H.R. and the Formation of an Early Music Aesthetic in The Netherlands (1916–1921)

H. R. stands for Herman Rutters (1879-1961), a highly influential Dutch musicologist, pedagogue, reviewer. For readers of his music reviews, the acronym H.R. came to be a logo indicative of quality, consistency and substance. As one contemporary journalist put it, when these two letters appeared at the end of a newspaper column, it was ‘synonymous with a music review combining information and judgment [1]. H.R.’s aim was to educate. His judgments were often harsh, but they always conformed to a rigorous and undeviating set of criteria.

Rutters was born in Amsterdam on the 22 December, 1879. He was variously described by those who knew him as ‘tireless’, ‘obstinate’, ‘emotional; and ‘incorruptible’. As a young man he completed his musical studies with the important Dutch composer and pedagogue Bernard Zweers. Rutters thereafter worked for the Dutch national opera company and taught music history in Amsterdam at the Volksuniversiteit and the Muzieklyceum. He held important positions on the boards of many music societies, including one called Muziek en Religie (Music and Religion) – which he co-founded and whose journal he co-edited – with the well-known Protestant theologian and politician Gerardus van der Leeuw.

A confirmed Protestant himself, Rutters’ religious views influenced his aesthetic stance [2]. Dutch Protestantism, dominated by the Calvinists, was and still is wary of the seductive power of musical sensuality. Indeed, in 1890 the respected Dutch theologian J. H. Gunning JHz. felt the need to plead for music in the church, albeit during special weekday services [3]:

1. Is a zangdienst, a “service of song”, like that held from time to time during the week in The Hague, in which the congregation alternately hears edifying [stichtelijke] sacred music — masterpieces by Händel, Bach, de Lange among others [e.a.] — and then themselves sing well-known psalms and hymns accompanied by a few well-chosen words from one or more of the pastors to start and finish, is something like this really so wrong?

Though traditional Calvinist services — in which the music was supplied by the congregational singing of psalms — were to remain the norm, the opening decades of the 20th century saw a discussion among certain Dutch Protestants (who were inspired by the goals of the Neue Bachgesellschaft) concerning the feasibility of introducing the music of J. S. Bach into the service [4]. In light of this, it is not insignificant that the Roman Catholic playwright and publisher Herman van den Eerenbeemt ironically used religious language in referring to Rutter’s musical activities, when he stated: ‘Bach is great and Herman Rutters is his prophet [5]’.

Indeed, Rutters had many minarets from which to call the Protestant faithful to the music of Bach: besides the various activities already mentioned, he also was employed by the Dutch radio, wrote books and gave public lectures. But perhaps most important for the dissemination of his thought was his work from 1916-1945 as the music editor of the Amsterdam newspaper, the Algemeen Handelsblad. Here I will be examining the aesthetic and spiritual points of view that Rutters established in print during the first five years of his tenure at the Handelsblad. I propose that the relentless reiteration of these aesthetic and spiritual criteria in often thunderous, always colourful language in reviews published over a thirty year period in one of Holland’s leading newspapers, laid an important intellectual foundation for the HIP offensive undertaken by Gustav Leonhardt in the 1950s. Rutters had by then created a school of followers armed and ready to defend original instruments and historically-informed performance practice. At least that is what one writer suggested in an article that appeared on the occasion of his retirement from the Algemeen Handelsblad in 1945:

1. [Rutters] was the first one to systematically defend that Early Music must be performed with stylistic purity […]. He took to the battlefield, fighting against the caprices of the musical virtuoso, while defending the rights of the composer, [and] respect for the score. He introduced these as objective, reasonable norms and they gave his judgments great stability and value. And with them, he established a school of followers [6].

Rutters, befitting a man of the new, objective, anti-Romantic generation, was adverse to performative freedoms of all kinds [7]. He disliked overtly personal, overly subtle and detailed performances, as well as any outward show of feeling, which he associated with virtuosi. He railed against massive music performed by massed forces. He warmly praised transparency, inner feeling and technical perfection. He repudiated any tampering with the composer’s score, be that score by Bach or by Bruckner, and scorned interpretation on the part of the performer. It is not surprising, therefore, that Rutters would, throughout his long career, repeatedly criticize the performances of the renowned Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg.

Mengelberg became principal conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1895. He was a Roman Catholic, was famous for his highly Romantic, idiosyncratic performance style. Indeed, some Dutch music-lovers were uncomfortable with his extravagant, and for them too Catholic, approach. Writing in 1916, H. L. Berckenhoff compared the musical style of Mengelberg’s conducting to that of his predecessor at the Concergebouw, Willem Kes:

1. Mengelberg has not been any more able than was Kes to “contenter tout le monde et son père”. That is something that no single artist, and certainly no single conductor, will ever manage to do. If some people found Kes too timid — for them Mengelberg is too exuberant. It is possible that his Catholicism has contributed its essence towards the development of his musical nature in the direction of the lyric-dramatic, which so permeates his conceptions that, according to the opinions of some, he overly relaxes the epic of Beethoven and overly dramatizes the mature spirit of Bach [8].

During the fifty years that he conducted the orchestra, Mengelberg programmed a varied repertoire including a good deal of 18th-century music, but he was particularly well known as a champion of the works of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Rutters both admired and castigated Mengelberg. Indeed, sometimes his censure was disguised as praise, as in the following review of a performance of Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, a piece that was dedicated to the Concertgebouw orchestra and its conductor [9]:

1. I feel that Mengelberg allows the brass to shine a bit too intensely, makes the lyricism a bit too sentimental and stretches the tempo a bit too much, so that he more or less inhibits the flow. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Heldenleben is a virtuoso master-interpretation, an unforgettable showpiece of conducting and ensemble playing […].

It might seem that such concepts as ‘virtuoso master-interpretation’ or ‘show piece’ were meant to be positive, but in Rutter’s critical language, any mention of ‘virtuosity’, even when encountered in a passage of seeming musical-technical praise, implied at least some degree of moral condemnation. Although he often admitted that it sounded good, Rutters associated virtuosity with outward display, with ego, with the personal. Such vanities might have been appropriate to the ego-driven music of Strauss, but to give them free reign in Bach’s music, especially in sacred works like the Matthew Passion as Mengelberg did, was to wave a red flag before the pious and bull-headed Rutters.

Mengelberg was particularly famous for his performances of a cut and re-orchestrated version of the Matthew Passion that took place every year, with massed forces, in the Concertgebouw on Palm Sunday. These much-beloved annual performances had begun in 1899 and continued until Mengelberg stopped conducting the orchestra after WWII. Mengelberg’s interpretation underscored the passion’s pathos, and, his critics believed, downplayed its liturgical significance. Rutters felt such a performance style more resembled a Romantic oratorio than a Protestant work written for communal worship. In reviewing Mengelberg’s 1916 performance he pointed out that the Matthew Passion had been ‘written for two choirs of a maximum of 16 voices each and two instrumental groups proportional in size’. In 1917 he wrote an extensive review in the form of an essay entitled ‘Bach Problems’, in which he summed up his main criticisms thus:

1. The displacement of [Bach’s religious music] from the very special atmosphere and acoustic of the church, to a space that came into being exclusively in the spirit of the modern, profane, massive music-practice, with its unsanctified, business-like commitment to facilitating virtuosic vanity; the presentation by an ensemble that not only turns the proportions upside down, but that also crushes the intimate spirit of the music through massive sound-production and mercilessly rips the fine polyphonic textures to shreds, that distorts the relationship between tutti and soli just like a funhouse mirror distorts the image of man, that turns the simple obligato-parts into virtuoso solo-flights — such a performance is, after all that modern research into Bach’s aesthetics has revealed and taught us, impossible to sustain. And I have not even mentioned the fact that Bach’s choral works were, as far as the upper voices are concerned, […] conceived for, and performed by, boys.

Rutters, however, was aware that he could only expect the most basic reforms in performance practice, if, indeed, he could expect any at all. One year later, in 1918, he again wrote an extensive essay, entitled ‘J. S. Bach’s Matthew Passion and our Time’, in which he repeated many of his arguments from previous years, but added, soberly:

1. I am not asking for a theoretical-historical reconstruction to the letter, I am not asking to maintain the Passion’s practical liturgical significance. But I demand respect for the precepts which grew together organically with the spirit of the work. Without following these prescripts the spirit of the work cannot penetrate our consciousness [10].

Rutters' reference to the spirit of the work is significant. For him, the spirit of Bach’s music, like that of all great music, was a religious one [11]. Therefore, it needed no virtuosic additions to embellish its divine beauties. Rutters applied such criteria not only to Mengelberg, but to all performers. For instance, in 1918 he reviewed a concert of lieder by the German soprano Gertrude Förstel [12]:

1. Gertrude Föstel’s singing is, from the point of view of pure vocal technique, a delight. Everything is easy for her, the sound glows and shines, the most refined pianissimo has great carrying power and expression, her virtuoso breath technique facilitated the subtlest nuances and most comprehensive legatos; her diction was unusually good […].

But again, one must beware of interpreting this as praise. The review is resoundingly negative. Rutters scoffs at ‘a […] tasteless little fioratura […]’ that the singer made in a Mozart aria, and castigated her because [13]

1. she tricked out the beautiful music of Schubert and Schumann in all kinds of tasteless nuances, which often rendered the spirit of the songs entirely unrecognizable. She did not restrain herself from performing vivisection on Hugo Wolf by cutting the exuberant play out of Er ist’s […] she allows herself to make the most inappropriate messa di voce’s, ritenuti and fermati as if the composer had forgotten them because he was thinking of something much more important […].

All of this Rutters labeled ‘fake virtuoso finery’.

Such criticisms should not surprise, for in 1919 Rutters wrote another extensive essay in which he explained how 18th-century virtuoso Italian opera singers had ruined musical taste:

1. With the dissemination of opera Italiana over all of Europe, virtuosity spread like an epidemic and soon infected instrumentalists as well. […] In the late 18th century, pleasing [the audience] through exclusively virtuoso performances became a mania that to our eyes looks decidedly morbid [14].

According to Rutters, the thrill of this diseased virtuosity filled ever-larger concert halls with audiences eager for outward display. As the 19th century progressed, this in turn led to an evolution in the sound of musical instruments, which grew ever louder and more opaque. Musical techniques had to change in order to accommodate these new instruments, and so the beauties of the past were lost. Rutters underscored this in 1917 when he wrote [15]:

1. Although the concert grand piano gradually developed from the clavichord and harpsichord, and the violoncello steadily displaced its near relation the viola da gamba — this does not make them the perfected examples of primitive predecessors. Those instruments were not less perfect in their kind than ours; they had their own construction and their own timbre, and, under the influence of different cultural trends underwent changes to their form; changes for which, however, they sacrificed their own beauty. But that intrinsic sound of the old instruments is completely inherent to the spirit of the music, which was written for it [that sound] […].

Such thinking led Rutters to call for the reconstruction of a Baroque violin and bow a few months earlier in 1917, in reviewing a concert by violinist Alexander Schmuller. Rutters often treated Schmuller harshly, even in his most favourable review he complained that the violinist was ‘not entirely unsullied by exaggerated sentiment [16]’. When Schmuller undertook to play the solo violin works of Bach, Rutters pounced:

1. For me an evening like this had the character of an experiment, the outcome of which was mainly this: violinists should leave much of Bach alone, unless they look for a technique, for a construction of their materials, that makes them capable of performing that music as Bach himself indeed conceived it, and as the character of the music itself indicates. I have great respect and admiration for the capability, energy and memory of Alexander Schmuller, but what he gave us to hear in the first two movements of the C major sonata was not Bach and often not even music, and the rough and out-of-tune tone, and forced phrasing, were also disturbing in other pieces. I will admit it is not possible to be otherwise, but in admitting this is there not an implicit condemnation of the experiment itself? In the end, the artist’s ideal here must be a pure representation in sound of Bach’s intentions, and if one cannot approach those intentions, then it simply is better that one not experiment with ‘more or less’. This music is immortal, is awesome, but still one must first strive for a better performance medium, as Wanda Landowska did when she reconstructed her harpsichord [17].

I have concentrated so far on reviews written by Rutters in the first five years of his tenure at the Handelsblad. It is clear that he embraced a number of ideas that later would become firmly associated with Early Music: respect for the score, conformity to the composer’s intentions and the necessity of using original instruments. More surprising are the moral overtones, particularly the religious connotations of the concept of the ‘spirit’ of the work. However, it is this very spirituality that illuminates the standpoint taken by Rutters, who from time to time spoke the language of a true musical mystic. Take, for instance, this extraordinary passage from a 1920 review of a performance of music by Saint-Saëns:

1. The great, like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Franck, specifically because of their cosmic consciousness and their receptivity for the tremendous, for the internal, are initially strongly influenced by their great predecessors, in order to struggle out from underneath them into independence; thus they spin forth the mysterious threads of metaphysical existence; they must perish in order to rise to glory. And therefore there is no genius that does not build on the past, who has not passed through the internal-ness of the past [18].

Rutters depicts the musical genius as a Christ-like figure, one that submerges his identity in the art of the past in order to pass through it and ‘rise to glory’. The implications, though not mentioned explicitly, are clear: if composers are redemptive figures, their scores resemble God’s own Word. They therefore must not be tampered with: not cut, not ‘tricked out’ in virtuosic nuances and cadenzas, not interpreted or used in any way for personal glory or outward display. Sola scripta, the Protestant approach to God’s word, was thus applied by him to musical texts. And just as geniuses themselves must pass through the ‘internal-ness of the past’ in order to be transformed, so the audience needed to experience the innerness, the spirit of the work as purely as possible in order to reach the eternal, the awesome, the tremendous.

This means that rather than being motivated exclusively by the desire to honour Bach’s intentions, Rutters advocated performative authenticity as part of a larger spiritual-cultural reformation. Bach’s legacy would ultimately profit from this trend, as he prophesied in a review of the Matthew Passion in 1918:

1. Those who can properly read the signs of the times have long noticed the symptoms of massive music's bankruptcy. It drives everything again towards intimacy, towards internalization. And I am convinced that at some point Bach too will profit from this reaction, that a technique will come, one that approaches the spirit, that with its sober internalized technique is in closer agreement than our technique of massive display and virtuoso allure [19].

Rutters maintained this viewpoint to the end of his days, particularly in relationship to the music of Bach. In 1941 he published a book entitled J. S. Bach and Our Time, in which he reiterated many of his opinions from twenty years earlier published in his review entitled ‘Bach’s Matthew Passion and our time’. In the book he gave a very clear explication of exactly what the spirit of the musical work is:

1. The Romantic ideal was the expression of the individual, the ‘I’ […] With Bach, on the contrary, the individual is perfectly dissolved in the universal, everything is the surrender of ‘I’ to God […] Thus Bach’s music sings not of the personal, the mortal, the temporary, but of the über-personal, the immortal, the eternal. It makes conscious that which in us too is eternal, connects us to the eternal. It is conviction and surrender. It fixes its gaze not forward but upwards; it comes from God and leads to God. That is its spirit [20] […].

It is clear that much of what historically-informed performance practice holds dear today had already energetically been promoted by Rutters before the 1920s, and that he prepared the way for the Dutch Early Music revolution of the 1950s and 60s with his repeated criticisms of Romantic performative freedoms. But how many current practitioners of Early Music would feel comfortable knowing that the cherished austerity and objectivity of the HIP style was born, at least in its Dutch manifestation, from a mystical Protestant spirituality, one which sought to sublimate the personality of the performer to the divine, to the eternal, by means of the innate spirit of the artwork as represented by the score?

Be that as it may, by 1919 Rutters already knew that the progress of music’s evolution was unstoppable. In full prophetic mode, he expressed his firm conviction that the diseased Romantic tradition must topple at last:

1. I myself am convinced that massiveness in music is in the last stages of degeneration. The best of modern music manifests a need for refinement, an urge towards the intimate. […] However — we need not preach revolution. The symptoms of a reaction are unmistakable. We are living in a stage of transition; a struggle continues between the desire for the massive and the longing for intimacy. A symptom of the latter tendency is the steadily growing appreciation for Bach’s art. Longing for Bach means longing for intimate, internal values. With this, the desire for massive effects still comes into conflict: a natural phenomenon of spiritual inertia. But, in the long run, Bach must be the winner in this conflict [21].

I believe we can all agree that H. R.’s prophecy has come true.

Anonymous 1954. Anonymous, “75”, in: De Telegraaf (1954).

Berckenhoff 1916. H. L. Berckenhoff, Kunstwerken en kunstenaars (muziek) (Amsterdam: Den Degel, [1916]).

Dukas 1920. Paul Dukas, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (1920), [1].

Gunning Wzn 1927. J. H. Gunning Wzn, Bach’s muziek in onzen tijd (s.l.: Nederlandse Bachvereniging, 1927).

L. H. 1945. L. H., “Herman Rutters gaat rusten: criticus, die school heeft gemaakt”, in: De Tijd: godsdienstig-staatkundig dagblad (1949).

Muller 1959. H. J. M. Muller, “H.R. Tachtig Jaar”, in: De Telegraaf (1959).

Muller 1961. H. J. M. Muller, ‘Herman Rutters overleden: bekend musicoloog, journalist en pedagoog’, in: De Telegraaf (18-04-1961).

Gunning 1890. J. H. Gunning, Onze eeredienst: opmerkingen over het liturgische element in den Gereformeerden cultus door Dr. J. H. Gunning JHz., predikant te Gouda (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1890).

Gunning 1926. J. H. Gunning Wzn, Bach’s muziek in onzen tijd (s.l.: Nederlandse Bachvereniging, [1926]).

Lohman 1941. E. Lohman, “Heden en Barokmuziek”, in: Dagblad van het Zuiden (1941).

Muller 1961. H. J. M. Muller, “Herman Rutters overleden: bekend musicoloog, journalist en pedagoog”, in: De Telegraaf (1961).

Rutters 1916. Herman Rutters, “Concertgebouw”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (1916), ochtendblad, 2.

Rutters 1917-1. Herman Rutters ‚ “Bachcyclus”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (01-24-1917), avondblad, 6.

Rutters 1917-2. Herman Rutters, “Schmuller’s Bachcyclus. De waarde van Bachtradities voor de Bachvertolking”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (07-04-1917), avondblad, 9.

Rutters 1918-1. Herman Rutters, “Gertrude Förstel”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (1918), avondblad, 6.

Rutters 1918-2. Herman Rutters, “Bach’s Matthaeus-Passion en onze tijd”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (31-03-1918), ochtendblad, 5.

Rutters 1918-3. Herman Rutters, “Concertgebouw”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (20-12-1918), avondblad, 7.

Rutters 1919-1. Herman Rutters, “Historische cyclus II”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (1919).

Rutters 1919-2. Herman Rutters, “Concertgebouw: Historische cyclus IV”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (10-11-1919), avondblad, 6-7.

Rutters1920. Herman Rutters, “Historische cyclus XIX: Saint-Saëns; Paul Dukas”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (02-21-1920), avondblad, [1].

Rutters 1941. Herman Rutters, J. S. Bach en onze tijd (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Ploegsma (1941).

Sibmacher-Zijnen 1910. W. N. F. Sibmacher-Zijnen, “Reisherinneringen. VI. Het Bach-feest te Duisburg”, in: Algemeen Handelsblad (1910).