The Short

lessened. But, as becomes apparent on closer investigation, it is by no means easy to be confident even about the
relationship of one tempo to another in many instances, especially since the tempo is indicated not merely by the Italian
term prefixed to the piece, but by a complex of other related factors and conventions that differ from composer to
composer, place to place, and period to period.
With the advent of the metronome in the second decade of the nineteenth century we have a mass of largely untapped
information about the tempo predilections of many major and minor composers, which offers tantalizing possibilities
of making better-informed judgements about differing notions of the speed implied by ‘allegro’, ‘andante’, and so on,
and the other factors in the tempo equation than are possible with the limited evidence for chronometric tempos in the
eighteenth century. But this evidence is by no means easy to interpret and must be approached with considerable
circumspection. Early metronome marks reveal the last phase of a complicated yet, in the case of some composers,
remarkably consistent method of designating tempo. Paradoxically, as will become apparent later, the availability of the
metronome as a means of exactly fixing tempo may have played a part in lessening later nineteenth-century composers'
concerns to indicate their wishes clearly in other ways, often making it particularly difficult to ascertain their intentions
where metronome marks were not supplied. Tradition, after the lapse of a generation or more, is an extremely
unreliable guide to such matters, as, for instance, a comparison of the timings of performances at Bayreuth in Wagner's
lifetime with subsequent ones shows.
Choice of Tempo
CHOICE OF TEMPO 283
Every sensitive musician is aware that the quest for historically appropriate tempos must essentially be concerned with
plausible parameters rather than with precisely delineated or very narrowly defined absolute tempos. Many
psychological and aesthetic factors, as well as the varying physical conditions in which performance takes place, militate
against the notion that a piece of music should be rigidly bound to a single immutable tempo. As A. B. Marx observed
in the 1830s: ‘the same piece of music must sometimes be played somewhat faster, sometimes slower, according to the
larger or more constricted space in which it is performed, according to the stronger or weaker forces employed, but
particularly according to the decision of the moment.’ 505 This was a view evidently shared by Marx's friend (at that time)
Mendelssohn; 506 for it was reported of Mendelssohn that ‘though in playing he never varied the
505
Schilling, EncyclopÄdie, art. ‘Tempo’.
506
The two musicians later fell out over Mendelssohn's refusal to perform Marx's oratorio Moses.