Despite the growing scholarly literature around performance, technical preparation still remains a relatively ‘private’ matter in relation to core repertoire: the literature around this tends to be pedagogic rather than research-led. Although there is a growing body of research exploring specific kinds of approaches to practice, this has predominantly focused on the acquisition of specialised skills or extended techniques, thus often on ‘new music’, or on aspects of music psychology.[6] My research is not intended to contribute to those fields, but to document the tasks involved in preparing Émile Sauret’s 24 Études Caprices for a first recording. The research questions that follow thus speak directly to a very practical end, and are oriented, initially, to my own needs as a musician, but I hope that presenting them in this format may awake interest and lead to further research.
In fact, my interest in making a first recording of the ÉC, op. 64 began before I had any plans to pursue a doctoral project. Despite being already equipped with a rich technical experience my encounter with the sophisticated technical and expressive details of this music caused me to challenge my understanding of, and relationship with virtuosity. Working on these pieces I began to feel the necessity of understanding more about Émile Sauret as a musician, and to share my findings beyond the recording itself.
Who was Émile Sauret?
It became clear early in the process that Sauret’s fame in his lifetime has not been accompanied by a posthumous understanding of his musical personality and that I needed to build a detailed picture of his musical life to have a sense of who he was and what he represented. For an artist of his stature, acclaimed by some of the greatest musicians of the era, the gaps and absence of knowledge in Sauret’s biographical, performance, pedagogical and compositional data in major dictionaries (as well as in the institution where he formed two of his last major pedagogical works) surprised me. When I introduced my project to the Royal Academy of Music in 2016, the connection of ÉC, op. 64 with the institution seemed to have been entirely lost.
The entries in key dictionaries, including the updated New Grove (2001) provide only brief overviews of Sauret’s professional life and a selected list of his works, owing to space limitations.[7] The only substantial readily available biographical sketch of Sauret is in an article featured in the January 1900 edition of The Musical Times.[8] From then on, every possible entry featuring even the minutest detail on Sauret had to be searched. I started looking for his name in the indices of books, autobiographies and memoirs relating to his contemporaries.
Subsequently, I began compiling a chronological timeline, which originated from a vast collection of material I was collecting of Sauret’s biographical content, concert programmes, reviews, professorial appointments, student registers and compositional output. This later allowed me to zoom in and further analyze certain entries or step back and view the big picture and see how and why certain events in Sauret’s life unfolded.
The first section of Sauret's Portrait depicts his extensive activities as a performer, with a secondary focus on his encounters with fellow musicians, which reveal interesting information around his collaborative work and the type of legacy he left with his infamous cadenza. The third section presents a picture of his pedagogical activities, including some first-hand accounts of Sauret’s approach to teaching, drawn from memoirs of his students. Previously unpublished material in relation to Sauret’s appointments at the Royal Academy of Music and the Trinity College of Music are extracted from entries in the Minutes, Calendars and Student Registers of the respective institutions. The fourth section, Sauret’s compositional output, lists a review of his salon works, dedications, transcriptions and arrangements, editions and pedagogical output, the latter effectively stemmed from his teaching activities.
Why has it taken over a century for someone to ‘rediscover’ Sauret’s major cycle of works for solo violin?
The absence of the scores in the RAM library evidently points to the lack of a performance tradition. Chapter II looks at Sauret’s final major pedagogical work, ÉC, op. 64 in the context of his other works in the same vein. The second subchapter examines the reception history of his monumental Gradus Ad Parnassum, op. 36 alongside the 24 ÉC, op. 64.
A performance approach and example analyses interpreted through my engagement with ÉC, op. 64 offers responses to the research questions governing the underlying purpose of this project:
How can I realise the specific technical challenges embodied in characterisations, musical structures, and detailed descriptions of technical execution in ÉC, op.64?
Can the specific technical and expressive challenges of these Études-Caprices help to develop and (re)define my perception and understanding of virtuosity?
My recording process is illustrated through the steps taken to bring the focal point of this research to fruition. From the second volume of the recording series onwards, I had the invaluable opportunity to work with Sauret’s c.1685 Stradivari violin. The second subchapter acknowledges another research question, which observes my engagement and working experience with this instrument and my understanding of its relationship with ÉC, op. 64:
How has working with Sauret’s c.1685 Stradivari violin provided a distinctive tactile perspective on my learning, performing and recording experience of these works?
The Appendices a catalogue of Sauret’s compositional output, alongside a list of his students in Berlin’s Stern’sche Konservatorium, London’s Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music. Sauret’s concert dates and programmes with the Gewandhaus Orchester, the Berlin Philharmoniker, selected US orchestras and concerts at the Bechstein Hall are presented. It also includes my articles prepared for The Strad and events undertaken featuring my research. It concludes with the critical reception of the CDs alongside the liner notes provided for the four-volume series, released by Naxos.
Aims and Approaches
By design, this project presents a process of exploration and discovery. It reveals some of the artistic and critical discoveries and challenges encountered, tackled and documented during the preparation and delivery of a recording of Sauret’s ÉC, op.64 for a major record company.
I began the project with a detailed tactile knowledge of a large part of this repertoire. My aim was thus to add these ÉC, op.64 to this knowledge, and in so doing, to discover their unique technical and expressive ‘dialect’. There is already a literature on the emergence of the violin etude.[9] The ÉC, op.64, however, stand in some senses at the end of the grand tradition of etude writing, and although there is a small repertoire written during the twentieth century this has not really been taken into the canon.[10]
Although my portrait of Sauret focuses closely on what we can discover about his performance style, it is not my aim to emulate him, or any of his widely recorded students, nor to engage in traditional HIP. Nevertheless, presenting the first recording of these works carries considerable responsibility in making them accessible to a modern audience of the twenty-first century and I have found it necessary to engage closely with both the detail of Sauret’s markings and in an attempt to understand his performance personality.[11] In learning these pieces and building a picture of Sauret’s musicianship it feels to me like I discovered a way of transcending contemporary notions of virtuosity.
In 1896, an American periodical, The Independent recognized one of Sauret’s outstanding features in performance amongst his own contemporaries:
"His rank has for many years been of the first in Germany, France and England (in which latter country he now holds a leading professional post); nor a stranger to the United States, in view of his brilliant concert tours in 1872 and 1877. It is true that Ysaye, Thomson, Ondricek and Marsick have somehow overstocked the present New York market of violin virtuosi. But even an overfed interest in violinism can find appetite for Mr. Sauret. He is so well known to Americans that it is not needful to discuss now his firm intelligence, his supreme mastery of his instrument, the freedom and the splendour of execution, in especial, that have raised him to so peculiar a conspicuousness among the great contemporary players. By training and temperament, Mr. Sauret – now in middle life – inclines to the older school of violin music; but he is, happily, not too conservatoire. If in Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Spohr, Vieuxtemps, Paganini he delights with his elegance, in Bruch, Joachim and the French modernists he is not only a great technicist, but virile and emotional in most expressive measure."[12]
Working with such sophisticated material in the ÉC, op.64 which equally demands mastering specific technical and expressive challenges with a spirit of artistic freedom and unrestrained ease, I have enjoyed setting myself the challenge of taking interpretative decisions to conceal any machismo or harshness in sound. The ‘concealing’ part carries with it a sense of experimentation and risk, in my efforts to convey the grace and elegance of the material. Thus, my work aims to provide a contemporary dialogue with past notions of virtuosity gleaned from reviews of Sauret’s playing – and that of his students.[13]
Notes and References
[6]. For example, Mieko Kanno, examines the significance and principles of order within the process of practice and learning to play new music, drawing on Michelangelo Abbado’s Come studiare I Capricci di Paganini (1973),6 as an example in her learning and playing approach to Sciarrino’s Per Mattia: per violino (1975). See, Mieko Kanno, ‘Order Matters: A Thought on How to Practice,’ Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology (Orpheus Institute Series, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014): 143-147. Tânia Lisboa, on the other hand explores her collaboration with two specialists in music psychology, Roger Chaffin and Topher Logan in a project designed to gain a better understanding of the processes of learning, memorising and performing the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Suite no. 6 for cello solo. The authors examine the relationship between the musician’s conceptualisation of the process – as evidenced in Lisboa’s logbooks and recorded commentary – and her practice. See Tânia Lisboa: A self-study of learning the Prelude from Bach’s Suite No. 6 for cello solo: Comparing words and actions, in Alessandro Cervino, The Practice of Practising (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011).
[7]. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York: Grove, 2001).
[8]. “Emile Sauret,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 41, no. 683 (January 1900).
[9]. Dimitris Themelis’, Étude ou Caprice: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Violinetüde, (München, 1967), K Marie Stolba’s, A History of the Violin Etude to About 1800, (Hays, Kansas: Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1968), and Chapter V of Philippe Borer’s study on The Twenty-Four Caprices of Niccolò Paganini, their significance for the history of violin playing and the music of the Romantic era (Zurich: Michel Scherrer Verlag, 1997), which traces the origins of the violin caprice and its development as a musical genre, offer significant contribution around the historical context of the violin etude and/or caprice genre.
[10]. I have specifically chosen to isolate works such as Hindemith’s Studies for Violinists (1926); Ysaye’s 10 Preludes, op.35 (1928 posth.), Rochberg’s Caprice Variations (1970); Cage’s Freeman Etudes (1980).
[11]. For example, modern practice, specifically in the etude or caprice genre, has seen a gradual marginalisation of portamento as an expressive practice. Players are often encouraged to mitigate any obvious signs of portamenti-led fingerings and aim for ‘clean’ position changes, thus putting speed at the forefront of expression. It may also be observed that the way I respond to portamenti-led material in the ÉC, op.64 varies in each volume, particularly intensifying from volume two onwards. This is partially owing to the change of instrument from the second volume onwards and also the fact that I had immersed myself more deeply in the project by then. Through working on Sauret’s ÉC, op.64, I began to discover that it was the journey and the specific timing of it from one note to the other that was of aesthetic importance to me.
[12]. “Music,” The Independent ... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (January 16, 1896).
[13]. The Violinist periodical depicted in 1928 how Sauret ‘greatly regretted the sacrificing of beauty of tone to speed in playing’.
In fact, my interest in making a first recording of the ÉC, op. 64 began before I had any plans to pursue a doctoral project. Despite being already equipped with a rich technical experience my encounter with the sophisticated technical and expressive details of this music caused me to challenge my understanding of, and relationship with virtuosity. Working on these pieces I began to feel the necessity of understanding more about Émile Sauret as a musician, and to share my findings beyond the recording itself.
Who was Émile Sauret?
It became clear early in the process that Sauret’s fame in his lifetime has not been accompanied by a posthumous understanding of his musical personality and that I needed to build a detailed picture of his musical life to have a sense of who he was and what he represented. For an artist of his stature, acclaimed by some of the greatest musicians of the era, the gaps and absence of knowledge in Sauret’s biographical, performance, pedagogical and compositional data in major dictionaries (as well as in the institution where he formed two of his last major pedagogical works) surprised me. When I introduced my project to the Royal Academy of Music in 2016, the connection of ÉC, op. 64 with the institution seemed to have been entirely lost.
The entries in key dictionaries, including the updated New Grove (2001) provide only brief overviews of Sauret’s professional life and a selected list of his works, owing to space limitations.[7] The only substantial readily available biographical sketch of Sauret is in an article featured in the January 1900 edition of The Musical Times.[8] From then on, every possible entry featuring even the minutest detail on Sauret had to be searched. I started looking for his name in the indices of books, autobiographies and memoirs relating to his contemporaries.
Subsequently, I began compiling a chronological timeline, which originated from a vast collection of material I was collecting of Sauret’s biographical content, concert programmes, reviews, professorial appointments, student registers and compositional output. This later allowed me to zoom in and further analyze certain entries or step back and view the big picture and see how and why certain events in Sauret’s life unfolded.
The first section of Sauret's Portrait depicts his extensive activities as a performer, with a secondary focus on his encounters with fellow musicians, which reveal interesting information around his collaborative work and the type of legacy he left with his infamous cadenza. The third section presents a picture of his pedagogical activities, including some first-hand accounts of Sauret’s approach to teaching, drawn from memoirs of his students. Previously unpublished material in relation to Sauret’s appointments at the Royal Academy of Music and the Trinity College of Music are extracted from entries in the Minutes, Calendars and Student Registers of the respective institutions. The fourth section, Sauret’s compositional output, lists a review of his salon works, dedications, transcriptions and arrangements, editions and pedagogical output, the latter effectively stemmed from his teaching activities.
Why has it taken over a century for someone to ‘rediscover’ Sauret’s major cycle of works for solo violin?
The absence of the scores in the RAM library evidently points to the lack of a performance tradition. Chapter II looks at Sauret’s final major pedagogical work, ÉC, op. 64 in the context of his other works in the same vein. The second subchapter examines the reception history of his monumental Gradus Ad Parnassum, op. 36 alongside the 24 ÉC, op. 64.
A performance approach and example analyses interpreted through my engagement with ÉC, op. 64 offers responses to the research questions governing the underlying purpose of this project:
How can I realise the specific technical challenges embodied in characterisations, musical structures, and detailed descriptions of technical execution in ÉC, op.64?
Can the specific technical and expressive challenges of these Études-Caprices help to develop and (re)define my perception and understanding of virtuosity?
My recording process is illustrated through the steps taken to bring the focal point of this research to fruition. From the second volume of the recording series onwards, I had the invaluable opportunity to work with Sauret’s c.1685 Stradivari violin. The second subchapter acknowledges another research question, which observes my engagement and working experience with this instrument and my understanding of its relationship with ÉC, op. 64:
How has working with Sauret’s c.1685 Stradivari violin provided a distinctive tactile perspective on my learning, performing and recording experience of these works?
The Appendices a catalogue of Sauret’s compositional output, alongside a list of his students in Berlin’s Stern’sche Konservatorium, London’s Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music. Sauret’s concert dates and programmes with the Gewandhaus Orchester, the Berlin Philharmoniker, selected US orchestras and concerts at the Bechstein Hall are presented. It also includes my articles prepared for The Strad and events undertaken featuring my research. It concludes with the critical reception of the CDs alongside the liner notes provided for the four-volume series, released by Naxos.
Aims and Approaches
By design, this project presents a process of exploration and discovery. It reveals some of the artistic and critical discoveries and challenges encountered, tackled and documented during the preparation and delivery of a recording of Sauret’s ÉC, op.64 for a major record company.
I began the project with a detailed tactile knowledge of a large part of this repertoire. My aim was thus to add these ÉC, op.64 to this knowledge, and in so doing, to discover their unique technical and expressive ‘dialect’. There is already a literature on the emergence of the violin etude.[9] The ÉC, op.64, however, stand in some senses at the end of the grand tradition of etude writing, and although there is a small repertoire written during the twentieth century this has not really been taken into the canon.[10]
Although my portrait of Sauret focuses closely on what we can discover about his performance style, it is not my aim to emulate him, or any of his widely recorded students, nor to engage in traditional HIP. Nevertheless, presenting the first recording of these works carries considerable responsibility in making them accessible to a modern audience of the twenty-first century and I have found it necessary to engage closely with both the detail of Sauret’s markings and in an attempt to understand his performance personality.[11] In learning these pieces and building a picture of Sauret’s musicianship it feels to me like I discovered a way of transcending contemporary notions of virtuosity.
In 1896, an American periodical, The Independent recognized one of Sauret’s outstanding features in performance amongst his own contemporaries:
"His rank has for many years been of the first in Germany, France and England (in which latter country he now holds a leading professional post); nor a stranger to the United States, in view of his brilliant concert tours in 1872 and 1877. It is true that Ysaye, Thomson, Ondricek and Marsick have somehow overstocked the present New York market of violin virtuosi. But even an overfed interest in violinism can find appetite for Mr. Sauret. He is so well known to Americans that it is not needful to discuss now his firm intelligence, his supreme mastery of his instrument, the freedom and the splendour of execution, in especial, that have raised him to so peculiar a conspicuousness among the great contemporary players. By training and temperament, Mr. Sauret – now in middle life – inclines to the older school of violin music; but he is, happily, not too conservatoire. If in Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Spohr, Vieuxtemps, Paganini he delights with his elegance, in Bruch, Joachim and the French modernists he is not only a great technicist, but virile and emotional in most expressive measure."[12]
Working with such sophisticated material in the ÉC, op.64 which equally demands mastering specific technical and expressive challenges with a spirit of artistic freedom and unrestrained ease, I have enjoyed setting myself the challenge of taking interpretative decisions to conceal any machismo or harshness in sound. The ‘concealing’ part carries with it a sense of experimentation and risk, in my efforts to convey the grace and elegance of the material. Thus, my work aims to provide a contemporary dialogue with past notions of virtuosity gleaned from reviews of Sauret’s playing – and that of his students.[13]
Notes and References
[6]. For example, Mieko Kanno, examines the significance and principles of order within the process of practice and learning to play new music, drawing on Michelangelo Abbado’s Come studiare I Capricci di Paganini (1973),6 as an example in her learning and playing approach to Sciarrino’s Per Mattia: per violino (1975). See, Mieko Kanno, ‘Order Matters: A Thought on How to Practice,’ Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology (Orpheus Institute Series, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014): 143-147. Tânia Lisboa, on the other hand explores her collaboration with two specialists in music psychology, Roger Chaffin and Topher Logan in a project designed to gain a better understanding of the processes of learning, memorising and performing the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Suite no. 6 for cello solo. The authors examine the relationship between the musician’s conceptualisation of the process – as evidenced in Lisboa’s logbooks and recorded commentary – and her practice. See Tânia Lisboa: A self-study of learning the Prelude from Bach’s Suite No. 6 for cello solo: Comparing words and actions, in Alessandro Cervino, The Practice of Practising (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011).
[7]. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York: Grove, 2001).
[8]. “Emile Sauret,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 41, no. 683 (January 1900).
[9]. Dimitris Themelis’, Étude ou Caprice: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Violinetüde, (München, 1967), K Marie Stolba’s, A History of the Violin Etude to About 1800, (Hays, Kansas: Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1968), and Chapter V of Philippe Borer’s study on The Twenty-Four Caprices of Niccolò Paganini, their significance for the history of violin playing and the music of the Romantic era (Zurich: Michel Scherrer Verlag, 1997), which traces the origins of the violin caprice and its development as a musical genre, offer significant contribution around the historical context of the violin etude and/or caprice genre.
[10]. I have specifically chosen to isolate works such as Hindemith’s Studies for Violinists (1926); Ysaye’s 10 Preludes, op.35 (1928 posth.), Rochberg’s Caprice Variations (1970); Cage’s Freeman Etudes (1980).
[11]. For example, modern practice, specifically in the etude or caprice genre, has seen a gradual marginalisation of portamento as an expressive practice. Players are often encouraged to mitigate any obvious signs of portamenti-led fingerings and aim for ‘clean’ position changes, thus putting speed at the forefront of expression. It may also be observed that the way I respond to portamenti-led material in the ÉC, op.64 varies in each volume, particularly intensifying from volume two onwards. This is partially owing to the change of instrument from the second volume onwards and also the fact that I had immersed myself more deeply in the project by then. Through working on Sauret’s ÉC, op.64, I began to discover that it was the journey and the specific timing of it from one note to the other that was of aesthetic importance to me.
[12]. “Music,” The Independent ... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (January 16, 1896).
[13]. The Violinist periodical depicted in 1928 how Sauret ‘greatly regretted the sacrificing of beauty of tone to speed in playing’.