impact, can only be experienced in the here and now and cannot be fully replicated for perpetuity in notated form. In music, historical treatises seem to be well aware of this mutability and accept it. They stress that we must faithfully respect the intentions of the composer, and at the same time they emphasize that we are expected to add our personal share of invention. Obviously, the latter was also part of the composer’s intention (or at least the composer’s expectation), but it is not always clear to what degree. We can be guided by the many descriptions of great performers (but there again: “erzählte Musik . . .”). Descriptions of bad examples mainly criticize excesses, and, less often, under-interpretation such as lack of ornamentation. Criticisms such as those found in Bollioud de Mermet’s De la corruption du goust dans la musique françoise (1746) might tell us as much about their author as about the performers he describes. Even so, they give us some detailed, albeit subjective, information.
Good taste is a key concept in many eighteenth-century treatises, being the sine qua non of artistry. Taste greatly influenced the way a composition was read—good taste in Versailles was not necessarily the same in Naples, London, or Berlin, not even in contemporaneous times. What was applauded in one place could be despised in another. The specific meaning of good taste must have been clear enough for the author himself or for his immediate surroundings, but the definition obviously varied greatly in time and place. To a certain extent, historical treatises can show us these changes of taste, but we have to be aware that the distance in time might cause a difference in our appreciation of a given idea. This can easily be experienced by listening to recordings from the beginning of the twentieth century. I propose to approach them with a very open mind, not with a retro attitude (in grandmother’s time everything was better), but not with a condescending attitude, either. These recordings by universally acclaimed performers (who presumably possessed good taste) often sound foreign to us. Though they obviously read the same notation as we do, it is not easy to understand the musical choices and identify, for example, with Adelina Patti’s rubato and glissandi in Mozart’s Voi che sapete, Rachmaninov’s beautifully free tempo in a Bach sarabande, or Mengelberg’s dramatic Matthäus Passion. I can hardly imagine that still-earlier performing styles would sound more familiar to us!
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