The Short

546 VIBRATO
Indications of a change of taste in this direction around 1800 may perhaps be found in warnings, such as Baillot's in
1834, to ‘avoid giving the vibrato a slackness that would make the playing old-fashioned’. 1049 More concrete are the
numerous eighteenth-century sources that specify the number of oscillations to be made on the note, either in the
context of general instruction or in particular musical instances. Leopold Mozart's account, giving the illustration in
Ex. 14.17 for three different manners of producing a left-hand vibrato,
Ex. 14.17.L. Mozart, Versuch, XI, §4
observes: ‘The larger strokes can represent quavers, the smaller semiquavers, and as many strokes as there be, so often
must the hand be moved,’ 1050 though he does not specify a tempo for his semibreves. His other music examples,
however, strongly suggest a rather slow tempo (Ex. 14.18,) as does his insistence on the regular distribution of metrical
stress in the vibrato. Interestingly, his description of this technique on the violin seems intended to produce an effect
very like the one that his son condemned in the singing of Meissner twenty years later. This may indicate that, in
practice, Leopold Mozart's violin vibrato was freer than his account suggests. But it may also indicate a rather different
attitude on the part of the young Mozart; after all, he described the use of vibrato on instruments as an imitation of the
natural quivering that comes into the human voice (maybe he implied that this occurred in connection with strong
feeling, though he did not explicitly say so) rather than comparing vibrato in singing and playing to the dispassionate
phenomenon of striking a bell or a slack string.
Like Leopold Mozart, many eighteenth-century writers, especially of the older generation, linked the number of dots or
undulations in the graphic signs
1049 L'Art du violon, 139.
1050 Versuch, XI, §4.