How not to phrase

My current obsession is phrasing. I hardly ever hear it done the way I think it should be. Here are some of the things people seem to think.

- Every time you see a slur or phrase mark, you have to put a big accent at the beginning of it. This is especially true if you are a string player taking a down-bow.

- When you have two slurred notes, you always have to do a massive diminuendo from the first to the second, and the second should be very short.

- You should never make one long phrase when you can make four shorter ones, and you should emphasise this by making the last note of every phrase very short.

- If you have a syncopation that accentuates a weak part of the bar you should emphasise this by playing the strong beat beforehand very weakly and then putting a massive accent on the syncopated note.

This is obviously all complete nonsense. Instrumentalists should think of how their line would look if it belonged to a singer. Consider the first line of Pamina’s aria, ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’, from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

 

Now this is from memory so I hope you’ll be kind if the last note is really a quarter rather than an eighth, or similar, but this is about how it goes. The German roughly means: ‘Ah, I sense it, it is lost, forever gone love’s happiness’. Pamina sings this aria when Tamino, who has been told by the priests that he will lose Pamina forever if he speaks to her, refuses to answer her, and she takes it as a sign that he no longer loves her.

Here is what you would get if you put this line, without text, in front of most orchestral players:

Now you will not find any soprano in the world who will sing the line like this – at least not one who understands the text or has the remotest clue about how to sing – because it wouldn’t make any sense. It’s one sentence and needs to be phrased with as much line as possible, especially in the slow tempo, so that we understand it as such. And every time instrumentalists see one of these slurs they should remember that it represents one syllable carried over two or more notes. Not even a whole word, let alone a whole phrase. But go into any classical concert and I promise you will hear this kind of phrasing all the time.

I wonder where it comes from. I think it might be bad teachers with nothing to say about the music. It’s a very easy, superficial way of telling the pupil how to ‘improve’ their performance to look down at the page, see a few slurs, accents and syncopations, and tell the poor unsuspecting student ‘you have to emphasise all these things or it’s boring’. After five hours of teaching, often working on music that you might not know all that well, it can be hard to find profound insights. Maybe you are a master of your instrument and good at sorting out people’s technique but not so hot on interpretation. Perhaps your student isn’t really that amazing either, or hasn’t done enough practice, and your motivation is waning. Maybe in some conservatories it is even true that in order to show the jury at your performance exam that you have noticed the slur or the accent you have to parody it. But whatever the reason, it is now incredibly hard to impress on orchestral musicians that it is possible to play the long phrase and let the details speak for themselves.

And even singers, though they might be a bit less inclined to completely bomb a phrase’s meaning to the ground, are also more and more inclined only to sing properly on the strong syllables. I am constantly reminding singers during coachings that the weak syllables have to be looked after as well. It’s very hard to understand a sentence of text where only the strong syllables are projected.

Has anyone got any other ideas where this might come from? Does anyone else find it as annoying and unmusical as I do?