The Short

THE FERMATA 625
assimilation of the triplets. But in that period precise notation of this kind need not exclude a degree of freedom in
performance. It may be legitimate to wonder how exact Beethoven might have expected the semiquavers in the second
and third bars of Ex. 16.42(b) to be.
A number of nineteenth-century writers continued to recommend overdotting in some cases, for instance the
mathematician and musician August Crelle in 1823, though he pointed out that ‘if the composer writes in a very
correct manner one must play the passage just as it is written’. 1186 About the same time Schubert made an interesting
distinction in Alfonso und Estrella between his notation for orchestral instruments and for solo singers. The instruments
have double dotted figures while the voices are left with single dots, but it seems highly unlikely that he did not intend
them to perform them in the same manner; it looks as if he expected the singers to over-dot in this type of passage and
spared himself the trouble of indicating this, but took the precaution of warning the orchestra (Ex. 16.43(a4)). A
similar instance occurs in his last completed opera, Fierrabras (Ex. 16.43(b).)
In Rossini, too, there is sometimes a lack of correspondence between the dotted rhythms of the accompaniment and
those of the singer, for instance in the aria ‘Ah si per voi già sento nuovo valor’ from Otello, as illustrated by García, 1187
which suggests an assumption that the singer would over-dot to match the orchestra. In similar pieces of a martial or
majestic character it seems clear that the convention of over-dotting remained strong throughout the nineteenth
century, especially in the Italian operatic repertoire. But it was not only in such genres of music, where composers
conventionally left much in the way of detail to be supplied by the performer, that the practice persisted. Even a
composer whose notation might be expected to have been particularly exact could, as late as the 1880s, call for
performers to apply a degree of over-dotting to his music. According to Heinrich Porges, Wagner intervened at one
point during a rehearsal of Parsifal (Ex. 16.44) to request: ‘hold the quaver with the dot longer; the semiquaver can then
be somewhat shorter—more to be effected through inner strength.’ 1188
Early recordings demonstrate the widespread survival of the practice of overdotting into the twentieth century. In the
recording of Berlioz's overture Carnaval romain made by Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra in 1913 there is
clear double-dotting of a single dotted figure in the cor anglais solo in bars 22 and 25 (Ex. 16.45.) Whether all
occurrences of this kind on early recordings would have met with the approval of the composer is a moot point, but it
is surely not without significance that over-dotting can frequently be
1186
Einiges, 77.
1187
New Treatise, 50.
1188
Porges in the piano score which he used during rehearsals for the première of Parsifal, quoted in Martin Geek and Egon Voss, eds., Richard Wagner: SÄmtliche Werke, xxx:
Dokumente zur Entstehung und erster Aufführung des Bühnennweihfestspiels Parsifal (Mainz, 1970), 179.