Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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СКАЧАТЬ The symphony has long become part of the landscape. It has an official title: ‘Symphony No. 9 in D Minor’, and the catalogue number Opus 125; it has a vernacular title: the ‘Choral’, and an insiders’ shorthand title ‘B9’. But what it doesn’t have, through all its thousands of performances, is even the loosest of agreements on its timing. Just how aggressively should the second movement be played? And how sluggishly the third? By what electrifying licence can Toscanini drive home the fourth movement more than five minutes faster than the relatively glacial interpretation by Klemperer? How can one conductor from the nineteenth century get the audience home a comfortable 15 minutes earlier than one in the twenty-first century? How can Felix Weingartner conduct the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic in February 1935 at a lick of 62.30, Herbert von Karajan lead the Berlin Philharmonic in the autumn of 1962 in 66.48, and Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony manage 68.09 in April 2006? What about Simon Rattle’s take of 69.46 back in Vienna in 2003? And then there are the live recordings complete with pauses and coughing between movements – most famously Leonard Bernstein conducting a multinational orchestra in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 to mark the fall of the Wall, the performance at which the word ‘joy’ was replaced by the word ‘freedom’ at the choral finale, clocking in at a remarkable 81 minutes 46 seconds. Has our patience for the symphony expanded against all the faster odds in our modern world? Does our modern appreciation of genius demand that we savour every note?

      The glory of music rests as much with its interpretation as its composition, and it is the interpretation that supplies the life force. Art cannot be reduced to absolutes; emotion cannot be measured in a timescale. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the method of interpreting contemporary music changed, and Beethoven’s impatience and radicalism had much to do with it. The composer found a new way of marking time.

      Although each movement of the Ninth Symphony carries the usual form of general introductory guidance for tempo and mood, even the casual listener will acknowledge the inadequacy of these instructions for such a varied and unconventional piece. The first movement plumps for ‘Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso’ (lively and joyous, but not too much so, and then a tad stately); the second ‘Molto vivace’ (very fast and forceful); the third ‘Adagio molto e cantabile’ (slow and lyrical); and the fourth, with its groundbreaking choral finale, ‘Presto – Allegro ma non troppo – Vivace – Adagio cantabile’ (trippingly fast, lively but steady, slow and sweet).

      Where did these tempos come from? From the human heartbeat and the human stride. Any definition of tempo required a baseline from which to operate – the tempo giusto from where one may either run fast or slow. An accepted average for both a leisurely stroll and a relaxed heart rate stood at around 80 beats per minute (bpm), and this was considered a ‘normal’ place to start. (In 1953 the fabled music historian Curt Sachs suggested that there was an upper and lower limit which prevented a concert performance descending or accelerating into incomprehension. ‘The maximum of slowness, which still allows for a steady step or beat, is possibly 32 (bpm) . . . and the maximum of speed, beyond which the conductor would fidget rather than beat, is probably 132.’ Sachs also made his own table, approximate at best but certainly original, linking precise bpm with vague terminology. Unfortunately, it slightly contradicted his estimation above. Thus he calculated that adagio would be 31 bpm, andantino 38, allegretto 53 ½ and allegro 117.³

      It was the Italians who introduced the descriptions of tempo we’re still familiar with (all those vivaces and moderatos), and by 1600 the moods of classical music were well established. Emotions were no longer merely intuited but inscribed: ‘gaily’ (allegro) and ‘at leisure’ (adagio). When he played in Bologna in 1611, Adriano Banchieri’s organ scores already carried very particular instructions for presto, più presto and prestissimo. Fifty years later the musical vocabulary stretched to the most staccato nervoso and the most beautiful fuso (‘melting’). The fabled link to the heartbeat found further resonance in the Italian term for a quarter-rest: sospiro, a breath or a sigh.

      But there was a problem: emotions are pliable things, and they didn’t always translate from composer to conductor. Nor did they translate between nations. In the 1750s, C.P.E. Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, found that ‘in certain countries [outside Germany] there is a marked tendency to play adagios too fast and adagios too slow.’ Some twenty years later, a young Mozart found that when he performed in Naples his interpretation of presto was so unparalleled that the Italians assumed that his virtuosity was somehow connected to his magic ring (which he then removed to rule out foul play).

      By the 1820s we know that Beethoven regarded these instructions as perfunctory and outmoded. In a letter to the musician and critic Ignaz von Mosel in 1817, he suggested that the Italian terms for tempo had been ‘inherited from times of musical barbarism’.

      For example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which once and for all means cheerful, and how far removed we are often from the true meaning of this description, so that the piece of music itself expresses the very opposite of the heading! As far as these four main connotations are concerned [allegro, andante, adagio, presto], which, however, are far from being as right or as true as the main four winds, we would do well to dispense with them.

      Mosel agreed with him, and Beethoven feared they would both be ‘decried as violators of tradition’ (although he regarded this as preferable to being accused of ‘feudalism’). Despite these protestations, Beethoven reluctantly persevered with the old style; right to the last quartets his work was proceeded by the Italian settings he despised.⁴ To temper his dissatisfaction he occasionally included slight modifiers in the body of the score: ritard, he writes early on in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, short for ritardando, a signal to slow down gracefully when the rhythms start running off in all directions. But throughout his score for the Ninth, Beethoven also provided a new and far more significant instruction to the conductor and players – a measure of exact timing supplied by a newly invented musical gadget.

      The metronome was as revolutionary to Beethoven as the microscope was to seventeenth-century bacteriologists. It afforded both ultimate steadiness and minute variableness, and it transmitted to the entire orchestra the composer’s precise intentions. What, at the beginning of a musical sequence, could be clearer and more exacting than a notation of regimented beats to the bar and beats to the minute? And what would bring an ageing composer closer to God than the belief that he was transforming the essence of time itself?

      In his letter to Mosel, Beethoven credited the invention of the metronome in 1816 to the German pianist and inventor Johann Mälzel, although Mälzel had copied, improved and patented a device developed in Amsterdam several years earlier by a man named Dietrich Winkel. (Winkel had been inspired by the reliable movement of a clock’s pendulum, which had been used as an aid to musical composition since the days of Galileo in the early seventeenth century. But the early musical pendulums were cumbersome, inexact machines closer in appearance to an upright weighing scale than the small pyramids we are used to today. The key innovation of Winkel’s device was the fact that the pendulum pivoted around a lower central point with movable weights; the old machines swung pendulously from the top. When Mälzel took out patents for Winkel’s machine across Europe, his sole innovation appears to have been a newly notched measuring plate.)⁵

      Mälzel had a talent for copying and claiming as his own: Beethoven had once accused him of taking undue credit for writing ‘Battle of Vitoria’, his short piece celebrating the Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon in 1813. The two had initially worked on the composition together; Beethoven had intended to use Mälzel’s panharmonicon (a mechanised organ-style box able to reproduce the sound of a marching band), but later expanded the scale of his piece, rendering the new instrument redundant.⁶

      Mälzel was the Caractacus Pott of his day. The son of an organ maker, his obsession with mechanical wonders reached both its zenith and nadir in his promotion СКАЧАТЬ