The Short

530 VIBRATO
gives the sound of the instrument a close analogy with the human voice when it is strongly touched with emotion.
This type of expression is very powerful, but if frequently used it would have only the dangerous disadvantage of
making the melody unnatural and depriving the style of that precious naÏvety which is the greatest charm of art and
recalls it to its primitive simplicity.
And he concluded his survey of the ways in which it could be produced and the circumstances in which it was
appropriate by requiring the player to ‘avoid making a habit of vibration of the hand, which must be employed only
when the expression renders it necessary and, furthermore, conforming with all that has been indicated in order to
prevent its abuse.’ 998
Many French violin methods during the first half of the nineteenth century, including some quite substantial ones,
seem to have considered vibrato worthy of little or no attention; FranÇois Habeneck's Méthode of about 1840, for
instance, ignored it entirely, as did Alard's école de violon of 1844, despite its subtitle Méthode complète et progressive.
Baillot's account of the function of vibrato is broadly in line with that of leading German musicians during the third
and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. Carl Maria Weber's friend Adolf Bernard Fürstenau, like Baillot,
compared the flautist's use of vibrato with that of the singer. He instructed that it should only be used to express
true, self-experienced deeper feeling and then too, even in a piece where passages of passionate gesture frequently
occur, far from everywhere, but only there where that gesture expresses itself most strongly, and in immediately
repeated passages of the same kind it should for instance only be used the first or second time, since it is all too easy
for the heaping-up of this embellishment to seem like a sickly mannerism, the continuous use of it even becoming a
piteous whining, which is naturally of an extremely repulsive effect; thus the vibrato [Bebung], if it is to be wholly
certain of its aesthetic success, must finally be confined every time to a single note, and, indeed, to the one on which
the culmination point of the passionate feeling occurs, and even here, yet again, confined to a three- or four-fold
quivering motion—notwithstanding that a longer continuation of the latter is very difficult to perform well—,
where, according to the circumstances, an accompanying crescendo or sforzato significantly increases the effect. 999
Numerous other flute methods into the second half of the century reiterated, in more or less strong language,
Fürstenau's instructions to introduce vibrato (both that produced by the breath and the finger vibrato) very
sparingly. 1000
998
L'Art du violon, 138–9. For a translation of Baillot's account see Stowell, Violin Technique, 208–10.
999
Flöten-Schule (Leipzig, [1826]), 79.
1000
Charles Nicholson, Complete Preceptor for the German Flute (London, [c. 1816]); id., A School for the Flute (New York, 1836); Charles Weiss, A New Methodical Instruction Book for
the Flute (London, [c. 1821]); James Alexander, Complete Preceptor for the Flute (London, [c. 1821]); Thomas Lindsay, The Elements of Flute Playing (London, [1828] ); John
Clinton, A School or Practical Instruction Book for the Boehm Flute (London, [c. 1850]).