After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance

by Kenneth Hamilton

Kenneth Hamilton's book engagingly and lucidly dissects the oft-invoked myth of a Great Tradition, or Golden Age of Pianism. It is written both for players and for members of their audiences by a pianist who believes that scholarship and readability can go hand-in-hand. Hamilton discusses in meticulous yet lively detail the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. He entertainingly recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today, how an often unhistorical "respect for the score" began to replace pianists' improvisations and adaptations, and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard.

Pianists will find food for thought here on their repertoire and the traditions of its performance. Hamilton chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. He emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement.

Audiences will encounter a vivid account of how drastically different are the recitals they attend compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. They will discover when cowed listeners eventually stopped applauding between movements, and why they stopped talking loudly during them.

The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical-some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly, if deceptively, remembered as constituting a Golden Age.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2007

Reviews

[Robert Poortinga · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is.... a complete masterpiece, it's so well written, it has so much information and so well backed up but still not jumping into conclusions.. Even though I like opinionated books (like Charles Rosen) this book just lets you decide what to do when ever you want to do it.

One of the books I learned the most from in the interpretation of the Romantic music and giving myself a break for missing 1 note in a piece during a performance. Thank you for your Psychology consult!

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent material, very thorough, feels inspired and 'crafted', has a lot of insight and thoughts to offer, wish I had the money to buy it (for continual reference) but instead had to return it to library.