The Short

CHOICE OF TEMPO 297
for a given tempo formula. No chronometric tempo markings by major composers of the eighteenth century are
known, and the evidence provided by contemporary and retrospective accounts is frustratingly slender. There are
general statements by ‘ear witnesses’: for instance, that Haydn and Mozart liked their allegro first movements slower
than they had come to be played in the second decade of the nineteenth century, although ‘both let the minuets go by
quickly’, while ‘Haydn loved to take the finales faster than Mozart’. 551 It was also reported some seven years after
Mozart's death that although he ‘complained about nothing more vigorously than the bungling of his compositions in
public performance—chiefly through exaggeration and rapidity of tempo’ he nevertheless insisted upon a tempo, when
directing his own music in Leipzig, that drove the orchestral players to the limits of their ability. 552 Perhaps the Viennese
allegro was already faster in Mozart's day than the north German allegro. There is certainly evidence that in the early
years of the nineteenth century there was a growing preference, in general, for faster tempos in fast movements; and
there may be reason to believe that broader tempos began to be preferred in slow movements.
References to the tempo of specific pieces by late eighteenth-century composers, too, often provides only relative
information. In Mozart's case, we learn, for instance, that in 1807 the first movement of a piano concerto was taken
‘twice as fast’ as Mozart performed it, while the Larghetto of his String Quartet K. 589 was taken ‘twice as slow’ as
under the composer's direction. 553 (The latter reference is to a performance by the French cellist Lamarre, who may
well have misunderstood the meaning of ? in conjunction with ‘Larghetto’ in the Quintet.) Gottfried Weber
commented that in Paris the adagio in the overture to Don Giovanni was played a little slower than Mozart had directed
it in Prague, while in Vienna it was performed a little faster and in Berlin nearly twice as fast, and that in all three places
the allegro was given a little faster than Mozart took it. 554 Occasionally the evidence is more precise, such as the
plausible assertion that ‘Ach ich fühl's’ from Die Zauberflöte was performed under Mozart at a speed in the range ♯ ? c.
138–52 (i.e. considerably faster than after his death). 555 Specific and interesting, but rather less plausible, is the list of
metronome tempos given by the ageing Václav Jan Tomášek in 1839 as a supposed record of speeds taken in
performances of Don Giovanni in Prague in
551
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 13 (1811), 737.
552
Friedrich Rochlitz in ibid. 1 (1798–9), 84. The reliability of Rochlitz's retrospective account of Mozart's visit to Leipzig has been doubted since Jahn questioned it in his
Mozart biography, but whatever licence Rochlitz may have taken in embellishing his recollections, it seems unlikely, from what is known of his profoundly moral character,
that he would wilfully have invented things that were fundamentally untrue.
553
Ibid. 9 (1806–7), 265.
554
Ibid. 15 (1813), 306.
555
Gottfried Weber in ibid., (1815), 247–9; also in Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Wolfgang Amadeas Mozarts Biographie (Leipzig, 1828), 123 f.