Some months ago, as she writes in this issue, Vivien Schweitzer heard Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried performed in a historically informed style, with the orchestra playing 19th-century instruments or replicas. Textures were light, tempos fleet, voices nimble; expressive effects such as vibrato were used sparingly. Anyone weaned on the golden age of Wagner recordings might have found the idea bizarre. But I can think of at least one person who would not have felt that way: the late English conductor Roger Norrington.
One of the leading lights of the period-instrument movement, the iconoclastic Norrington died in July at the age of 91. With such ensembles as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, he advocated for strict adherence to a composer’s metronome markings, while carefully considering an orchestra’s size and how the musicians should be arrayed onstage. He applied his research not just to composers of the classical era but also to the Romantics: Hector Berlioz, Edward Elgar, Anton Bruckner, and yes, Wagner. Perhaps most famously, he waged a war on vibrato—which he once likened to a “modern drug”—arguing instead for a pure-tone orchestral sound.
Indeed, it was his position as an anti-vibrato evangelist that drew me to his work. In the Spring 2009 issue of the Scholar, I wrote about several Norrington recordings, my initial skepticism giving way to astonishment at how poetic the music sounded: The more I listened to the orchestra’s naked timbre, to those silvery string tones, the more I wanted to hear. Much to my surprise, Norrington wrote me a letter of thanks. This led to a brief but lively email exchange in which we touched on many aspects of performance practice and the degree to which historical research can inform the interpretations of, among others, Gustav Mahler. Norrington’s death sent me back to those emails, and I was taken once again by the clarity of his thought, the intensity of his passions, and the love he evinced of his Stuttgart orchestra. “It is easy to over-egg the Late Romantics,” he wrote. “Trouble is, when you play it straighter, people think it must be lacking in passion. They mistake the gift-packaging for the piece, the makeup for the face.”
