Marketing by manifesto is a technique that has been successfully pioneered in recent years both by musicians and record companies. I am not referring here to genuine scholarly innovation—to the detailing of the multiplicity of fresh insights that are now available to promoters and performers of early music—but to those who use tendentious arguments, half-baked aesthetic theory and scholarship that is often far from water-tight to market the idea that here at last is the truth about some Himalayan masterpiece that the legendary interpreters of the past have somehow managed to misrepresent. John Eliot Gardiner's, for me, dismal recording of the Brahms Requiem, complete with accompanying manifesto, was a recent case in point.
Benjamin Zander has gone even further. His bright, breezy, workmanlike and occasionally eccentric semi-amateur performance of the Ninth Symphony has generated enough copy in newspapers and magazines to fill a small skip. Which is good news for Pickwick. As one cynical publishing hand used to say, ''We don't read reviews, we measure them''.
English-born and American-based, Benjamin Zander is preoccupied with Beethoven's metronome markings and what he considers to be the damaging disregard of the markings by old leviathans of the podium like Klemperer and Furtwangler. It is hardly a new preoccupation. Unfortunately, the problems are insoluble for a variety of reasons—technical, editorial, practical, philosophical and even psychological. Did Beethoven use the new-fangled metronome at all accurately? Were his wishes reliably conveyed by editors? Were they reasonable? (One is not thinking of Beethoven the composer but Beethoven the would-be performer: old, irate, deaf and increasingly tyrannical.) Beyond that, is there any sense in which a metronomically calculated tempo can work in the first instance (composers generally think their music can travel faster than is practical), let alone when affected by a multiplicity of orchestras and acoustics? One could go on about the many-sidedness of the greatest works of art. Or the variability of the tempos adopted for their own music by virtually all composers for whom documentation exists.
In practice, Zander's Ninth—keenly played, tolerably sung and vividly recorded—adds virtually nothing to our understanding of the work. Norrington (EMI), Toscanini (RCA) and even the maligned Klemperer (EMI) have all shown how well a swiftish tempo works in the third movement. Dozens of conductors have taken the controversial second movement Trio at a racy presto. (Though none I recall takes quite so procrustean a view as Zander.) For the rest, what merit is there in an account of the Ninth that turns the first movement into a gabble of chattering themelets that even Schumann might have blushed to own? So obsessed is Zander with tempo, he seems to have given little thought to the harmonic and structural base of the symphony. Yet, in the booklet essay, how he struts and preens himself, lording it over poor misguided Furtwangler (EMI)!
I should add that the proof-reading of the booklet is wretched, though I suppose this could be symbolic: a paradigm of the printed texts of the Ninth that Zander finds so unsatisfactory.'