Of late the convergence in my world seems to be centering around tempo changes, in the most literal sense of the word — i.e., changes of speed in music. In particular, though, I’m concerned mostly with non-notated tempo changes.
I was musically raised by fairly strict, Viennese-type teachers who were very much of the school that “if the composer didn’t write it, you don’t do it.” Of course such a stance doesn’t stand up more than a few seconds even under the lightest inquiry; any musical performance is filled with a vast array of inflections, fluctuations, and dynamics that the composer did not notate. If we were to play music precisely as notated it would be horrible. That can be easily proven by using a music notation program like Sibelius or Finale to make a copy of something, and then have the computer play it. The computer plays it precisely as written, not one jot more or less. And the results are unlistenable to anyone except for the most tone-deaf hardcore geek type, I should think.
No: there will always be a lot in performance that isn’t notated, so pure pedantry is stopped dead in its tracks before even leaving the station. But what about the larger, more macro-issues of interpretation?
The whole issue of macro-tempo changes within a single movement or within a single piece (unnotated as such) has approached me from several directions of late:
• Item: I am studying the Schubert B-flat Posthumous Sonata, D. 960. The work opens with a beautiful, soulful legato melody as the primary theme. It them moves through a number of secondary areas, and settles into a secondary theme in F Major. Trying to keep a uniform tempo throughout — there is a “molto moderato” at the beginning and nothing else — results in either the primary theme being too fast or the secondary theme too slow. The only real solution appears to be a discretely faster tempo for the secondary theme. That results in some trickiness during the development when the primary and secondary themes are blended, but again discretion comes to the rescue and it can be dealt with.
• Item: I’ve been going over a lot of recorded performances of said Schubert sonata to see what pianists in general do about this issue. I have found that most of them do play the secondary theme faster than the primary theme, in some cases quite a bit so. That includes more ‘cerebral’ pianists such as Alfred Brendel, Richard Goode, and Artur Schnabel. But it’s also the case with Mitsuko Uchida, Artur Rubinstein (very subtle there) and Maurizio Pollini, all of whom are less intellectual and more heartfelt-type players. In short, it’s relatively rare for a performer to keep a strict tempo throughout the movement.
• Item: I’ve been listening to Arthur Nikisch’s 1913 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the first-ever complete recording of a Beethoven symphony. It’s remarkably good-sounding given the primitive technology of the time and the necessity of paring down the Berlin Philharmonic to what amounts almost to a chamber orchestra. (Only so many instruments can crowd around that one single acoustic recording horn, after all.) There has been a lot of talk about Nikisch’s practice of slowing down for secondary themes and the like, 19th century performance practices. Both Toscanini and Bruno Walter said that the recording was an aberration and Nikisch didn’t do that in performance. (I’m not at all sure about that; both of those conductors have soapboxes to stand on about ‘fidelity to the score’, and so they weren’t about to admit that the Grandfather Of Them All might have effected tempo changes.) What I find in the recording is that the tempo changes are subtle, and quite effective. I especially like the way he gives that oboe solo in the first movement recapitulation all the time in the world. I also like the slight letting up on the bridge theme in the last movement. The entire piece is played a bit slower than we’re used to hearing nowadays, and it has more grandeur about it. In short, I found nothing offensive in the tempo changes.
• Item: Thomas Fey and the Heidelberger Sinfonika are in the process of doing a set of the Haydn symphonies. Whether or not they get to the end of the project, well who knows: only two ‘complete’ sets of the symphonies actually ever got all the way from start to finish (Dorati’s and Adam Fischer’s). But the six volumes so far are glorious. One of the signature issues in Fey’s interpretation is to abandon that kind of motoristic, almost frenetic tempo that characterizes so many “authentic” performances these days (à la Gardiner) and instead is quite willing to throw in a lot of rubato and distinct changes of tempo where effective. That’s quite a revelation: even the most Romantic-y kind of conductor wouldn’t have dreamed of taking the trio of the Minuet in Symphony No. 85 so dramatically slower than the Minuet, or the intermezzo-ish passage in the first movement of the “Farewell” so much slower. And he throws in fun little ritards here and there where effective, instead of just barreling on ahead the way so many people do. In short, he has broken free of the metronome in these performances, and the symphonies are distinctly improved as a result. He’s intelligent and musical about it all, of course.
So: it’s an interesting time for me to be playing around with tempo. I actually hear some voices in my head while practicing the Schubert, rebuking me for taking the secondary theme faster than the primary, or speeding up for the A Major section in the second movement. But that’s my old habits dying hard: all those pedagogic types sitting their with their Urtexts, wagging their fingers at the first sign of anything that wasn’t right there in the Urtext. Sometimes I realize just how much fear-based training is part of modern conservatory life. Most of us aren’t so absurdedly careful about the printed page because we really, really want to be, but because we’re afraid of reprisals if we stray. It’s almost as though there is a Puritan movement going on in our midst, despite that fact that when you get right down to it, we’re really all a bunch of hedonists. We’re in music because we want to be in music, and not because we’re terribly concerned with doing everything right. If we were so all-fired determined to do everything right, then I don’t think we’d be in music at all, but rather we’d be doing something that the bulk of society doesn’t regard as being faintly weird. We’d all be doing accounting or business management or software engineering or whatnot.
How odd. We escape the madding throng to enter this wonderful world of making music, and then we all start tip-toeing around like we’re at an Episcopal tea and we’re terrified we’re going to rattle our teaspoon on the saucer or something equally dire. And I’m just as prone to this as anyone else I know.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………………………….