The Short

208 NOTATION OF ARTICULATION AND PHRASING
The Functions of Staccato Marks
Both in theory and in practice, it is clear that staccato marks or other visually identical marks (whether or not a
distinction was made between dots and strokes) signified a number of different things. Some of these were quite
specialized and are relatively infrequently encountered outside particular repertoires. In French eighteenth-century
music, for instance, dots and strokes might be used to warn against the application of inequality. Quantz, too, referred
to this function of dots and strokes. 356 In such cases, the theory was that the dot merely prevented inequality and the
stroke indicated both equality and staccato. 357 Since French mechanical instruments, even from the early nineteenth
century, show a penchant for inequality, 358 this may be a factor worth taking into consideration in the performance of
nineteenth-century French music. 359
A particular use of the staccato mark, which is mentioned by C. P. E. Bach, can be found in the second movement of
Beethoven's Violin Sonata op. 30 no. 3 in G major (and perhaps elsewhere in Beethoven's music of that period if it
were to be looked for). Throughout this movement, in the autograph, Beethoven consistently placed a staccato stroke
not over the first or second note on each appearance of a dotted figure first heard in bar 19, but over the dot of
prolongation (Ex. 6.6;) the placement is so careful and consistent in each case that it must be deliberate, for it is not
characteristic of Beethoven that staccato marks regularly occur so far after the note heads to which they belong. The
meaning is almost certainly ?, and Beethoven may possibly have derived this notation directly from the passage added
in the 1787 edition of C. P. E. Bach's Versuch where he suggests precisely this relationship of staccato mark and dot of
prolongation to signify a rest in such a figure. Bach realized the turn shown in Ex. 6.7(a) as Ex. 6.7(b), then suggested
writing it as Ex. 6.7(c) or(d). 360 It may be that this notational device was used by other composers, but, not being
sought, has not been noticed.
The use of dots or strokes simply to indicate that the notes so marked were not to be slurred, yet not to specify a
genuinely staccato execution, appears to be very common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. In many scores
of the period these marks are very regularly encountered in mixed figures of slurred and separate notes, even if the
composer hardly ever employed them in other contexts (as was often the case in the second half of the eighteenth
356 Versuch, XI, §12.
357 For a very helpful discussion of the problems surrounding inequality in 18th-c. music see Fuller, ‘Notes inégales’.
358 Fuller (‘Notes inégales’) mentions a barrel-organ version of the overture to Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro.
359 See also the reference in Bériot's Méthode (above, Ch. 4n. 37.)
360 1787 edn., i, II, 4, §24.