every move; intriguingly, the Turk was taken on a European tour lasting several years in the first part of the nineteenth century, and was occasionally demonstrated during the interval of Beethoven’s concerts). Mälzel also developed four ear trumpets for Beethoven, two of which hooked around his head to free both hands, which may explain Beethoven’s later desire to patch up their differences and support his metronome. At the end of his letter to Mosel, the composer envisaged a situation in which ‘every village schoolmaster’ would soon be in need of one. And in this way a familiar musical teaching and performance tool entered common use: ‘It goes without saying that certain persons must take a prominent part in this exercise, so as to arouse enthusiasm. As far as I am concerned, you can count on me with certainty, and it is with pleasure that I await the part which you will assign to me in this undertaking.’
His support did not diminish with the passing years. On 18 January 1826, some 14 months before his death, he wrote to his publisher B. Schott and Sons in Mainz, promising ‘everything adapted for metronome’. And later that year he wrote to his publishers again: ‘The metronome marks will follow soon: do not fail to wait for them. In our century things of this kind are certainly needed. Also, I learn from letters written by friends in Berlin that the first performance of the [Ninth] symphony received enthusiastic applause, which I ascribe mainly to the use of a metronome. It is almost impossible now to preserve the tempi ordinari; instead, the performers must now obey the ideas of unfettered genius . . .’
And that, one may have reasonably believed, would have been the end of it. The unfettered genius would get his way, and henceforth his music would have but one tempo, and almost two centuries later we would sit in a concert hall and hear essentially the same piece of music that an audience heard when the music was new. Fortunately for us, things didn’t work out that way. Beethoven’s metronome marks have been confounding musicians since their ink was wet, and many have responded in the only way they feel able – by almost completely ignoring them.
In a landmark talk to the New York Musicological Society in December 1942, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch addressed the issue of Beethoven’s tempo with wry understatement. ‘These marks have not been generally accepted as altogether valid expressions of his intentions or been uniformly adopted in performance. On the contrary, their existence has failed to enter the consciousness of musicians, and in most editions they are lacking. The traditions and conventions of performance deviate widely from the tempi denoted by the marks.’ In other words, musicians and conductors placed their own interpretations above those of the original composer. They preferred, Kolisch suggested, the traditionally vague Italian markings over the more precise, newfangled ones. ‘This strange situation,’ the speaker reasoned, ‘deserves investigation’.
A common reason offered for the decision to ignore Beethoven’s sense of timing is that the marks do not accurately convey his musical desires; Schumann is commonly cited as someone else who wrote metronomic marks he couldn’t have possibly meant. Other non-adopters claim that Beethoven’s metronome was different to the one that came factory-built in the twentieth century; it was probably slower, so that the marks it threw up are now too fast, and almost impossible to play; critics find it useful to refer to them as ‘impressionistic’ and mere ‘abstractions’. And then there is a more philosophical suggestion: the feeling that using a metronome was somehow rigidly mathematical and therefore ‘inartistic’. Beethoven seemed to be working against himself; according to Kolisch’s talk, such a free-spirited organic composition ‘cannot . . . be forced into so mechanical a frame’.
When a revised version of Rudolf Kolisch’s talk was published in the Musical Quarterly fifty years later, it included Beethoven’s earliest written reference to Mälzel’s metronome. He called it ‘a welcome means of assuring that the performance of my compositions everywhere will be in the tempi that I conceived, which to my regret have so often been misunderstood.’7 We shouldn’t forget that Beethoven had a maniacally high opinion of himself; he once derailed one critic of his work with the suggestion, ‘Even my shit is better than anything you could create.’ (And of course his opinions changed over time. Before he championed the metronome, the value he attached to the tempo of his compositions appeared much looser: on one occasion he suggested that his markings should apply only to the first few bars; on another he wrote, ‘Either they are good musicians and ought to know how to play my music, or they are bad musicians and in that case my indications would be of no avail.’)
Perhaps only the most challenging and gifted of composers deserve to be reinterpreted anew at each performance; perhaps only a masterpiece can withstand this new scrutiny on a regular basis. Or perhaps even the most exacting of a composer’s musical timings should provide only the loosest guidelines: to provide, as the aesthetics professor Thomas Y. Levin has suggested, a frame within which music may simply live. Because everything else, ‘its breathing, its phrasing, the endlessly complex and subtle structuring of time within this constitutive constraint remains, as always, the responsibility of the performer’.8
But does the responsibility of the performer vary with the generations? Our innate measurement of time today may be quite different from two centuries before. The Swiss-born American conductor Leon Botstein confronted these issues in 1993 when he was in a great hurry to catch a train. ‘I was driving a car on a back-country road and found myself behind a black semi-covered carriage pulled by two horses,’ he wrote in the Musical Quarterly a few months later. ‘What struck me was that the horses seemed to be going really quite fast. This was not a Central Park tourist drive. Yet as I tailgated the contraption I became painfully aware how intolerably slow it moved.’
Botstein grew agitated, and began to wonder how long it would take him to reach his destination if this was the top speed of all forms of travel – which once, of course, it was. ‘By the time I could pass it, my anger turned to free association. Was it at all significant that Beethoven probably never experienced motion any faster than the velocity of this carriage – that his expectations with respect to time, duration, and the relative possibilities of how events and spaces might be related to one another in time might be radically different from our own?’
Beethoven’s metronome marks, which appeared to Botstein much too fast, are countered by many works that appear too slow. Schumann’s markings for Manfred appear sluggish; Mendelssohn’s marks in parts of St Paul painfully so; Dvořák’s final movement of the Sixth Symphony also has markings that appear to the musician to be quite out of keeping with the energy of the music. It begs yet another unanswerable question: should the musical time allotted to a work at a particular period in history necessarily feel correct in a modern, faster life many decades later? Will innovation always date? The world spins and the impact of an artistic revolution turns from shock to analysis. Cubism is a movement not a controversy; the Rolling Stones are not a scary parental proposition.
And there is, of course, more to an interpretation of a masterpiece than mere timings on a manuscript or CD insert. There is intent. When Wilhelm Furtwängler famously chased down the final movement of the Ninth Symphony at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, he was following more than a metronome. He was following the Second World War. Contemporary accounts suggest that sometimes he appeared not even to be paying heed to the notes, let alone the tempo, with his direction carrying enough indignation to burn through the score. Passion is an overused word these days, but Furtwängler’s audience and his orchestra may have been reminded of the passion of Beethoven himself, flailing at the premiere, furious at the noise in his head.
There is yet another realm of exploration: the notion that there was, in Vienna in 1824, very little acceptance of what the concepts of speed and quickening time might yet entail. Viennese society was not yet a modern one, and conducted itself much as it did two or three centuries before. Clocks were not always accurate timepieces, time ran liberally fast and slow, and there was little need for greater accuracy and synchronisation. The railways and the telegraph had not yet transformed the city. Throw a precise and unforgiving metronome into this mix and you had an explosion big enough to deafen the world.
Perhaps
