On Playing the Flute by Johann Joachim Quantz; Edward R. ReillyReview by: Howard Mayer BrownJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1967), pp. 300-302Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830797 .

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300 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

used to make a line of communication between the worshipper and the object of his worship. Whether messages are carried in both directions or only in one (or in neither) is, in the present con- text, immaterial; but what men have sent out over the line from time to time tells, if one has ears to hear, a great deal about the senders.

DONALD JAY GROUT Cornell University

Johann Joachim Quantz: On Play- ing the Flute. A complete transla- tion with an Introduction and Notes by Edward R. Reilly. New York: The Free Press; London: Faber and Faber, z966. xxxix, 365 PP. QUANTZ'S Versuch einer Anweisung die Fldte traversiere zu spielen (1752) is hardly an unknown work. It has been studied and quoted widely by almost every musician involved with problems of performances of i8th-century music. The first thing that most writers have said about it-and quite rightly-is that the title is somewhat misleading, since the work is much more than merely a method book for learning to play the flute. It is in fact an attempt at a com- prehensive essay on how to become a complete i8th-century musician. While it is true that sixteen of its eighteen chapters deal directly with flute playing, even these chapters can, or rather should, be read with pleasure and profit by everyone interested in performing mid- i8th-century music, and, in fact, by almost anyone who is interested in any aspect of this music. Along with details, most of them of immediate practical value even today, about the technique of flute playing, matters of fingering, tonguing, embouchure, and breathing, Quantz introduces much valuable infor- mation in these early chapters on oblig- atory and extempore ornamentation, on playing fast and slow movements and in-

venting cadenzas, and on good execution in general. His advice about the things that a flutist must observe if he plays in public concerts (chap. xvi) should be required reading for all amateur per- formers, and for many professionals to- day. The last two chapters of the work, each of them long, self-contained essays, take a broader view of the musical world. In the first Quantz discusses with insight the duties of each member of an orchestra: what makes a good leader, and what a good orchestral violinist, and so on. In the final chapter he surveys the principal sorts of music written in his time, describing with surprising sophisti- cation the necessary parts of each form (sonata, concerto, and the like), and writes with shrewdness and sense as well as sensibility of the differences between the Italian and French styles of perform- ing and composing. This final chapter was written ostensibly to give performers some clear idea about how a piece of music should be judged; Quantz con- siders the material he discusses to be a necessary part of the equipment of any performer who wishes to be more than a mechanical drudge.

From this work alone, it is clear that Quantz was a first-rate musician even if he was not a great composer, and Ed- ward R. Reilly, the translator of the book, quite rightly makes the point in his introduction that we are scarcely in a position to judge Quantz as a composer since so few of his works, and those few untypical, are currently available. Quantz's musicianly qualities are mani- fest on every page of his work, for he tries to do much more than merely in- struct the beginner in the rudiments of playing. Instead, he does really try to capture in prose those qualities that make up a sensitive performer. Along with a treasure house of facts about pre- cisely what performers actually did, then, the work is especially fascinating-and fascinating is precisely the right word- for the insights it gives us into the sorts of musical problems faced by i8th-cen- tury musicians, which turn out to be, not so surprisingly, the very same prob- lems that face musicians today, and prob-

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REVIEWS 301

ably also at all other times: how to play in tune, how to play expressively, and how to phrase beautifully and with good taste. Any 20th-century musician who still has a patronizing attitude toward the musicians of the past, and maintains, for example, that all performances before the 20th century were painfully out of tune, should be made to read Quantz's book, for he discusses at great length very subtle problems of intonation, and gives good advice on how to avoid many pitfalls. Anyone who has had any expe- rience at all with older instruments knows that they can in fact be played in tune, al- though with greater difficulty than with modern instruments. But anyone who has heard, for example, Shelley Gruskin of the New York Pro Musica play the one- keyed flute knows that Quantz's ideal was attainable. And such performances constitute proof that Quantz knew what he was writing about, although it seems to me insulting to Quantz to demand such proof, for every page of his book offers evidence enough that he was a skilled and intelligent musician. I do not mean to suggest that every i8th-century performance was distinguished by its good intonation, a virtue that was doubt- less more difficult to obtain then than now, but one that was definitely within the grasp of competent musicians, even though they were playing on their quaint, old instruments. The modern mu- sicians who insist that our new and im- proved instruments are always played in tune must never go to concerts.

Quantz, born in 1697, spent the first twenty-five years of his mature life (1716-1741) in Dresden, mostly as a member of the royal orchestra. In the middle of his stay there, he devoted three years (1724-1727) to a grand tour of Europe, getting to know the musical personalities and the tastes of Italy, France, and England. In 1741 he moved to Berlin, where, as is well known, he became the flute teacher and musical adviser to Frederick the Great, and where he stayed until his death in 1773. Musicians who wish to apply Quantz's advice to performances today must first decide which repertoire of music he was

describing, and that decision must take into account the facts of his career. In- deed, the question of the relevance of Quantz's book to various kinds of i8th- century music is perhaps the major prob- lem that must be faced in using the book. It is a question that engenders heated discussion,' and a final answer seems not yet to be near. There can be little doubt, in view of Quantz's career, that his book may be interpreted as at least one man's opinion on how to play mid-i8th-century German music, especially that in the new galant style, that is, music by the Grauns, Hasse, C. P. E. Bach, probably Telemann, and of course Quantz him- self and his student, Frederick the Great. The extent to which his remarks apply to what he would have called the learned style of the generation preceding his own, notably the music of J. S. Bach, is more difficult to know. One hopes that Edward R. Reilly will offer us his opin- ions on this crucial question in his vol- ume of commentary on Quantz, which is announced for early publication by the American Musicological Society.

Translations of important books on music are of great value, not only to the wide audience of musicians and mu- sic lovers who do not read foreign lan- guages, but also for the scholar whose linguistic abilities must perforce be con- stantly cultivated. A translation can never substitute for the original work- scholars must still use the original Ger- man text of Quantz-but it can make infinitely easier the task of assimilating a large work, for the larger outlines of a book and its overall scope and compe- tence are much better judged from the vantage point of one's native language, even though all details must constantldy be checked against the original. And the expertise of a translator who has thought seriously about the subtler nuances of each passage should be thankfully ac- knowledged by everyone who is not completely at home in a foreign lan- guage.

The greater ease of approaching x See, for example, Frederick Neumann,

"The French InIgales, Quantz, and Bach," this JoUrRNAL. XVIII (i965), 313-358.

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302 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Quantz as a whole, and the reassuring help with the more difficult passages are the two main reasons why I am thankful to Edward R. Reilly for preparing this fine translation of Quantz's important book. Ideally, of course, the translation should appear on pages facing the origi- nal, but in this case that de luxe format was scarcely necessary, since a facsimile of the third edition (1789) was published in the Documenta Musicologica series in 1953, and is, therefore, readily available. Reilly has done a very careful job. The paragraphs of the translation are num- bered as in the original, so that com- parison between the two is very easy; he has incorporated all of Quantz's ex- amples into the body of the text, rather than leaving them in a separate appendix as in the original, to add to the reader's convenience; and the translation is very competently done. Where I made a spot check against the original, I found, in- evitably, a few places with which I would disagree but no outright mistakes. I must confess that I do not understand his reasons for preferring the word "tip- ping" (which he defines on p. xxxviii as "the process of articulating one or sev- eral notes with the tongue in playing the flute") to the more usual "tonguing"; and I hope that, in the second edition, the chapter numbers are included in the running heads, so that references can more easily be found. But these are quib- bles of the most inconsequential sort. Reilly has provided an excellent transla- tion of an extremely important book, and it should be in the library of every- one concerned in any way with x8th- century music.

Pier Francesco Tosi's book on singing has just been reissued along with its translation into German by Johann Friedrich Agricola;2 C. P. E. Bach's essay on playing keyboard instruments has been available for some time in an

English translation;3 and Leopold Mo- zart's Violinschule has been reprinted within the last twenty years both in an English translation and in the original German.4 With Reilly's translation of Quantz's Versuch to supplement the facsimile edition of 1953, the four most important treatises on mid-18th-century performance are all now readily acces- sible. Ten years ago, Gustave Reese published a small descriptive bibliog- raphy of eighty important books on music.5 In his introduction he expressed the hope that the list would encourage translations. While a surprising number of the books on his list are now in print in facsimile or critical editions in the original languages, comparatively few of them have been translated. Let us hope that Reilly's example will be followed, and that there will be more good trans- lations of important books, and that the easy availability of these four x8th- century treatises will stimulate more and better performances and studies of this important segment of our musical past.

HOWARD MAYER BROWN

The University of Chicago

2 Johann Friedrich Agricola, Anleitung zur Singkunst (1757) . . . zusammen mit dem italienischen Original von Pier Fran- cesco Tosi: Opinioni de'cantori antichi e moderni o sieno Osservazioni sopra il canto figurato (1723), ed. Erwin R. Jacobi (Celle, I966).

a Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instru- ments, translated and edited by William J. Mitchell (New York, 1949).

4 Leopold Mozart, Griindliche Violin- schule, ed. Hans J. Moser (Leipzig, 1956); and Leopold Mozart, A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, transl. Editha Knocker (London, 1 948).

5Gustave Reese, Fourscore Classics of Music Literature (New York, 1957).

Theophil Antonicek. Zur Pflege Hindelscher Musik in der 2. Hilfte des z8. Jahrhunderts. Veriffentli- chungen der Kommission fUr Mu- sikforschung, Heft 4. Vienna: Kommissionsverlag der Oester- reichischen Akademie der Wissen- schaften, I966. 6o pp.

THEi DISTINGUISHED series of publications issued by the Austrian Academy of Sci- ences and known to music scholars through the essays of Robert Lach,

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