The Short

Ex. 13.34. Fétis and Moscheles, Complete System, 6
Ex. 13.35. Bériot, Méthode, 204
APPOGGIATURAS AND GRACE-NOTES 481
force to the note which marks the strong time of the measure’; 889 but he remained silent about grace-notes in other
contexts.
Practices in this matter seem not only to have been affected by national preferences, but may also, to some extent, have
been specific to particular instruments, especially in the later nineteenth century. The German violinist Andreas Moser,
writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, supported a pre-beat conception in many situations, arguing that the
approach was largely determined by the nature of different instruments. He observed that even at that time ‘there were
the most contradictory opinions among practical musicians’; 890 he noted that keyboard players still tended to favour
placing grace-notes firmly on the beat while the majority of singers and string players anticipated them, and he
suggested that this had been the case continuously since the middle of the eighteenth century. There is little firm
historical evidence to support Moser's claim for practices before his own day, but it probably reflects the views of
Joseph Joachim, whose practical experience and association with the leading musicians of the day in Vienna and
Leipzig stretched back to the 1840s. Joachim's own performance of grace-notes in his 1903 recording of his Romance
in C was very rapid, and it is difficult to tell whether they fall on or before the beat.
Some of the argument that has led, perhaps, to an over-reaction against the on-beat conception of the grace-note is
worthy of closer examination. Frederick Neumann, in his extensive studies of ornamentation, 891 advanced the opinion
that an accent or staccato on the main note before which a grace-note stands precludes the performance of that gracenote
on the beat; he felt that the
889
Méthode, 204.
890
Joachim and Moser, Violinschule, iii. 28.
891
Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (Princeton, 1978) and Ornamentation and Improvisation in Mozart.