Submitted by Apaticamente t3_z88mnm in Music
As the title says, I was listening to Niccolò Paganini violin music and I wondered if the song I was listening to was as close as possible to what the original performance might have sound like, is there any way to know how how faithful it is to the original work?
scandal_pants t1_iyadyd3 wrote
I'm responding as a professional pianist.... There are a couple of variables that come into play when listening to someone play a piece of music. One is that different publishers use different editors when producing sheet music. So, even from the earliest source material that can be found, editors may take liberties in regards to dynamics, articulations, and tempo. Also, the player will approach a piece with their own sense of musicality. Even if you handed two pianists identical sheet music, there would be variations in how they were performed. I suppose that's not a super helpful answer, but I guess one could go down a rabbit hole and find out how close the sheet music we have today matches the originals, if they still exist. I would assume that the players are doing their best to be true to the source material, based on what we know about music of the era, but honestly, some take great liberty. I remember doing an exercise in school where we each had a sheet of paper, and the teacher read aloud a list of instructions like, "draw a circle in the upper right corner", and so forth. Even though we all received the same set of instructions, every paper looked different. It's kind like that.