The Short

TYPE OF TEMPO MODIFICATION 391
However, he certainly did not exclude the possibility of a certain amount of tempo modification by the director of the
orchestra, for he also noted:
With respect to the time or degree of movement, the orchestral player must be guided entirely by the conductor,
whether he leads or simply wields the baton. It is also his duty frequently to cast a glance at him, in order that he
may not only remain true to the time, but also immediately fall in with any retardation or acceleration of it.
Regarding the orchestral accompaniment of a soloist, he instructed: ‘The accompanist must be careful not to hurry or
retard the solo player, though he must instantly follow the latter whenever he slightly deviates from the time.’ 764
Since Spohr was among those who favoured a very restrained approach to tempo modification in general, and since he
was in any case among the earliest effective baton conductors, there will have been no significant discrepancy between
what he sought to achieve as a soloist and as a conductor, though naturally the minute subtleties of expression that he
aimed for in the one could not be attained in the other. In the case of a musician like Liszt, however, whose solo
performances involved much greater and more pervasive manipulation of the tempo, the conventional orchestral
performance in the first half of the nineteenth century, which allowed little flexibility, must have seemed far from
satisfactory. It is surely this kind of thing that lies behind his statements in the preface to his symphonic poems about
freeing performance from the ‘mechanical, fragmented up and down playing, tied to the bar-line’. 765 The difference
between his approach and Spohr's is nicely suggested by their very different styles of conducting, which must have
made a striking contrast when they were joint conductors of the great Beethoven Festival at Bonn in 1845. Spohr was
noted for his extremely calm and dignified presence on the rostrum but Sir George Smart, in his diary of the festival,
referred to Liszt as conducting ‘with much twisting of the person’. 766
The gradual development of conducting technique during the early nineteenth century did not immediately encourage
conductors to manage their orchestras as the more wilful soloists managed their instruments. Many musicians
continued to believe that the ideal in orchestral performance was steady maintenance of the tempo throughout a
movement with only, perhaps, the subtlest of nuances at important points. A writer, probably Schumann, in the Neue
Zeitschrift fürMusik of 1836 recommended that a conductor should only beat at the beginning of a movement or at
tempo changes, though he conceded that it might be helpful to beat regularly in very slow tempos. 767 This seems to
have been close to the practice adopted by Mendelssohn, and under the general conditions of rehearsal and
performance at that time it certainly ruled out any frequent or substantial modification of tempo. Mendelssohn was
particularly
764
Violin School, 234.
765
Liszts Symphonische Dichtungen.
766
Smart Papers, British Library, London, Dept. of Manuscripts, vi, 16.
767 Vol. 4 (1836), 129.