In Search of the ‘Tempo Giusto’
Giovanni Antonini
“I frankly admit [to having recorded Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca so slowly] because no one had ever played it that way, at least on record.” – Glenn Gould
A basic issue that performers must face every time they have to perform a piece of music is the choice of tempo. Numerous attempts have been made in history to ‘objectivise’ and establish the ‘tempo giusto’ (right tempo) with a fair degree of accuracy: from the tactus, based on the human pulse beat, in the Renaissance, by way of Étienne Loulié’s chronomètre, to Johann Maelzel’s invention of the metronome. Yet even with the last-named, as when Beethoven adopted it to indicate the tempi of his works, uncertainties persisted, even for composers themselves.
In spite of the fundamental remarks of Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Mozart’s tempi in one of his important essays, in which he lists, in order of increasing speed, no fewer than thirteen different types of marking for allegros alone, it is still difficult to establish with certainty what the difference is between, say, an Allegro di molto and an Allegro assai. However, there is another element, at least in my personal experience, that can help with the choice of tempo, often a somewhat troublesome business requiring frequent reconsideration: the possibility of being able to ‘articulate’ and make notes ‘speak’ – like someone who has to give a speech, even a terse or rapid one, while ensuring the intelligibility of each individual word – within a musical ‘discourse’, in the light of a ‘rhetorical’ approach to Baroque and Classical music.
The importance of this aspect became evident to me a few years ago during a recording with some Irish folk musicians, a kind of crossover project combining Vivaldi with their traditional music. At one point, the Irish artists asked me to rerecord a piece at a slower tempo, so that they could play the ornaments ‘nonchalantly’ (there is practically one ornament every two notes in Irish music) and apply the correct articulation and the typical rhythmic unevenness to their musical phrases, so imbued with rhythm and ‘physical’ communicativeness.
Articulation and rhythmic inegalité are also fundamental elements of the performance practice of eighteenth-century music. In their absence, and especially on modern instruments, many performers (quite legitimately) choose to play the fast movements of Haydn’s music at high speed, which produces an effect of sparkling brilliance but also entails a loss of rhetorical and ‘discursive’ content.