The Short

TYPE OF TEMPO MODIFICATION 377
Bach described and recommended both types of rubato (without, however, using the word) to keyboard players,
though he considered each of them to be appropriate to different circumstances, observing:
One can often intentionally commit the most beautiful offences against the beat, but with the distinction that, if one
is playing alone or with a few intelligent people, it is permissible to make an impact on the tempo as a whole, for the
accompanying players will be far more likely to become alert than to let themselves be led astray, and will enter into
our intentions; but if one is playing with a larger accompanying body, and if indeed the latter consists of a mixture of
people of unequal accomplishment, it is only within one's own part alone that one can undertake a variation that
goes against the regular distribution of the beat, for the overall pace of the beat must be precisely maintained. 726
The term ‘rubato’ has been used to describe both these types of tempo modification at least since the end of the
eighteenth century, although it was predominantly employed at that time to designate techniques in the latter category.
During the nineteenth century the expression ‘rubato’ was increasingly invoked to describe the former type, but
general acceptance of that meaning was slow to develop. An early example of a definition of ‘tempo rubato’ that could
possibly imply this kind of tempo modification is found in Busby's 1801 Complete Dictionary of Music, where it is
explained as ‘An expression applied to a time alternately accelerated and retarded for the purpose of enforcing the
expression’; 727 but this is ambiguous and could equally refer to fluctuation within a steady beat. However, Türk had
acknowledged in a gloss on the index entry for ‘Tempo rubato’ in his Klavierschule that some considered the use of
accelerando and ritardando to be covered by this expression. Yet the majority of dictionaries and treatises continued to
use the term in its traditional sense right through the nineteenth century; thus, ‘rubato’ and ‘tempo rubato’ were
defined by Hamilton in the 1830s as borrowing from one part of the bar to give back elsewhere ‘so that the time of
each bar is not altered in the aggregate’, and this definition was still reproduced in the 1882 edition. 728
The history of tempo modification during the period 1750–1900 reveals many different approaches and aesthetic
attitudes, and changing notions of where one or the other type might be most appropriate. The principal techniques
and practices may be categorized as follows:
1. Modification of the basic pulse of the music either momentarily or for a more extended period can occur in
different ways and for dramatic, expressive or structural purposes.
(a) This can occur on the small scale as the lengthening, without restitution, of a single beat or rest.
726
Versuch, i, III, §8.
727
Art. ‘Tempo rubato’.
728
Dictionary, 4th edn., and Hamilton's Dictionary of Musical terms. New Edition… Enlarged (London, [1882]), art. ‘Tempo rubato’.