The Short

468 APPOGGIATURAS, TRILLS, TURNS
Ex. 13.15. Gluck, Semiramide riconosciuta: (a) Act II, Scene vi; (b) Act I, Scene iv. österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Vienna, Cod. mus. 17.793
lengths of these small notes are governed by no discernible rules; sometimes they evidently obey the rule to take half
the note (Ex. 13.15(a),) but they seem never to follow the ‘two-thirds or longer’ rule and appear most frequently to be
intended to be short (Ex. 13.15(b).) The only guiding principle for interpreting these notes appears to have been
confidence in the musical instinct—le bon goût—of the performer. In his later operas, especially those written for Paris,
Gluck differentiated the values of small notes. Haydn began increasingly to notate small notes in a more differentiated
manner from about 1762. 860 In works after this date the value of the small note is likely to be a useful indicator of how
it should be realized; but there remained habitual oddities, such as his use of a semiquaver small note in the pattern
shown in Ex. 13.16, where something shorter is clearly meant (either a demisemiquaver or a grace-note). Mozart had
already begun to use small notes of different values in very early works. At first he employed minim, crotchet, quaver,
semiquaver, and occasionally demisemiquaver small notes, but after about 1780 he stopped using minim small notes,
and wrote out his longer appoggiaturas as full-size notes.
Ex. 13.16
860
See Laslo Somfai, ‘How to Read and Understand Haydn's Notation in its Chronologically Changing Concepts’, in Eva Badura-Skoda, ed., Joseph Haydn: Bericht über den
internationalen Joseph Haydn Kongress, Wien … 1982 (Munich, 1986), 25.