bill killpatrick wrote: > i find the whole hip approach to early music to be something of a > tyranny. if we were to apply it to other disciplines - like painting > or opera, for example - then we wouldn't have verdi's shakespearian > operas or anything much beyond cave drawings.
You don't seem understand what historically informed performance is, which might explain why it could be "applied" to painting. We don't, after all, "perform" Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes (though a person's attitude toward the importance of experiencing Michelangelo's original conception might affect his position on restoration, or whether it would improve on Michelangelo to view the whole thing on video screens or postage stamps or bubble gum cards). Of course, operas are performed in historically informed ways all the time, with gratifying effects on the bank accounts of lutenists and theorbo builders. Taking a historically informed approach to Verdi's Falstaff means trying to understand what sort of sounds and effects Verdi expected from the performing forces at his disposal and assuming that the closer a performance comes to them, the better it will be; i.e., that Verdi knew best how it should sound. If you begin by assuming that Verdi and Boito were committing a sin in tampering with Shakespeare, you won't perform the opera at all, and the question of whether to perform it in a historically informed manner won't come up. HIP is not a dogmatic system of condemning anything anachronistic (anachronism is as pervasive as continuo in baroque opera) or historically impure, but rather an assumption that a) an old work worth performing is worth performing well, and 2) performing it well entails understanding as fully as possible the sound that the creators had in their ears when they did the creating. Amazing. I just wasted 250 words justifying historically informed performance to a bunch of lute players. Howard
