As intimated in the previous chapter, the extent to which ‘historically informed performance’ relating chiefly to pre-romantic repertory offers a convincing contrast to (unreformed) present-day ideals and practices was probed in some depth as long as thirty years ago. The conclusions hinged upon a charge of misselling and the absolute term ‘authentic’ was consequently downgraded. The matter has rested here for some time.

Discussion of ‘romantic’ performance reopens these fundamental debates, however. An established perception of a ‘historical’ versus ‘mainstream’ divide – a binary opposition at its height during the Taruskin-inspired debates of the 1980s and 1990s – does not easily subsume ‘romanticist’ performance. If ‘modernism’ is a response to ‘romanticism’, it does not necessarily follow that historical performance propels us back to ‘romanticist’ values. This is obvious – modern HIP since World War II went back to so-called ‘early music’ and only more recently started to examine nineteenth-century performance in detail. This perhaps explains why, to a non-specialist observer, ‘historical violin’ is still equated with ‘baroque violin’; many conservatoires and university departments have historical specialisms, but what this still means for most is HIP interpretations on eighteenth-century (or earlier) instrument models.

Rehabilitating romanticism as a set of performance behaviours in its own right is thus a much more recent phenomenon. The process of doing this – rescuing romanticism from the slur of mawkishness and tastelessness – has been via assertion of its principled technical and stylistic basis (perhaps to counter anticipated hostility) as well as showing how many of its ideals and precepts act in continuum with earlier (and therefore perhaps more academically respectable) performing practices.

If this idea holds any truth, then one might not be very surprised to find that seeking parity and continuity between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ values has been expressed by scholarship that aims to bring these epochs together. Clive Brown's 1999 monograph is an obvious example. So too is my Classical and Romantic Music, for which I selected essays that transgress this far from stable and, of course, in many ways imaginary boundary.