The Short

touch and the staccato. 308 Türk gave the example shown in Ex. 5.1(a), suggesting that it would probably be played as at
Ex. 5.1(b) or(c).
Ex. 5.1. Türk, Klavierschule, VI, 3, §40
STACCATO, LEGATO, AND NON-LEGATO 171
For the flute, Quantz had specifically limited the wind player's equivalent of the non-legato style of performance to
notes of a particular value, generally the second fastest type of note in a piece, suggesting, unlike, Bach, that longer
note values would be played more connectedly; there is also the implication that, presumably for technical reasons, the
fastest notes would have been slurred. He instructed:
If in an Allegro assai semiquavers are the quickest notes, the quavers must be tipped briefly for the most part, while
crotchets must be played in a singing and sustained manner. But in an allegretto where semidemiquaver triplets
occur, the semiquavers must be tipped briefly and the quavers played in a singing fashion. 309
From the practical viewpoint it seems likely that some such considerations must often have applied to the fastest notes
in keyboard music, where a genuinely detached style of performance is only practicable up to a certain speed. As will
become apparent from examples of composers' practices, it is probable that, in some cases, fast notes in eighteenthcentury
string and wind parts that have neither slurs nor staccato marks would also have been intended to be played
legato.
Yet there was a counter-current to the view that unmarked notes indicated a detached, quasi staccato, style of
performance. At about the same time as Bach's and Marpurg's treatises, Niccolo Pasquali wrote in his The Art of
Fingering the Harpsichord. ‘The Legato is the touch that this Treatise endeavours to teach, being a general Touch fit for
almost all Kinds of Passages’; and he added that all passages that have no marks for other kinds of articulation ‘must
be played Legato, i.e., in the usual Way’. 310 Some twenty years later Vincenzo Manfredini, writing about cantabile
playing, stated that ‘One must be careful not to raise the finger from the key before having played the next note.’ But
he added significantly: ‘This rule is not only followed in this case, but on almost any occasion’. 311
308
Klavierschule, VI, §40.
309
Vosuch, XII, §22.
310
(Edinburgh, [c. 1758]), 26.
311
Regole armoniche, o sieno Precetti ragionati (Venice, 1775), 28.