The Short

CHOICE OF TEMPO 311
Vierteln)’ (rather slow (in crotchets)). 580 Coupled with this increasingly ‘practical’ approach to the role of metre went a
more subjective employment of tempo terms, which is examined further in Ch. 10 below.
Nevertheless, some of the other considerations that were felt to influence the speed at which a particular piece of
music would be performed, besides the relationship between metre, note value, and tempo term, retained their validity
and even became more pronounced in the nineteenth century. The slower tempo for church music (which, however,
may have been stronger among Protestant and northern musicians than among Catholic and southern ones) is, for
example, reflected in the metronome tempos (commented upon adversely by Ferdinand Ries) 581 that Spohr gave for his
oratorio Die letzten Dinge. It seems also to be a factor in the very slow metronome marks given for Haydn's Creation in
the Novello edition of 1858. The same appears to be true for much other nineteenth-century religious music.
Mendelssohn's metronome marks for his organ sonatas op. 65 (which may perhaps be regarded as falling into the
categories of both church music and ‘strict’ music) indicate that in this genre his tempo terms were to be interpreted as
slower than they normally were in other types of work (compare for instance the common-time Allegro con brio of op.
65 no. 4 at ♭ ? 100 with the Allegro vivace in his String Quartet op. 44 no. 3 at ? = 92, both containing semiquavers).
The possibility that a tradition of faster tempos for sacred music survived longer in southern Europe, especially in
Austria and Italy, may be suggested by an article in the Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung in 1844, 582 where the cathedral
Kapellmeister F. G. Hölzl complained about the ‘modern tempo mania’ which led to such music being performed, in
his opinion, much faster than the composers intended. However, his remark that ‘It may indeed not be an easy task
once more to perform at a slower tempo a work that one has performed at the tempo of many years standing’, and
other such comments, indicate that these fast speeds were no recent modern craze in Vienna, but rather the speeds to
which everyone had always been accustomed. He accompanied his comments with a list of metronome marks for
Haydn's ‘Nelson’ Mass in which he supplied each movement with the metronome mark for the tempo ‘to which one is
accustomed’ followed by that ‘which I regard as appropriate’, as shown in Table 8.5.
Much later in the century a distinct division between German and Italian notions in these matters is revealed by
German reactions to Verdi's own performance of his Requiem in Cologne in 1877, when a critic expressed
astonishment at some of the fast tempos. With respect to the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Libera me domine’ fugues he observed:
‘—both tempos hardly seemed fast enough for the
580
Miniature score (Leipzig, Eulenburg (EE 3506), n.d.), 94–5.
581
Cecil Hill, Ferdinand Ries: Briefe und Dokumente (Bonn, 1982), 267.
582 Vol. 4 (1844), 334.