But old assumptions about how freely “Messiah” could be interpreted were beginning to change. An example of a stricter understanding of how to perform “Messiah” was the conductor Johannes Somary’s version with the English Chamber Orchestra in 1970. With its smaller ensemble, much faster tempo and marked sense of restraint by vocalists, it reflected the influence of the “historically informed performance” movement, which would shape recordings of a wide variety of classical music in the coming decades.
This movement encouraged a greater fidelity to scores — in their earliest extant versions, not the received tradition of 19th-century orchestration that had survived into the 20th century — as well as the use of so-called period instruments (gut rather than steel strings on bowed instruments, for example). Most characteristically, the movement advocated a style of singing that discouraged vibrato in favor of a clean tone associated, to modern ears, with Oxbridge boys’ choirs.
Performances like Somary’s, audiences were assured, were more authentic, capturing how Handel had meant the work to be performed, free of the corruptions that had accrued over the centuries. “Messiah” was supposed to be a refreshing draft of cold English spring water, not the stuffed German sausage of conductors such as Otto Klemperer. (Though, oddly enough, Klemperer’s gloriously slow Teutonic “Messiah” with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1965 is one of the few performances of that era and style that remains highly regarded.)
But this purist view was always dubious. It assumes that the correct approach to performing a piece of music can be “unearthed” in a straightforward archaeological sense. This understanding of authenticity — as something that requires discarding a tradition that evolved organically over time — has been influential, and not only in the world of classical music. It is of a piece, for example, with the 1986 edition of the Oxford Shakespeare, whose editors changed the name “Falstaff” to “Oldcastle” in “Henry IV, Part 1,” as its author may well have written in a manuscript that does not, alas, exist. In doing so they made a speculative attempt at recovering “history” but erased one of the most famous literary creations of all time.
Despite its reverence for the music of earlier eras (and its commendable rediscovery of countless works that had not been performed for centuries), the historically informed performance movement can be seen as a fundamentally modern project, one that unwittingly destroys the past — the actual performance tradition handed down to us by generations of conductors and musicians — in the name of reclaiming it.