it (“inflection”). Vibrato and portamento (sliding between notes) also find themselves incorporated into the all-enveloping category of tone; Auer says that “like the portamento, the vibrato is primarily a means to.. embellish and beautify a singing passage or tone” (Auer 1921, 59). Moser appeals to history as a way of demonstrating the link between portamento and singing tone. The four strings of the violin were historically thought of as four separate vocal registers, insists Moser, which gave rise to the belief that one should play the notes of a melody entirely on the same string; subsequently, one needs to slide to reach notes that lie beyond the first position of the left hand (which only produces notes up to a perfect fifth above the open string. Joachim & Moser 1905, 3/8).

Conceived of as a physiological entity, tone may happily consist of its material manifestations, but as a spiritual entity tone may constitute their binaristic opposite. In Auer’s writings we find evidence of this distinction at work. We recall here the possible neo-Idealist influence on Auer’s thought; Auer makes a firm distinction between tone as a non-material entity and its material outworking; tone’s origins are found in the player’s “spirit” and “intellect” but it manifests itself as “a matter of the hairs on the stick, of rosin” and other materials:

The problem involved in the production of an entirely agreeable tone – that is to say a tone which is singing to a degree that leads the hearer to forget the physical process of its development is one whose solution must always be the most important task of those who devote themselves to mastering the violin.

The question of tone production, we might as well acknowledge at once, is not primarily a matter of the hairs on the stick, of rosin, of change of bow on the strings, nor of change of position by means of the fingers of the left hand. All these really signify nothing, absolutely nothing, when it comes to the production of a pure crystalline and transparent violin tone. ... The student must not only expect to sacrifice whatever time may be necessary, but he must be willing to bring to bear on the problem all his intelligence, all the mental and spiritual concentration of which he is capable. (Auer 1921, 51-52.)

We also begin to see in this quote the implications for this distinction between spirit and matter; tone, as spirit, “leads the hearer to forget the physical process of its development”. Singing tone thus conceals its mechanical act of reproduction. [9] There are further repercussions of this prior conceptual framework for Auer’s discursive construction of violin technique; when playing a passage with ascending or descending stepwise motion, Auer advises that the replacement of fingers, as the hand changes position (for example, as the first finger replaces the second when moving up into third position), take place without any glissando, since neglect of this rule is “certain to spoil a ‘singing’ passage” (Auer 1921, 87). Auer does not mean here that slides interfere with a legato bow stroke, since slides require a legato bow stroke in the first place (as opposed to lifting the bow) in order to be heard. What Auer wishes to conceal, rather, is the element of mechanism; Auer insists that the sound produced by the left hand’s mechanisms must not obstruct the essentially spiritual nature of tone.

Spiritual tone has a further consequence for ideas regarding the concrete act of violin playing, in that its fundamentally immaterial origin leads Auer to prohibit applying excessive pressure with the right hand. For Auer, tone cannot result solely from a single human’s effort; as a grandiose and transcendent “power” which exceeds human dimensions, it has to be “called forth”:

Hold the bow lightly, yet with sufficient firmness to be able to handle it with ease; above all, do not try to bring out a big tone by pressing the bow on the strings. Do not press down the bow with the arm: the whole body of sound should be produced by means of a light pressure of the wrist, which may be increased, little by little, until it calls forth a full tone, perfectly pure and equal in power. (Auer 1921, 55.)

Deliberate and purely physical mechanisms are done away with here; there is no need to “press”, and one does not “bring out” the tone, as if it were a material object; rather the player employs his higher faculties in “calling forth” the tone, in keeping with Auer’s earlier assertion that tone emanates from the violinist’s “spirit” and “intellect”. Auer also indicates how such a tone might sound tangibly; as a force with fundamentally immaterial origins, spiritual sound must sound “pure”, and after describing how to produce tone on the violin Auer recommends practicing a scale without “forcing” the tone, which would cause it to become “rough”. (Auer 1921, 55-56, 88, 57) One can imagine that a rough-sounding tone would again draw attention to the mechanisms of the instrument, since one’s ear would be drawn to the scraping of the bow on the strings.

Auer’s above description of the right hand’s role in tone production is, of course, highly practical advice, and one can imagine similar instructions’ being given for the playing of stringed instruments in other periods and cultures, by way of causing a taught string to freely resonate. If the localized experience came first, however, then here is an example of what Lakoff and Johnson have referred to as the tendency for a set of ideas from one experiential domain (in this case, spirit) to be transferred wholesale to a new domain (tone, as sound production), as the result of a shuttling back and forth between the old and new domains (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 7-9); in Auer’s case, therefore, a particular experience of tone production turns back to the original cultural idea of spirit to procure a new metaphor.

Common to much nineteenth-century thought and first mobilized by the Romantics, binarisms frequently overlap; spirit and matter often maps on to subjective-objective, as it does in Hegel’s thought. Whereas Auer pits spiritual tone against material body/instrument, Moser uses the subject-object binarism to conceive of two types of tone; these two kinds correspond quite closely, however, to the properties which Auer ascribes to spirit and matter. As well as the subjective tone (subjectiv-Ton), which is an “in-born gift” (angeborne Gabe), there is the “objectively-beautiful tone” (objektiv-schöne Ton). Objective tone, however, is denounced on account of its material limitations:

It is really only a sound of a certain height or depth, of which the resonance and colouring depend on the quality of the instrument used. It is different with the subjective or expressive tone, which results from an interplay, somewhat difficult to explain, between the pressure of the fingers of the left hand and the drawing of the bow across the strings. (Joachim & Moser 1905, 3/6.) [10]

Whereas objective tone is described as physical ‘sound’, and is aligned with the instrument of the violin, subjective tone is aligned with the player himself; admittedly, Moser’s description of the player’s bodily mechanisms is not quite Auer’s ‘spirit’ of the player, but in a passage which follows shortly we find evidence of tone’s link to notions of foundational subjectivity; this time, however, we find an appeal to vitalism:

First, of that factor of tone production, which is capable of thawing the original stiffness of the objective-beautiful sound, that the tone, which from hence has become alive, is able to release in the listener the feeling of pleasant warmth: of trembling or vibrato. (Joachim & Moser 1905, 3/6.) [11]

The import of Moser’s sentence is that vibrato plays a central role in bringing about tone’s vital properties. “That factor of tone production” is vibrato, through which the tone becomes “alive”; the metaphor is made more vivid by the addition of imagery associated with dead or inanimate objects (“stiffness”), which contrasts with signs of life (“thawing”, “warmth”).

Tone and the Threat of Nervous Exhaustion

Tone’s undecided positioning on the spectrum ranging from physical sound (as a legato bow stroke) to conceptual idea creates a problem for early twentieth-century writers on string playing; whereas its elevated, philosophically-resonant status leads writers to incorporate other musical dimensions into it, such as rhythm and vibrato and so on, these same components threaten to undermine tone’s basic sonic form, as a simple legato bow stroke. Moser and Auer find continuous vibrato problematic for this very reason. At the end of the last section we saw that Moser conceives of vibrato as the lifeblood of tone, but Moser goes on in this passage to advise that vibrato only be used on accented notes. Vibrating on every note is undesirable; Moser advises that vibrato should correspond to the character of a piece, and that it would be distasteful to use the same kind of vibrato in gentle movements as in expressive movements; “but even in movements headed con gran espressione, or molto apassionato,” Moser continues “it would also be very objectionable on the part of the performer to vibrate every note of each bar incessantly” (Joachim & Moser, 3/7) [12] Auer’s remarks on continuous vibrato are particularly pejorative; he goes as far as to declare that “this curious habit of oscillating and vibrating on each and every tone amounts to an actual physical defect” (Auer 1921, 61), an idea that, as we shall see shortly, is an outcrop of a wider discourse of health and disease in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. More significantly, in the same passage Auer reveals that what is truly at stake here is tone:

Some of the performers who habitually make use of the vibrato are under the impression that they are making their playing more effective, and some of them find the vibrato a very convenient device for hiding bad intonation or bad tone production. But such an artifice is worse than useless. (Auer 1921, 59.)

Fuelling Moser’s and Auer’s anxiety over the overuse of vibrato and the eclipsing of tone is the widespread fear, common to the era, of loss of physical strength. We have already seen how Nietzsche and Wagner negotiate notions of health and disease. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth the belief was widespread that the fast past of urban living placed a strain on the body’s nervous system, and led to exhaustion. Physicians such as George Miller Beard in the United States, and Emil Kraepelin in Germany promulgated this view in influential publications; Beard is responsible for naming the condition “neurasthenia”, a term which Emil Kraepelin initially used also, but after 1896 dropped it in favor of “disorders of exhaustion” (Gijswijt-Hofstra 2001, 11). Moving into the early decades of the twentieth century, the preoccupation with neurasthenia was increasingly replaced with notions of degeneration, which shifted the focus from domestic affairs to the collective health of nation states. Discourses on both topics, however, pathologized a remarkably wide range of traits and behaviors; for example, the self-styled cultural commentator Max Nordau lists as the symptoms of an “exhausted central nervous system” mysticism, “ego-mania”, “sexual psychopathy”, subversion of male and female roles and attire, attempts to make legal same-sex marriages, sadism, bestiality and necrophilia (Nordau 1993, 536-539). Having surveyed a wide range of primary sources from the period, particularly in relation to Wagner, James Kennaway argues that “what was on the surface a debate about music and science was in fact a discourse on masculinity and the self” (Kennaway 2004, 12).

Early twentieth-century violinists’ association of tone with physical strength, and their fears of what might happen if tone is compromised by other musical elements, is demonstrated well by a quote from the pedagogical treatise of the German violinist and pedagogue Carl Flesch. Flesch suspects that deviations from an ideal way of playing form along a spectrum, ranging from violinists who use little vibrato and who force their tone, to violinists who use too much vibrato and have a small and inflexible tone:

Beside the ideal violinist, whose emotion flows in equal proportion from his soul into his arms, we have there the cold type of violinist with slight vibratory capacity, and a tendency to force the tone, as well as the excessively vibrating, effeminate violinist, who has at his command no more than a small tone incapable of modulation. (Flesch 1939, 102.) [13]

Flesch’s fear that excess vibrato is “effeminate” confirms Kennaway’s assertion above, that pathological anxieties largely center around the masculine ideal.

We can now understand more fully why Auer views continuous vibrato as a kind of sickness. Auer also uses the metaphor of strength/weakness in discussing types of bowing; when advising on the spiccato Auer recommends using the third finger of the right hand to turn the bow in such a way as to cause more bow hairs to touch the string, “since otherwise the tone will be feeble” (Auer 1921, 75). Although Auer advises against using the muscular strength of the bowing arm in tone production, he is nevertheless concerned that the strength of the tone itself should not diminish, which leads him to argue that “the more one tries to diminish the body of tone… the more one should increase the finger pressure” (Auer 1921, 90); Auer frequently refers to the need to develop the “strength” of the left hand fingers (Auer 1921, 90, 91, 97, 98 for example).

It is also clear that, in the pedagogical treatises of early twentieth-century violinists. the introduction of pathological notions serves to further fortify their authority on all matters surrounding violin playing. They had already inherited the notion of tone as a health from prior models of subjectivity with the same attribute, but their promotion of tone as the linchpin of all musical components in performance, coupled with their further equating of various performance devices with more pedestrian concerns over disease, enabled them to freely exercise control over these devices.

Bel Canto: Imitation of the Singer, Imitation of a Style, or Subjectivism in the Guise of Historicism?

We have so far looked at the implications of a tension between two notions of tone, one as the material sound of a legato bow stroke, the other as an idea laden with many of the philosophical concepts of the age; we have yet to ask, however, whether the idea of singing tone incorporated any notions of the physical singing voice. Was the idea of song merely a metaphorical off-cut of a set of philosophical concepts, or did the idea of the human singing voice, with its various abilities and constraints, or perhaps the workings of individual body parts, play an important role in the discursive construction of string playing?

If violin playing is thought of as the real-time practices of the singer, then does that mean that violinists should imitate singers? Nietzsche and Wagner, as well as writers on string playing, were in the business of searching for a primary entity or energy that is foundational, totalizing, deep and organic; subsequently, imitation becomes undesirable because it tends to be occasional and superficial. Whereas the foundational principle is all-inclusive and unifying, imitation leads to multiplicity. As Bernd Sponheuer notes, depth is a longstanding and recurring ideal in German culture (2002, 40).

Indeed, Auer had this conceptual framework in mind when discouraging students of the violin from imitating eminent violinists. After discussing the practicing routines of the masters, Auer adds that these are not to be copied directly:

But what I have meant to suggest here is that the great artists are exceptional. Each has his peculiarities, and one must not and should not try to imitate any one of them blindly. Rather you must try to catch the reflection of his genius and, utilizing whatever light it may shed, readapt it to your own individual needs. It is often the case, in fact, that when a great artist stresses some small defect or peculiarity in his playing, any number of young students will first of all seize upon the unessential personal quirk and believe that in so doing they have grasped the very essence of the artist’s genius. It is much easier, of course, to imitate this trifling defect than the more substantial qualities which, at bottom, make up the artist’s true individuality. (Auer 1921, 46-47.)

Auer’s concern is that it is all too easy to mimic superficial qualities (“trifling defect”); we notice that Auer also appeals to pathological notions to make these small qualities appear further unattractive. Rather, the process of learning from another, if at all possible, is presumably more long term and on a larger scale, since geniuses maintain a high degree of autonomy; genius is deep (“substantial qualities… at bottom”), and one can only “catch the reflection” of geniuses, not partake of their character.

Moser hesitates to declare upfront the singer as corporeal model for the student violinist; rather, he fashions a distinction between the singer’s and violinist’s material sound production on the one hand, and the abstracted origins of their tone on the other:

Even the most musical and euphonious singer must partly ascribe the impression he produces to that heaven-born gift, a beautiful tone of voice; likewise for the interpretation-artist whose instrument is the violin, a beautiful, warm tone is of the greatest importance. It is the sounding expression of his inner feeling. (Joachim & Moser, 1905, 3/6.) [14]

On the material side we have both the “musical” and well-sounding (“euphonious”) singer and the violinist with his “instrument”; but both, says Moser, owe their physical gestures and equipment to tone, which is both of the greatest external (“heaven-born”) and internal (“inner”) origin. It is difficult to ignore, however, the juxtaposition of singer and violinist, with the singer placed first. In fact, Moser later appeals directly to the singers’ embodied practices to provide guidance for violinists; Moser argues that violinists should not make breaks in phrasing by raising their bows, on the grounds that this is comparable to an asthmatic singer, whose breath fails to support his intended phrasing:

Anyone making a pause here [in the middle of a phrase] in the raising of the bow... creates the same impression as an asthmatical singer whose breath fails him at the most important moment. (Joachim & Moser, 14.) [15]

We notice here that Moser monopolizes on wider society’s anxieties over disease to strengthen his promotion of long musical phrases.

Moser’s promotion of singing as a model for violin participates in the wider idealizing of bel canto, which, as Owen Jander and Ellen T. Harris have explained, was understood in the latter half of the nineteenth century as the lost vocal art of the Italians of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (Jander & Harris 2010). This was as much an important topic for Wagner in his essay on conducting as it was for Moser, an issue which I will address shortly. Moser actually comes as far as to use the word “imitation” (Nachahmung) when declaring that the pinnacle of violin playing is the imitation of bel canto; it is unclear, however, whether Moser here implies the direct imitation of singers’ embodied practices or whether he is using the ideal of bel canto to identify an authentic tradition of teaching:

Now, as the violin is pre-eminently a singing instrument, and always finds its highest expression in the imitation of the bel canto of the Italians, we are surely justified in following the teaching transmitted to us by Leopold Mozart. (Joachim & Moser 1905, 19.) [16]

The need to establish a sense of perspective in terms of which historical documents on violin playing were more authoritative than others is highly important to Moser in his essay on interpretation. Much of Moser’s career up until the publication of Violinschule was taken up with source studies; with Philipp Spitta’s prior work in this area constituting an example, Moser had uncovered much past literature on matters of violin playing, as is clear from the Violinschule. In the midst of nineteenth-century Germany’s increasing turn to historicism, this constituted for Moser an important guide on issues such as vibrato, portamento, ornaments, and so on.

The notion of bel canto in this passage appears to do no more than justify a certain pedagogical tradition, but later in Moser’s essay we come to see the greater resonance of the idea, as Moser knits it together with the themes that we have explored so far in this article. Moser identifies Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule of 1741 as an authoritative guide for violinists because Mozart senior had been taught the violin by the Italian violinist, Giuseppe Tartini, thus making him a direct conduit to bel canto; we come to see, though, that Mozart’s text is only of use to Moser in so far as it informs a rather dense and dry passage on ornaments. Later, however, we come to see how the idea of bel canto functions more potently in Moser’s web of beliefs and ideas.

Moser links bel canto to his central ideas about violin playing by constructing a historical argument designed to prove German violin playing’s direct link to the Italian bel canto of the eighteenth century. In the tenth and final section of the essay Moser argues that a German “art” (Kunst) of violin playing can trace its roots “almost exclusively to Italian teaching and models” (fast ausschließlich auf italienische Lehrer und Vorbilder), by which Moser means bel canto (Joachim & Moser 1905, 34). Moser doesn’t expand further on the representatives of this German art in this paragraph, but a few paragraphs on he relates that the famous violinists, George Hellmesberger senior, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst and Joseph Joachim issued from the German violinist Joseph Böhm’s “school” (Schule) of violin playing, who had in turn studied with the French violinist, Pierre Rode, who had in turn himself studied with Giovanni Battista Viotti, an Italian violinist (Joachim & Moser 1905, 34). Moser uses his argument for this direct lineage of the German school from the Italian to denigrate the playing of many French and Belgian violinists, not on grounds of race or national characteristics, but because they have “entirely forgotten that healthy and natural method of singing and phrasing which originated in the bel canto of the old Italians” (Joachim & Moser 1905, 32) [17].

Bel canto’s function in furthering a German nationalism readily springs to mind here; Moser employs historical enquiry in the service of proving German music’s roots in an authentic source, and is then subsequently able to denigrate Romance musical cultures. One also wonders also whether Moser had certain French or Belgian violinists in mind to whose playing he objected. What one can most certainly argue from Moser’s essay though, and the point which constitutes the fuller significance of this final section of prose, is that the idea of bel canto is bound up with the promotion of subjectivism; Moser aligns bel canto with spirit, expression, and the ‘characteristic’ by insisting that these are the qualities which the playing of French and Belgian violinists lack:

In their performance of the various bowings there is as little trace of the ‘characteristic’ as there is of that modulatory richness in variety of tone, whereby all nuances of expression may at once be commanded. They never bring out the spirit of the artwork, which they imagine to interpret (vortragen). (Joachim & Moser 1905, 32.) [18]

In contrast, “the bowing and tone-production” of the French and Belgian players “merely aim at the sensuous in sound” (hat nur das rein Sinnliche des Klanges im Auge. Joachim & Moser 1905, 32); Moser thus posits French and Belgian players as the binaristic opposite of the subjectivist school of playing he promotes here, as materialists. What is even more significant in this passage is that tone production is at the centre of the discussion; we can say, then, that bel canto is, by and large, singing tone.

As singing tone, bel canto is also aligned with health, as we saw in the previous section (the French and Belgian musicians have “entirely forgotten that healthy and natural method of singing and phrasing which originated in the bel canto of the old Italians”). Remembering that for Max Nordau, as for many others at the turn of the twentieth century, disease was associated with sexually immoral behavior (see above), Moser may in fact be accusing French and Belgian players of aiming at sexual stimulation of the senses when he accuses them of merely attaining to the ‘sensous’ (sinnliche) in sound. Laurence Dreyfus has argued that the term Sinnlichkeit is a euphemism, in texts from the latter half of the nineteenth century, for the view that Wagner’s music ‘provokes an explicit erotic charge’ (Dreyfus 2010, 3).

It would be unfair to say that Moser’s historical arguments are a smokescreen for his ideological approach to violin playing; despite the feeling that one is being deceived by Moser’s rather tenuous historical arguments, his historicism plays an integral role in the formation of his ideas. Having said this, we have also seen that, apart from a few direct analogies between violin playing and the physical act of singing, the strength of Moser’s notion of a foundational subjectivity, essential to his construction of the idea of singing tone, largely overrides the idea of violin playing as a direct imitation of singing practices.

Concluding Remarks

By now it should be clear that the discursive construction of violin playing in the early-twentieth century is a complex affair, to say the least; what I have tried to show is that singing tone constitutes a unifying theme to the many strands, and helps us gain perspective on a highly diverse range of beliefs and ideas. The idea of singing tone incorporates a wide range of ideas, drawn from the experience of the embodied voice, as well as some major philosophical notions of subjectivity. We have also seen that since the idea of tone incorporates the notion of a physiologically healthy form of subjectivity, it draws in many of the pathological anxieties from the time. In the previous section we saw that because Moser conceives of singing tone as bel canto this also draws in his historicist approach to writing about music.

What I also hope to have shown in this article is that the discursive negotiation of beliefs and ideas surrounding violin playing is dynamic and complex. In one sense my goal has been to advance the case for an historical and cultural approach to performance, which might imply that what we are looking for is the origins of performative practices in prior historical/cultural trends. I have demonstrated in this article, however, that this clean-cut, one-directional relationship clearly does not exist, and that both cultural notions and first-hand descriptions of practices are constantly modified by their influence on each other. It is difficult to say what came first most of the time; for example, I suggested in the section on nervous exhaustion that interference to a smooth legato bow stroke from left hand vibrato led writers to analogize this as healthy tone under threat from disease. However, one could also argue that the vibrato was initially pathologized because it is a mechanism that is, by its nature, difficult to control, and therefore it became a prime target for fears over the uncontrollable workings of the nerves. I have therefore tried to resist any robust systematizing of the contingent interaction of ideas, and instead present them as a complex of interlinked ideas.

I have focused exclusively on pedagogical treatises in this article, but there are documents from other genres dating from the early-twentieth century that are deserving of study, such as the memoir, the biography, the journalistic article (among others); a comparative study of these genres, and their role in shaping the ideas contained within the documents, would further enrich the historical study of early twentieth-century cultures of performance. The pedagogical treatises of Moser and Auer have certain qualities which make them prime targets for a discursive study of performance; they are substantial literary projects, were written by eminent performers of the age, and have been read extensively by violinists, at the time and ever since. I also have endeavored to show something of the link between the genre of the pedagogical treatise and the content of Moser’s and Auer’s volumes; as authoritative texts they incorporate notions of subjectivity which were highly appealing to the sensibilities of the age, and resisted critique, as well as capitalize on more everyday fears over nervous exhaustion to prohibit the use of certain performance devices. There are other documents which are equally as interesting, however, and present us with quite different constructions of performance; some examples are Moser’s biography of Joachim (Joseph Joachim: Ein Lebensbild, 1898), Frederick Martens’s collection of interviews with famous violinists (Violin Mastery: Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers, 1919), and Carl Flesch’s memoirs (Erinnerungen eines Geigers, late-1920s – early-1930s).

An obvious direction for future expansion of research in this area is to consider other instruments. In terms of substantial texts on or by cellists I have not been able to find any dating from earlier than the late 1920s, beginning with Hugo Becker’s pedagogical treatise, written in 1929 (Mechanik und Ästhetik des Violoncellspiels). There are also numerous texts surrounding Pablo Casals dating from the 1920s on, which notably include JM Corredor’s 1955 book, Conversations avec Casals: Souvenirs et Opinions D'un Musicien. There are very few documents surrounding the viola; William Primrose is probably the first to write extensively on the instrument (for example, My Viola and I, 1974). From the 1950s onwards there are many audiovisual recordings of master classes which are deserving of study.

I note, finally, that my approach in this article has been exclusively discursive in kind; it would be highly profitable, however, to incorporate sound recordings into the source field, and to marry a cultural/discursive approach with the existing research on early twentieth-century sound recordings. The advantage of my current approach is my extensive coverage of close-range performative acts, and my attempt to show that their interaction with cultural ideas is close-knit; a study of these in relation to analyses of recorded practices, therefore, would readily lead to valuable insights.

Notes

Ein Tempel der Kunst war enstanden, und in hellen Scharen strömten die Gläubigen hin, um aus Munde eines Priesters die neue Lehre zu vernehmen. Ich spreche von den Joachimschen Quartettabenden in der Singakademie. Weismann, Adolf (1911). Berlin als Musikstadt. Geschichte der Oper und des Konzerts von 1740 bis 1911. Berlin, 311.
Apart from four introductions to edited violin scores in the third volume signed J.J., the German violinist, writer and music editor, Andreas Moser (1859-1925) is the author of Violinschule. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that in a preface to the entire work, Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), an eminent German violinist, attests to Moser’s acquaintance with his ideas, since Moser studied the violin with him. Joachim also says that the two exchanged ideas on violin playing through extended discussions (Joachim & Moser 1905, 1/4). Alfred Moffat’s translation has been ammended where necessary.
‘For the performance of a musical composition in the spirit of its creator, two conditions must necessarily be fulfilled.’ Der Vortrag einer musikalischen Komposition im Geist ihres Schöpfers ist an die Erfüllung zweier Bedingungen geknüpft. (Joachim & Moser 1905, 3/5.)
Fröhlich empfunden und geistvoll dargestellt, wird dann das köstliche Stück auch im Zuhörer frohsinniges Behagen auslösen und im Mitgenießen seinen Geist entzünden.
HJ Moser (Andreas Moser’s son) relays this information soon after his father’s death (Moser 1926, 108). In his New Grove article on Spitta (Wolff 2010), Christoph Wolff writes that Spitta’s ‘aesthetic judgments were strongly influenced by neo-Kantian philosophy’.
Was mir am Klaviere, oder bei der Lesung der Partitur, im Ausdrucke so seelenvoll belebt erschienen, erkannte ich dann kaum wieder, wie es meistens ganz unbeachtet flüchtig an den Zuhörern vorüberging.
Gewiß liegen diese zuvördest in dem gänzlichen Mangel eines wahrhaften deutschen Musikkonservatoriums, im strengsten Sinne des Wortes, wonach in ihm die genaue tradition des ächten, von den Meistern selbst ausgeübten Vortrages unserer klassischen Musik durch stete lebendige Fortführung aufbewahrt worden ware, was natürlich widerum voraussetzen lassen müßte, daß diese Meister dort selbst dazu gelangt wären, ihre Werke ganz nach ihrem Sinne aufzuführen. Diese Voraussetzung, wie das darauf sich gründende Ergebniß, hat sich leider der deutsche Kultursinn entgehen lassen, und wir find nun auf die Einfalle jedes einzelnen Dirigenten dafür angewiesen, was dieser etwa von dem Tempo oder dem Vortrage eines klassischen Musikstückes halte, um uns über den Geist desselben zu orientiren. (Wagner 1873, 336-337.)
Nach wie vor rücken in den grossen Orchestern die Musiker nach dem Unziennitätsgesetze zu den Stellen der ersten Instrumente herauf, und nehmen folgerichtig erst bei eingetretener Schwächung ihrer Kräfte die ersten Stimmen ein, während die jüngeren und tüchtigeren Musiker an den zweiten sizten. (Wagner 1873, 329.)
Achille Rivarde, an American violinist who settled in London in 1899, also expresses a desire that mechanism be concealed in his pedagogical treatise of 1921: “To me technique is only interesting from the moment it becomes so subtle as to be unnoticeable; when it gives the impression of facility rather than of technical ability. Sarasate had the greatest technique of any violinist, but it was so easy and so natural that it attracted no attention; the listener merely heard the finished result without being disturbed by the consideration of his method of producing it.” (Rivarde 1921, 16-17.)
Er ist eigentlich nur Klang von bestimmter Höhe oder Tiefe, dessen Resonanz und Farbe von der Qualität des betreffenden Instrumentes abhängen. Anders der subjective, ausdrucksvolle Ton, der aus einer schwer zu beschriebenden Wechselwirkung zwischen den greifenden Fingern der linken Hand und dem streichenden Bogen resultiert.
Zunächst von jenem Faktor der Tongebung, der die ursprüngliche Starrheit des objektiv-schönen Klanges soweit aufzutauen imstande ist, dass der nunmehr lebendig gewordene Ton im Zuhörer das Gefühl wohltuender Wärme auszulösen vermag: von der Bebung oder dem vibrato.
Aber auch bei einer con gran espressione oder molto appassionato überschriebenden Melodie wäre es von Übel, wenn der Vortragende auf allen Tönen jedes einzelnen Taktes ununterbrochen beben wollte.
Neben dem Idealgeiger, dem die Empfindung in gleicher Proportion (1/2:1/2) aus der Seele in die Arme fliesst, gibt es den kalten Geigertypus mit geringer Vibrationsfähigkeit und mit einer Neigung zum Forcieren des Tones (1/4 links, ¾ rechts) sowie den übermässig vibrierenden weichlichen Geiger (3/4 links), dem stets nur ein kleiner, wenig modulationsfähiger Ton zur Verfügung steht (1/4 rechts). (Flesch 1929, 76)
Wie selbst der musikalische Sänger, der eine wohlklingende Stimme hat, nicht umhin können wird, einen Teil seiner Wirkung jener Himmelsgabe zuzuschreiben, so ist auch für den geigenden Vortragskünstler ein schöner, warmer Ton von größter Wichtigkeit. Er ist die klingende Äusserung seines inneren Empfindens.
Wer hier... eine Luftpause verursacht, ruft den Eindruck eines asthmatischen Sängers hervor, dem in entscheidenden Moment der Atem ausgeht.
Da nun die Violine in erster Linie ein Gesangsinstrument ist und ihre ureigenste Betätigung stets in der Nachahmung des bel canto der alten Italiener genfunden hat, so dürfen wir uns mit weit gröserer Berechtigung an die Überlieberferungen L. Mozarts.
Jene gesunde, natürliche Art des Singens und Phrasierens, die im bel canto der alten Italiener begründet ist… völig verlernt haben.
Von einer Characteristik der Stricharten… ebensowenig eine Spur wie von jener modulationreichen Art der Tongebung, die alle Nuancen des Ausdrucks auf der Palette hat! Sie geben nicht den Geist des Kunstwerkes wieder, das sie vorzutragen wähnen.

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