The Short

104 NOTATION OF ACCENTS AND DYNAMICS
Where nineteenth-century German composers used both types of staccato mark, the stroke seems generally to have
been intended as much to indicate accent as to specify shortening. G. F. Kogel, the nineteenth-century editor of
Marschner's Hans Heiling, explained that Marschner used the staccato stroke to designate ‘notes that ought, with short,
powerful bowstrokes, to be most especially strongly (sfz) made to stand out’. 210 A similar type of execution appears to
be implied by Schumann's use of strokes (printed as wedges), for instance in the first movement of his ‘Rhenish’
Symphony, where a particular passage is always marked in this way (Ex. 3.53,) while only dots are used for staccato in
the rest of the symphony. The autograph of ‘Reiterstück’ from Schumann's Album für die Jugend provides a good
example of the composer's use of ? together with ⌃ and · as a graduated series of accent/articulation marks in
keyboard writing (Ex. 3.54.)
Ex. 3.53. Schumann, Third Symphony op. 97/i
Brahms also made a distinction between dots and strokes, and although Kogel (writing in the 1880s) considered that
the stroke as used by Marschner was ‘an obsolete form of notation’, Brahms, who was quite conservative in his
attitude towards notation, seems clearly to have associated strokes with this kind of sharp, accented staccato (Ex.
3.55,) 211 DvoŘák, too, made use of them in a similar way (Ex. 3.56.) Amongst other composers who certainly used the
stroke and the dot in this manner was Wagner, at least in some of his late works. 212 His orthography in the autographs
is often unclear, nor does it always correspond with the earliest printed editions, but where Wagner is known to have
overseen the publication of a work (i.e. in the case of his later operas), it may be conjectured that some of the
differences result from alterations at proof stage. Among more recent composers, Schönberg seems to have inherited
this tradition, for he explained in the preface to his Serenade op. 24: ‘In the marking of the short notes a distinction is
here made between hard, heavy, staccatoed and light, elastic, thrown (spiccato) ones. The former are marked with ? ?,
the latter by’ 213 Elgar, too, evidently considered the stroke to have accentual qualities, to judge by passages such as Ex.
3.57.
210 Full score (Leipzig, Peters, c. 1880), preface.
211 See below, Ch. 6, p. 218 and Ex. 6.20.
212 But see Ch. 6.
213 (Copenhagen and Leipzig, W. Hansen, 1924).