In the nineteenth century, the progressive affirmation of the concept of the musical work, understood as something complete, intangible and reproducible, gradually eclipsed certain performative and listening practices which involved active mediation with works which were open to multiple interpretations. In comparison to the giant steps of the last fifty years in the field of performance practice of baroque music, and notwithstanding the continuous renewal of methods and forms of extemporaneous creations in the music of the twentieth century, the interpretation of nineteenth-century repertoire lags behind in the activation of real-time performative processes. The necessity to promote a renewed performance practice comes from the need for re-authentication of nineteenth-century repertoire through an analytical awareness not only of its textual forms, but also of the performance practices of the times and the horizons of expectation of our contemporaneity.

Whereas, in the past, interpretive traditions were handed down from teachers to pupils, in the last decades the immediate and seemingly unlimited availability of recordings from different times and circumstances is causing a progressive narrowing of artistic- interpretive choices. Today, the role of the interpreter of classical music is charged with increasing responsibilities towards so-called ‘faithfulness’ to the text and to composers’ intentions on the one hand, and towards the necessity to favour new forms of involvement and interaction with audiences on the other.

The conference aims to promote discussions about the decisions artists make to ‘actualize’ (bring into sound) musical works composed between the sunset of the eighteenth-century aesthetic and the dawn of the avant-garde poetics of the twentieth century, with particular attention to historically informed improvisatory and extemporaneous practices.

A further aim is to incentivise debate between interpreters and musicologists, with the input of musicians who have undertaken artistically significant initiatives, while bringing into dialogue the repertoires of the nineteenth-century with other musical experiences of the current day and the demands and sensibilities of modern audiences.