The Short

Ex. 15.39.Elgar, Violin Concerto op. 61/ii
PORTAMENTO 587
on Menuhin's 1932 recording with the composer, and in later recordings it is executed in an extremely discreet manner.
Virtually all the authors who discussed portamento in singing and in string playing stressed the danger of abusing it;
but their notion of abuse is directly dependent on what they considered to be the norm. It is impossible from these
writings to be absolutely certain how apparent or frequent the musicians of the Classical and Romantic periods
expected portamento to be, yet there is every reason to believe that it was often meant to be a distinctly audible effect,
not merely a by-product of singing distant intervals to the same syllable or shifting position on a single string. Even the
authors of the most violent diatribes against its abuse were almost certainly quite happy to hear it tastefully and
proportionately introduced, but here, as elsewhere, ideas of what was tasteful or proportionate will almost certainly
have been very different from ours at all stages of the period.