THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA
Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; the
Meiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that is, the thing itself.
When this orchestra plays a piece of music every note lives, and not, as
with most orchestras, every particularly significant note. Brahms is
sometimes dull, but he is never dull when these people play him;
Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him. What they do is
precisely to put vitality into even those parts of a composition in
which it is scarcely present, or scarcely realisable; and that is a much
more difficult thing, and really a more important thing, for the proper
appreciation of music, than the heightening of what is already fine, and
obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation
has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to
what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out
of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work
with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his
moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss,
played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful musicians shows, as he
never could show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectre
stands from life.
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