12 Before this standardization, the first message transmitted telegraphically some forty miles along the Baltimore to Washington line was ‘What hath God wrought!’
13 No such delineations in Russia, though: throughout the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway between 1891 and 1916, and despite the great distances involved, the route ran entirely on Moscow’s civil time. The route now spans seven time zones across an eight-day journey.
14 Quoted in Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America 1865–1900 (New York, 2008) and in Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, 2000). The latter is especially comprehensive, and has been a useful source for the American details in this chapter.
15 Those within even touching distance of railway fanaticism, and admirers of Michael Portillo (more now than there used to be), will be aware of Bradshaw’s, the guide that began in England as a pocket-sized timetable in 1839 and soon expanded into a UK railway atlas, a traveller’s guide and a European handbook. It was both infinitely useful and highly accurate, and its popularity obliged railway companies to run punctual trains; the printed timetable dictating the service rather than the other way around.
16 Many eyewitness accounts suggest punctual Fascist trains were a myth, but there can be no doubting the hitherto unavailable possibilities of synchronised troop movements.
A revolution in sound: three minutes of bliss from the Beatles.
Chapter Four
The Beet Goes On
i) The Way to Play the Ninth
At 6.45 p.m. on Friday, 7 May 1824, a large crowd gathered at a theatre in the centre of Vienna for the first performance of the greatest piece of music ever written. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in almost total deafness, was a work so radical in form and free in spirit that even those who interpret it almost two centuries later never fail to find within it something revelatory. When the world falls apart or unites, this is the music it reaches for.
No one could predict this at the time, of course. Since its construction in 1709, the Theater am Kärntnertor had witnessed premieres by Haydn, Mozart and Salieri, and its audience was versed in high opera. The last great work by Beethoven performed at the theatre had been the newly revised version of Fidelio, which was received rapturously, but that was exactly 10 years before. The composer, now aged 53, the state of his finances always precarious, had accepted many commissions from royal courts and publishers in London, Berlin and St Petersburg, had frequently missed his deadlines, and was thought to be overwhelmed not only with work but also with legal battles over the custody of his nephew Karl. Besides, he had developed a reputation for obstinacy and cantankerousness. So there was no reason to expect that Beethoven’s latest work was going to be much more than another worthy milestone, not least since it became known that the piece was long and complex, involving a larger orchestra than usual, with solo singers and a chorus in the finale, and had undergone less than four days’ rehearsal. And there was one more thing. Despite the announcement that the concert was to be conducted by the theatre’s regular maestro Michael Umlauf, assisted by first violin Ignaz Schuppanzigh, it was agreed that Beethoven would also appear onstage for the entire performance, placing his own conductor’s stand next to Umlauf, ostensibly to guide the orchestra in the dynamics of the symphony’s tempo (or as it said in the official announcement of the concert the day before, ‘Mr Ludwig van Beethoven will himself participate in the general direction’). This would, of course, create a complicated dilemma for the orchestra to negotiate. Where to look? Whose tempo to follow? One eyewitness, the pianist Sigismond Thalberg, claimed that Umlauf instructed his players to honour Beethoven by occasionally looking at him, but then to totally ignore his beating of time.
The evening began well. Before the premiere there were two other recent compositions: the overture Die Weihe des Hauses, which had been commissioned for the opening of another Viennese concert hall two years earlier, and three movements from his great D Major Mass Missa Solemnis. As his new symphony began, Beethoven was a dramatic figure on stage, his hair and arms wild and everywhere – or, in the words of one of the orchestra’s violinists Joseph Böhm, ‘he threw himself back and forth like a madman’. Böhm further remembered, ‘he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.’ Helène Grebner, a young member of the chorus, recalled that Beethoven’s timekeeping may have been a little tardy: although he ‘appeared to follow the score with his eyes, at the end of each movement he turned several pages together’. On one occasion, possibly at the end of the second movement, the contralto Caroline Unger had to tug on Beethoven’s shirt to alert him to the applause behind him; these days the audience holds its approval until the end of the entire piece, but in those days praise arrived at regular intervals. Beethoven, still facing the orchestra, had apparently not heard the clapping, or was too busy readying his score for the adagio. Could this really have happened? Or was this last story a myth subtly amplified by time?1 The performance throws up bigger questions too. How could one so profoundly deaf compose a piece of music that would send almost all who heard it into raptures? Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler wrote how ‘never in my life did I hear such frenetic yet cordial applause . . . The reception was more than imperial – for the people burst out in a storm four times.’2 A reviewer in the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung suggested that Beethoven’s ‘inexhaustible genius had shown us a new world’. Everyone – friends, critics, the whipped-up cream of Viennese connoisseurship – had delightedly thrown their hats in the air. But had they heard what the composer intended? And have we?
We know the score. The first movement in sonata form that never settles down, the orchestra in an elemental battle with itself, the hovering tension of the first gentle bars soon colliding with the full swaggering crescendo that announces a work of unshakeable emotional force. The second movement, the scherzo, a juggernaut of engaging and urgent rhythm before the controlled and heart-stoppingly beautiful melody of the slow third. And then the last visionary movement, the stirring optimism of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, thunderous as to Heaven, a rhapsodic symphony in itself, described by the German critic Paul Bekker as rising ‘from the sphere of personal experience to the universal. Not life itself portrayed, but its eternal meaning.’
But how well do we really know the score?
The notes are one thing, the tempo quite another. The symphony has long become part of the landscape. It has an official title: ‘Symphony No. 9 in D Minor’, and the catalogue number Opus 125; it has a vernacular title: the ‘Choral’, and an insiders’ shorthand title ‘B9’. But what it doesn’t have, through all its thousands of performances, is even the loosest of agreements on its timing. Just how aggressively should the second movement be played? And how sluggishly the third? By what electrifying licence can Toscanini drive home the fourth movement more than five minutes faster than the relatively glacial interpretation by Klemperer? How can one conductor from the nineteenth century get the audience home a comfortable 15 minutes earlier than one in the twenty-first century? How can Felix Weingartner conduct the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic in February 1935 at a lick of 62.30, Herbert von Karajan lead the Berlin Philharmonic in the autumn of 1962 in 66.48, and Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony manage 68.09 in April 2006? What about Simon Rattle’s take of 69.46 back in Vienna in 2003? And then there are the live recordings complete with pauses and coughing between movements – most famously Leonard Bernstein conducting a multinational orchestra in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 to mark the fall of the Wall, the performance at which the word ‘joy’ was replaced by the word ‘freedom’ at the choral finale, clocking in at a remarkable 81 minutes 46 seconds. Has our patience for the symphony expanded against all the faster odds in our modern world? Does our modern appreciation of genius demand that we savour every note?
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p; The glory of music rests as much with its interpretation as its composition, and it is the interpretation that supplies the life force. Art cannot be reduced to absolutes; emotion cannot be measured in a timescale. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the method of interpreting contemporary music changed, and Beethoven’s impatience and radicalism had much to do with it. The composer found a new way of marking time.
Although each movement of the Ninth Symphony carries the usual form of general introductory guidance for tempo and mood, even the casual listener will acknowledge the inadequacy of these instructions for such a varied and unconventional piece. The first movement plumps for ‘Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso’ (lively and joyous, but not too much so, and then a tad stately); the second ‘Molto vivace’ (very fast and forceful); the third ‘Adagio molto e cantabile’ (slow and lyrical); and the fourth, with its groundbreaking choral finale, ‘Presto – Allegro ma non troppo – Vivace – Adagio cantabile’ (trippingly fast, lively but steady, slow and sweet).
Where did these tempos come from? From the human heartbeat and the human stride. Any definition of tempo required a baseline from which to operate – the tempo giusto from where one may either run fast or slow. An accepted average for both a leisurely stroll and a relaxed heart rate stood at around 80 beats per minute (bpm), and this was considered a ‘normal’ place to start. (In 1953 the fabled music historian Curt Sachs suggested that there was an upper and lower limit which prevented a concert performance descending or accelerating into incomprehension. ‘The maximum of slowness, which still allows for a steady step or beat, is possibly 32 (bpm) . . . and the maximum of speed, beyond which the conductor would fidget rather than beat, is probably 132.’ Sachs also made his own table, approximate at best but certainly original, linking precise bpm with vague terminology. Unfortunately, it slightly contradicted his estimation above. Thus he calculated that adagio would be 31 bpm, andantino 38, allegretto 53 ½ and allegro 117.3
It was the Italians who introduced the descriptions of tempo we’re still familiar with (all those vivaces and moderatos), and by 1600 the moods of classical music were well established. Emotions were no longer merely intuited but inscribed: ‘gaily’ (allegro) and ‘at leisure’ (adagio). When he played in Bologna in 1611, Adriano Banchieri’s organ scores already carried very particular instructions for presto, più presto and prestissimo. Fifty years later the musical vocabulary stretched to the most staccato nervoso and the most beautiful fuso (‘melting’). The fabled link to the heartbeat found further resonance in the Italian term for a quarter-rest: sospiro, a breath or a sigh.
But there was a problem: emotions are pliable things, and they didn’t always translate from composer to conductor. Nor did they translate between nations. In the 1750s, C.P.E. Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, found that ‘in certain countries [outside Germany] there is a marked tendency to play adagios too fast and adagios too slow.’ Some twenty years later, a young Mozart found that when he performed in Naples his interpretation of presto was so unparalleled that the Italians assumed that his virtuosity was somehow connected to his magic ring (which he then removed to rule out foul play).
By the 1820s we know that Beethoven regarded these instructions as perfunctory and outmoded. In a letter to the musician and critic Ignaz von Mosel in 1817, he suggested that the Italian terms for tempo had been ‘inherited from times of musical barbarism’.
For example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which once and for all means cheerful, and how far removed we are often from the true meaning of this description, so that the piece of music itself expresses the very opposite of the heading! As far as these four main connotations are concerned [allegro, andante, adagio, presto], which, however, are far from being as right or as true as the main four winds, we would do well to dispense with them.
Mosel agreed with him, and Beethoven feared they would both be ‘decried as violators of tradition’ (although he regarded this as preferable to being accused of ‘feudalism’). Despite these protestations, Beethoven reluctantly persevered with the old style; right to the last quartets his work was proceeded by the Italian settings he despised.4 To temper his dissatisfaction he occasionally included slight modifiers in the body of the score: ritard, he writes early on in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, short for ritardando, a signal to slow down gracefully when the rhythms start running off in all directions. But throughout his score for the Ninth, Beethoven also provided a new and far more significant instruction to the conductor and players – a measure of exact timing supplied by a newly invented musical gadget.
The metronome was as revolutionary to Beethoven as the microscope was to seventeenth-century bacteriologists. It afforded both ultimate steadiness and minute variableness, and it transmitted to the entire orchestra the composer’s precise intentions. What, at the beginning of a musical sequence, could be clearer and more exacting than a notation of regimented beats to the bar and beats to the minute? And what would bring an ageing composer closer to God than the belief that he was transforming the essence of time itself?
In his letter to Mosel, Beethoven credited the invention of the metronome in 1816 to the German pianist and inventor Johann Mälzel, although Mälzel had copied, improved and patented a device developed in Amsterdam several years earlier by a man named Dietrich Winkel. (Winkel had been inspired by the reliable movement of a clock’s pendulum, which had been used as an aid to musical composition since the days of Galileo in the early seventeenth century. But the early musical pendulums were cumbersome, inexact machines closer in appearance to an upright weighing scale than the small pyramids we are used to today. The key innovation of Winkel’s device was the fact that the pendulum pivoted around a lower central point with movable weights; the old machines swung pendulously from the top. When Mälzel took out patents for Winkel’s machine across Europe, his sole innovation appears to have been a newly notched measuring plate.)5
Mälzel had a talent for copying and claiming as his own: Beethoven had once accused him of taking undue credit for writing ‘Battle of Vitoria’, his short piece celebrating the Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon in 1813. The two had initially worked on the composition together; Beethoven had intended to use Mälzel’s panharmonicon (a mechanised organ-style box able to reproduce the sound of a marching band), but later expanded the scale of his piece, rendering the new instrument redundant.6
Mälzel was the Caractacus Pott of his day. The son of an organ maker, his obsession with mechanical wonders reached both its zenith and nadir in his promotion of the automaton chess-playing ‘Turk’ (a fraud, of course: a small and masterful player sat beneath the Turk in a cabinet controlling every move; intriguingly, the Turk was taken on a European tour lasting several years in the first part of the nineteenth century, and was occasionally demonstrated during the interval of Beethoven’s concerts). Mälzel also developed four ear trumpets for Beethoven, two of which hooked around his head to free both hands, which may explain Beethoven’s later desire to patch up their differences and support his metronome. At the end of his letter to Mosel, the composer envisaged a situation in which ‘every village schoolmaster’ would soon be in need of one. And in this way a familiar musical teaching and performance tool entered common use: ‘It goes without saying that certain persons must take a prominent part in this exercise, so as to arouse enthusiasm. As far as I am concerned, you can count on me with certainty, and it is with pleasure that I await the part which you will assign to me in this undertaking.’
His support did not diminish with the passing years. On 18 January 1826, some 14 months before his death, he wrote to his publisher B. Schott and Sons in Mainz, promising ‘everything adapted for metronome’. And later that year he wrote to his publishers again: ‘The metronome marks will follow soon: do not fail to wait for them. In our century things of this kind are certainly needed. Also, I learn from letters written by friends in Berlin that the first performance of the [Ninth] symphony received enthusiastic applause
, which I ascribe mainly to the use of a metronome. It is almost impossible now to preserve the tempi ordinari; instead, the performers must now obey the ideas of unfettered genius . . .’
And that, one may have reasonably believed, would have been the end of it. The unfettered genius would get his way, and henceforth his music would have but one tempo, and almost two centuries later we would sit in a concert hall and hear essentially the same piece of music that an audience heard when the music was new. Fortunately for us, things didn’t work out that way. Beethoven’s metronome marks have been confounding musicians since their ink was wet, and many have responded in the only way they feel able – by almost completely ignoring them.
In a landmark talk to the New York Musicological Society in December 1942, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch addressed the issue of Beethoven’s tempo with wry understatement. ‘These marks have not been generally accepted as altogether valid expressions of his intentions or been uniformly adopted in performance. On the contrary, their existence has failed to enter the consciousness of musicians, and in most editions they are lacking. The traditions and conventions of performance deviate widely from the tempi denoted by the marks.’ In other words, musicians and conductors placed their own interpretations above those of the original composer. They preferred, Kolisch suggested, the traditionally vague Italian markings over the more precise, newfangled ones. ‘This strange situation,’ the speaker reasoned, ‘deserves investigation’.
A common reason offered for the decision to ignore Beethoven’s sense of timing is that the marks do not accurately convey his musical desires; Schumann is commonly cited as someone else who wrote metronomic marks he couldn’t have possibly meant. Other non-adopters claim that Beethoven’s metronome was different to the one that came factory-built in the twentieth century; it was probably slower, so that the marks it threw up are now too fast, and almost impossible to play; critics find it useful to refer to them as ‘impressionistic’ and mere ‘abstractions’. And then there is a more philosophical suggestion: the feeling that using a metronome was somehow rigidly mathematical and therefore ‘inartistic’. Beethoven seemed to be working against himself; according to Kolisch’s talk, such a free-spirited organic composition ‘cannot . . . be forced into so mechanical a frame’.
Timekeepers Page 6
