The Short

THE FERMATA 613
been less happy to see it interpolated where it was not indicated. Yet Brahms was reported to have employed unwritten
arpeggiation. After he gave the first performance of his D minor Piano Concerto in 1865 a critic complained about the
‘incessant spreading of chords in the slower tempos’; and other contemporaries also mentioned this characteristic of
Brahms's playing. 1176 The continuation, into the early years of the twentieth century, of a tradition of liberally
introducing unwritten arpeggiation in piano music, is abundantly documented in early recordings. 1177
The Variable Dot and Other Aspects of Rhythmic Flexibility
Many instances of the fluid relationship between the literal meaning of the musical notation, and the ways in which
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performers might have been expected to interpret it, have frequently been touched
upon in the preceding chapters. Classical and Romantic notions of musical rhetoric undoubtedly excluded the idea that
notated rhythms should, in general, be immune from expressive manipulation, though some may have been perceived
to depend for their musical effect on a degree of strictness. Musical figures involving pairs of notes (with or without
dots of prolongation) or figures with an upbeat were particularly prone to be modified in performance. Some of this
modification might occur at the whim of the performer; but there were a number of circumstances in which particular
types of rhythmic alteration appear to have been customary and others in which, by convention, composers employed
misleading notation.
Pairs of notes were often performed unequally for much of the period under consideration, not so much as a matter of
course, in the manner suggested by French theory or in Quantz's Versuch, but for particular expressive purposes. There
are many examples in Domenico Corn's editions (see Ex. 12.7,) and similar modifications of equal pairs were still
common more than a century later, as can be heard in recordings by Joachim and Patti (see above, Ex. 12.12, 12.9, and
below, Ex. 16.36.) Other evidence of the manner in which rhythmic inequality might have been employed in
performance can be found in a variety of documentary sources. It is interesting, for example, that when Spohr noted
down in his diary how a singer in Milan performed a passage from Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri in 1816, he notated
dotted rhythms where Rossini had
1176
Review cited in Frithjof Haas, Zwischen Brabms und Wagner: Der Dirgent Hermann Levi (Zurich and Mainz, 1995), 106. See also Richard Hudson Stolen Time: The History of Tempo
Rubato (Oxford, 1994), 333.
1177
Arpeggiation and extensive dislocation between the hands is abundant, for instance, on piano rolls by Saint-SÄens (b. 1835), Carl Reinecke (b. 1824), and Theodor
Leschetizky (b. 1830), available on CD Archiphon-106. See also Robert Philip, Early Recording and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900–1950
(Cambridge, 1992).