![]() ![]() In the 21st century, particularly at an institution such as London’s Royal College of Music, fluency across both practice and theory is the norm. Of particular interest to me, a musician working across both practice and theory primarily in the arena of historical performance, is Ong’s identification and definition of some characteristics of orally-based thought and expression. In 1982, nine years earlier, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word explored differences between oral and literate cultures. Successful performers must be able to seamlessly function across the widest possible range of musical styles, accommodating an equally wide gamut of tastes, both individually and collectively. In the arena of Western Art music, historical performance is now an essential component of musical training and education. Since Clive Brown’s 1991 accusation that many twentieth-century manifestations of historical performance lacked an appropriate degree of musical sensitivity, the historical performance movement has truly come of age. Furthermore, it also allows an exploration of the musical intuitions that are the root cause of these speeds. ![]() By using as many sources on Beethoven’s tempo as possible, this approach makes reasonable estimations of the actual speeds that Beethoven had in mind for his works. In particular the metronome marks by Beethoven, as well as those from his close contemporaries Carl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, and Karl Holz, provide great insight into the composer’s sense of tempo. This thesis overcomes these limitations by incorporating all of Beethoven’s works, and rooting the whole research in a wide variety of sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth century that have a plausible relationship with Beethoven’s practice. Thirdly, discussions of Beethoven’s tempo have typically focussed on works in one particular genre. Secondly, the substantial differences between tempo preferences in the early nineteenth century and now has made these tempo indications difficult to approach for musicians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Firstly, some of the discussion has been based on unreliable sources, or an unrepresentative sample of sources. Finally, it discusses the meaning of these metronome marks for modern performers, and how these editions give options to disentangle the author from the text.īeethoven’s tempo indications have been the subject of much scholarly debate, but a coherent understanding of his intended tempos has not yet emerged. In addition, it also discusses to what degree the editors seem to have influenced each other, which indications are most likely representative of Beethoven’s intended speeds, as well as why the metronome fell out of favour later in the nineteenth century. By presenting new evidence, including the discovery of what are most likely the metronome marks intended for the missing sonatas from the first ‘complete’ edition by Tobias Haslinger, the article presents a more complete overview of the indications in these editions, as well as their chronology. Nevertheless, the provenance and meaning of these metronome marks have remained unclear, which has led to some confusion in the literature. Previous discussions of Carl Czerny’s and Ignaz Moscheles’s metronome marks for Beethoven’s piano sonatas have highlighted the importance of these indications for our understanding of the intended performance practice of these works. Shortly after Beethoven’s death, several of his closest associates provided performance indications for editions of his works. ![]()
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