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In Reply to: RE: Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto posted by jazz1 on July 01, 2009 at 10:40:46
What are the Auer "cuts" and "alterations" to the Tchai VC anyway? I've heard about them, but not being a string player, don't know what they are compared to the autograph score. Tchai admired Auer's playing greatly and dedicated the concerto to him. Auer found the original too awkward to play.
Auer's credentials are the best of any performing musician of his era. His list of pupils is stellar. He lived to age 85, taught 49 years in St Petersburg,and later at Juilliard and Curtis. The man invented modern violin playing, at least in the Russian/Hungarian style.
Hi, Brian
I have an edition of the violin/piano score edited by Max Rostal (Edition Schott), who, in his preface, notes, "Very rarely has a work undergone so many alterations, variations, distortions and so-called 'improvements' as the violin concerto by Tchaikovsky. . . The present edition is based on the Russian Urtext and even the piano reduction, which the composer did himself (including fingerings and metronome markings) has been preserved." However, Rostal's edition does show where the Auer cuts are, heard (or, rather, not heard!) in the third movement as follows:
bars 073-080
bars 263-270
bars 295-298
bars 306-309
bars 423-430
bars 480-487
bars 580-583
Less than fifty measures in all, but they completely change the structure of the melodies. (I once played it with a violinist who employed slightly different cuts than the ones listed above. Other violinists take some, but not all, of these cuts.) My theory is that Auer, who was so heavily influenced by Joachim and Germanic musical theory, also grew to share in the type of Germanic musical conceit and quasi-racist aesthetics of the time (notwithstanding the fact that Auer himself was Jewish), which found expression in Hanslick's infamous review of the Tchaikovsky Concerto ("music that stinks to the ear"), or even in Brahms's comments about the Dvorak Te Deum (as wonderful a friend as Brahms was to Dvorak in other ways) - I think this attitude was always simmering below the surface.
I can just imagine Auer, with his Germanic influences (and remember, even among Germans, Joachim was particularly conservative), pedantically pruning Tchaikovsky's measures away, saying to himself, "Ach! So much repetition!"
Of course, I grew up hearing these cuts in the third movement (from the Heifetz recording, and, as well as I remember, from the Rabin recording). When I first heard an uncut performance on the radio (I think it was Grumiaux), I thought to myself, "What the heck is this guy playing???". Nowadays, with the ascendency of respect for Urtext and musicological scholarship, I seem to hear most violinists playing the concerto without the cuts. For instance, J-Fi plays it uncut. (I'm tempted to post a picture here, but I'll save it for the future. :-) )
I understand Milstein played the Tchai VC uncut, and he was Auer's most famous pupil after Heifetz!
That's a lot of cuts. What about the "alterations". Fingerings, simplifications,outright improvements??
Brian - I'm not as attuned these other alterations as I am to the cuts. I imagine these would mainly have to do with fingerings and bowings, but I can't say for sure.
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