The Short

376 TEMPO MODIFICATION
certain specific types of piece such as fantasias or recitative); and, where it was felt to be appropriate, particular
emphasis was often laid on the use of specialized techniques of tempo rubato, which did not disturb the underlying
unity of tempo. Exceptions to this general rule seem largely to have been confined to a few individuals and schools of
solo instrumentalists and singers. In the course of the nineteenth century a more pronounced degree of tempo
modification, in a wider range of musical genres, was sanctioned by influential sections of the musical élite, although
some of the older established techniques of tempo rubato seem to have been less widely cultivated as the century drew
to its close. During this period the employment of more conspicuous tempo modification, which affected the
steadiness of the beat, spread increasingly from solo and small ensemble performance to orchestral performance,
largely as a result of the advocacy of ‘interpretative’ conducting by Wagner and his disciples. The influence of this
approach, persuasively advanced by Wagner in his polemical writings, was closely tied to the growing prestige of the
so-called New German School in the middle of the century, and in due course made itself felt in France, Italy, and
elsewhere.
Despite the evidence for significant modification of the beat by particular musicians during the eighteenth century,
there is little to suggest that musicians of that period explicitly challenged the notion that the beat should remain
fundamentally steady unless the composer decreed otherwise. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the
promotion of such ideas, and their practice as a matter of conviction by leading musicians of the day, provoked strong
reactions from those who remained true to the older aesthetic, espoused most notably perhaps by Mendelssohn and
his followers. The strength of feeling may partly be explained by an apparent discrepancy between theory and practice
among the champions of freedom of tempo. Although most of those who supported this approach in theoretical or
polemical writings, including Wagner, were insistent that whatever type of tempo modification might be under
consideration it must be employed with discretion, it is evident from frequent complaints that one person's discretion
was another's excess.
Types of Tempo Modication
There are a number of distinctly different ways in which, where no modification of tempo has been indicated by the
composer, the steadiness of the beat can be manipulated by the performer for expressive purposes. These fall into two
basic categories: one involves genuine disruption of the tempo; the other, which is intimately related to improvisation
and embellishment, although it causes a redistribution of note values and accents in an individual strand of the music,
leaves the regularity of the beat fundamentally undisturbed. C. P. E.