The Short

292 TEMPO
(particularly in England and France) ignored these theoretical distinctions, recognizing only one type of 4/4 or ?,
whose character was governed by the musical content and the tempo terms.
Another point, about which the German theorists appear not to have been entirely clear, is whether the crotchets in 2/
4 were regarded as essentially livelier than those in 4/4. Neither Schulz nor Türk explicitly say so; indeed, in the case of
Schulz's zusammengesetzten 4/4 they are exactly the same, since he says that, with regard to performance style and
motion, the zusammengesetzten metres are identical to the simple metres from which they are derived. It follows from
this, however, that common 4/4 has a character that is different from 2/4 and zusammengesetzten 4/4. But there seem to
have been considerable differences of opinion about the relationship of 2/4 to 4/4, since many composers treated it as
if it were really 4/8. Hummel's metronome marks for Mozart symphonies (e.g. the ‘Linz’) suggest a steadier
interpretation of the crotchets in 2/4 than in 4/4; and, somewhat later, Bernhard Romberg, after listing tempo terms
with what he regarded as appropriate metronome marks, added: ‘When the above marks [i.e. tempo terms] occur in 2/
4 time … the strokes of the pendulum must be rather slower than in Common or ♩ time.’ 538 In the music of Beethoven
and Mendelssohn, metronome marks appear to bear out this view of 2/4 to some extent: compare for instance the
Allegro ? (? = 80) in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony op. 68 with the Allegro 2/4 (? = 126) of the String Quartet op. 59
no. 1 or the Allegro non troppo ♩ (? = 92) of Mendelssohn's Erste Walpurgisnacht op. 60 with the Vivace non troppo 2/
4 (? = 126) in the ‘Scotch’ Symphony op. 56. But in Beethoven's case, and that of other composers, the situation is
complicated by a tendency to employ a type of 2/4 with four quaver beats in the bar that stands in the same
relationship to ? as ? does to ?: for example, the 2/4 adagios in Beethoven's string quartets opp. 18 no. 6 and 59 no. 1
or the first and last movements of op. 18 no. 2. The treatment of 2/4 by later nineteenth-century composers continued
to be variable in this respect; Schumann and Dvořák, for instance, do not seem to have regarded ♩ and 2/4 as, in
themselves, implying any basic difference in the speed of the crotchets in relation to the tempo term, but DvoŘák quite
frequently wrote movements in 4/8 which have a different character.
In doubtful cases the note values employed in the piece and its overall musical characteristics were generally expected
to provide the necessary clues to decide in which of the metrical sub-types the piece belonged. Despite these
complexities, the idea of a tempo giusto seems to have played an crucial part in the thinking of many eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century musicians. The tempo giusto was considered to be the speed at which a piece in a given metre,
containing a certain range of note values and with a particular character, would
538 A Complete, no. See also Peter Williams, ‘Two Case Studies in Performance Practice and the Details of Notation, 1: J. S. Bach and 2/4 Time’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 613–22.