The Short

STACCATO, LEGATO, AND NON-LEGATO 173
occasionally to certain passages and to set off the HIGHER BEAUTIES of the LEGATO.’ 316 And in the revised eleventh
edition of his treatise he seems to have decided that even more emphatic guidance was necessary, changing the phrase
‘the best rule is to adhere chiefly to the LEGATO’ to the more succinct and peremptory ‘let the LEGATO prevail’.
Jean Louis Adam expressed the same thing in French, in his influential Conservatoire method; apparently paraphrasing
Clementi's recently published book more or less directly, he commented:
Sometimes the author indicates the musical phrase which should be smooth, but if he abandons the choice of legato
or staccato to the taste of the performer, it is best to adhere to the legato, reserving the staccato to make certain
passages stand out and to make the advantages of the legato felt by means of a pleasant artistic contrast. 317
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century the view expressed by these writers remained the orthodox one. For
instance, in Henri Herz's A Standard Modern Preceptor for the Pianoforte it is stated that slurs indicate ‘each note being held
down its full length, and till the following note is actually struck. This is called the legato style of playing, and is that
which is generally used.’ He further commented that 'staccato is to be used only where it is expressly indicated [by
means of dots or strokes].’ 318 Here there seems no longer to be any question of a non-legato touch intermediate
between legato and staccato or even of a ‘non-staccato’. Staccato is only to be employed where marked, and this would
include every type of articulation from highly detached to virtually legato. The degree of separation or accent could be
either marked by the type of signs employed, marked by additional performance directions, or entrusted to the
performer's musical understanding, much in the way that a host of authors advised. 319
The concern of mid-nineteenth-century pianists with cultivating a legato execution as the fundamental basis of their
performance style finds its apogee in Sigmund Thalberg's L'Art du chant appliqué au piano. And at the end of the century
Hugo Riemann, in his various editions of the Classics, where legato playing is particularly emphasized, reiterated the
instruction that ‘The legato touch should always be used, unless specially marked to the contrary’, 320 thus recognizing
no separate role for unmarked notes. The pedagogic aims of Riemann's editions necessitated a particularly extensive
repertoire of markings to indicate a graduated series of degrees and types of articulation and accent, but by that time
many composers were scarcely less meticulous.
316
Introduction, 9.
317
Méthode du piano du Conservatoire (Paris, 1804), 151.
318
(London, [c. 1840]), 7.
319
e.g. C. P. E. Bach in the 1750s, Türk in the 1780s, Witthauer in the 1790s, etc.
320
Moments musicaux, ed. Riemann (Brunswick, Litolff, [c. 1890]), preface (copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford).