Paul Taffanel - Playing Style

Playing Style

Taffanel came at a crucial moment in the flute's history, after Theobald Boehm had completely remodeled the instrument. He proved the flute fully capable of elegance and extreme expressivness. At the same time, the credo later advocated by the French Flute School that tone quality was more important than loudness did not always hold true for him. His low register was often described as "powerful and brassy", "ample" or "full." This may have been due in part to Parisian audiences of the period. They expected the flute, along with all the woodwinds, to play with assertiveness. When Hans von Bülow conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Paris, critics and audiences alike criticized the tone of the wind instruments as being too small.

Georges Barrère recalled in 1921 that quality and quantity of tone, as well as fine technique, were not all that set Taffanel's playing apart. Fleury added,

Elegance, flexibility, and sensitivity were the hallmarks of Taffanel's artistry, and his phenomenal virtuosity was made as inconspicuous as possible. He hated affectation, believing that the text of the music should be respected absolutely, and beneath the supple fluency of his playing there was a rigorous adherence to accuracy of pulse and rhythm.

"Rigorous adherence" is a relative term here. By the standards of his time, Taffanel's pulse and rhythm were free from exaggeration. As rhythmic interpretation became more literal in 20th century practice, recordings of Taffanel's contemporaries came to sound relatively free and loose.

Another aspect of flute playing which Taffanel changed was his use of vibrato, which differed markedly from the standards later developed by the French Flute School. The Taffanel-Gaubert Méthode discouraged vibrato, especially in playing early music. Taffanel himself, however, employed "a light, almost imperceptible vibrato", according to Fleury. Another pupil, Adolphe Hennebains, goes into more detail:

When he spoke to us of notes with vibrato or expression, he told us with a mysterious air that these notes, forte or piano, seemed to come from within himself. One had the impression that they came directly from the heart or soul.