Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, who supressed his Violin Concerto
Years ago, before I joined this paper, I wrote a programme note on Schumann's Violin Concerto for a performance at the Barbican in London. Even Schumann fans (of whom I'd count myself one) wouldn't claim that the concerto is one of his great achievements. In fact, arguably it's his weakest large-scale work, composed very near the end of his life when his mental faculties were already in sharp decline.
After his death, his widow Clara suppressed the manuscript, and it wasn't rediscovered and performed until the 1930s. Since then, performances have been rare. It seemed to me there was no use pretending to the Barbican audience that they were about to hear a neglected masterpiece - and therefore I wrote accordingly about the concerto's shortcomings.
My Guardian predecessor, Ted Greenfield, in his review of that concert, made a point of complaining about the negative tone of the programme note (though with characteristic tact he didn't mention the name of the programme-note writer). He was probably right - but I'm still not sure.
The point and purpose of concert programmes seems less and less clear. Apart from providing the audience with basic information - who's playing that night and what they're playing - what are programme notes meant to do? Increase the feel-good factor, convince the audience that what they are hearing is great music, or give the audience even-handed and, one hopes, well-informed background to what they are going to hear?
These days, programme note in London's concert halls come in many varieties, but a tendency to prejudge the music, not leave the audience to make up its own mind, but proclaim everything a masterpiece in the most gushing terms, is becoming more common. There's been a more welcome move, too, to give them added value; for instance, the Philharmonia Orchestra's programmes include recommended recordings, not only of the works being played that night but also other recent discs by the performers involved.
The LSO's now include very basic background about the composers involved, potted biographies for those who need to know who Beethoven or Brahms was. Old style, theme-by-theme accounts of each work are much less frequent nowadays; historical background is more fashionable than musical foreground, though for the Proms, the BBC now tends to give both, dividing notes into two parts, and following a general introduction with a more detailed discussion of what the music does.
Opera programmes - more lavish and more expensive - are generally intended to be perused after the performance, with a variety of essays around and about each work. But not everyone wants even that, especially if means they have to pay £5 when all they really want is a synopsis of the action. Publishing programme notes in advance on websites, as the LSO and the BBC regularly do now, is one solution.
But the problem of what to put in the notes remains - do audiences really want to be told what to think, or just given a context for deciding for themselves?
