Adolph Menzel, “The Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci,” 1852. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In 1752 a book appears in Berlin whose title, in German, means an essay on a method for playing the transverse flute. The author is Johann Joachim Quantz, court flautist to Frederick II of Prussia and also the king’s teacher. The title is modest and the content is not: there are perhaps a hundred pages on the flute in the strict sense, and the rest is the most detailed manual we possess on how music was performed in the mid-eighteenth century.
There is everything in it, and it is written by someone who did the job every evening. How the bow is held, though he played the flute, because there is a whole chapter on how those who accompany should behave. What the harpsichordist should do and what the cello should do when the soloist breathes. How a cadenza is built, that is, the improvisation the soloist makes before the close, with the rules for not making it too long: it must fit, he says, within a single breath.
The chapter that has done most to change the way this music is performed today concerns tempo, and the solution it proposes is surprising because the metronome did not yet exist. Quantz takes as his unit of measure the pulse of a healthy, calm person, which he estimates at around eighty beats a minute, and from there builds a table: how many beats equal one bar of an allegro assai, of an allegretto, of an adagio cantabile. It is not as precise as a metronome, but it is enough to tell us something no other source says so clearly, namely that several slow tempos of the era went much faster than the way we play them, and several fast tempos much slower.
A second decisive chapter is the one on inequality. Quantz explains that certain successions of notes written equal are not to be played equal: the first of each pair is slightly lengthened and the second shortened, because that way the phrase breathes. It is a practice the written text does not record and that, without sources like this, we would have lost entirely. Anyone who today listens to a historically informed performance and finds that way of moving forward in waves, instead of equal steps, is hearing the application of these pages.
Then there are the parts that are read today for the pleasure of the malice. Quantz describes what a good conductor should do, and what he says about the bad conductor, about the soloist who shows off, about the accompanist who covers, about the singer who lengthens the cadenzas to get applause, might have been written last week. There is also a chapter on how to judge a musician and a performance, which is essentially a guide to reviewing, two hundred and seventy years before music criticism became a trade.
The book had a French translation at once and kept being reprinted for decades. It is in the public domain, reproductions of the eighteenth-century editions can be found online, and modern translations exist. It is not a specialists’ read: it is written in a practical tone, with short examples, by a professional who set out to explain how the job is done.
In the Melos library it sits beside Gasparini and the Neapolitan partimenti, and together those three shelves say the same thing from three different angles: in the eighteenth century written music was a set of incomplete instructions, and everything that made a performance alive lay outside the page, inside the head of the person playing. Those books exist because someone had the good idea of writing down that part too.