Classical music getting faster?

[ardcarp]

There was a slightly facile discussion on R4's Today Programme (just before the 8.30 sport slot) between Jane Glover and Norman Lebrecht. It was in response to Telegraph letters, apparently [I haven't seen them!] complaining that music is 'getting faster'. I must say the snippets played from Offenbach's Barcarolle didn't really do much to illustrate the argument. (A Bach Brandenburg from two camps might have done better.) However, once again a news programme is devoting a slot...albeit a small one... to the arts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/live:bbc_radio_fourfm

[Cockney Sparrow]

I didn't quite catch it - not sure - was Lebrecht referred to as a musicologist?

Was it Monday morning, they had a piece about the violinist who gave the first performance of the Elgar violin concerto in Albania, and others in Roumania - Alda Dizdari. And exceptionally for Today - given in excess of a whole minute as the 9a.m. pips approached - that's 60 seconds or slightly more folks (an age in the assumed attention span of their audience for Today producers) to play the 2nd theme.

https://www.cadoganhall.com/event/southbank-sinfonia-181014/

[cloughie]

I don’t know about getting faster - depends who’s playing/conducting! Radio 3 morning programmes make it seem faster by omitting three movements from a symphony!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I don’t know about getting faster - depends who’s playing/conducting! Radio 3 morning programmes make it seem faster by omitting three movements from a symphony!

They have to play faster to compensate for the verbal padding.

[Bryn]

Well, in many cases it's just a matter of getting back to the sort of tempi intended by the composer.

[Serial_Apologist]

The treatment of climaxes in the orchestral music of Haydn and Beethoven's time has become much more violent in recent performances and recordings, I've been noticing. Must be a boon to the manufacturers of replacement drum skins!

[gradus]

IMV many young pianists today play too fast which gives them a chance to display their technique but doesn't always do much for the music.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Sometimes it's the more recent performance that are played more slowly:-


Furtwangler 1948: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI8dbqmZqMg

Krips 1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rim6YZVuU74

Krips was even slower for his later Concertgebouw version.

[kea]

Mainstream performances became very slow sometime between the 1950s and 2000s (although with a few idiosyncratic slow performers earlier on) and are only now starting to return to their intended tempi, or at least the tempi at which they were commonly played in the early twentieth century. These may still be quite divergent from the tempi favoured by the composers (eg I recall that Beethoven got through the premiere of his 9th Symphony in three quarters of an hour, regardless of metronome marks; even "historically informed" performances these days take about an hour)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Mainstream performances became very slow sometime between the 1950s and 2000s (although with a few idiosyncratic slow performers earlier on) and are only now starting to return to their intended tempi, or at least the tempi at which they were commonly played in the early twentieth century.

Indeed, some performers seem to have taken the term "Long Player" as definitive! As Alpie suggests in #8, recordings of Live concerts from before the LP era show swifter speeds than many Studio recordings from the '50s onward - most significantly (for me) Klemperer's Live Cologne recording of the (complete) Bruckner #8, which tales six minutes less than his studio recording, which has a considerable, and disfiguring cut in the Finale. Lucy Beckett's Cambridge Opera Guide gives details of changing running times for the Opera - only Boulez of the (then) modern recordings matches those of the earliest recorded times.

I recall that Beethoven got through the premiere of his 9th Symphony in three quarters of an hour

You were there??!!! Seriously, can you point out where this information is - I can't find any reference to it in my collection (which includes David Levy's monograph on the work, which is pretty extensive in its quotations from reports of the first performances - and makes clear that Beethoven gave the metronome markings a couple of years after the work had been performed. [The first mention of duration given here is from the first London performance - in which the finale was sung in Italian - where the critic complains that it lasts "exactly an hour and five minutes; a fearful period indeed"! ]).

[kea]

Ok, I can't find the source either. There is another source attributing a time of 65 minutes to the Vienna premiere, which may or may not have included the applause between movements and pause for Beethoven to acknowledge the audience. (Albrecht, from the conversation books & other contemporary sources.) I can't remember where I might have seen the claim that it lasted 45 minutes but it doesn't seem to have much corroboration among scholarship in any case.

[Bryn]

Ok, I can't find the source either. There is another source attributing a time of 65 minutes to the Vienna premiere, which may or may not have included the applause between movements and pause for Beethoven to acknowledge the audience. (Albrecht, from the conversation books & other contemporary sources.) I can't remember where I might have seen the claim that it lasted 45 minutes but it doesn't seem to have much corroboration among scholarship in any case.

I hope this is not the source. Not ony is the 40 minutes a tad short, the 70 minutes is quite excessive, too. Performances which follow the composer's own metronome markings take around an hour. From what I recall of the BBC Eroica drama-documentary, it was that work which was intended to take 45 minutes, and Ries reports a slower perfromcnes which would not have pleased his teacher.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ok, I can't find the source either. There is another source attributing a time of 65 minutes to the Vienna premiere, which may or may not have included the applause between movements and pause for Beethoven to acknowledge the audience. (Albrecht, from the conversation books & other contemporary sources.) I can't remember where I might have seen the claim that it lasted 45 minutes but it doesn't seem to have much corroboration among scholarship in any case.

A pity - it would have led to some interesting conjecturing on my part! (One online comment that I discovered in my search claimed that there was a Toscanini performance on record that took 55mins - pretty swift enough - but the fastest of his I can find [the televised NY performance of 1948] takes about 63 minutes.)

[Bryn]

The Smart answer to this question appears to be Henry. It is he who claimed Beethoven to have said the 9th should last 45 minutes. See https://www.quora.com/In-Beethovens-...epeats-are-not and serch for "Henry Smart". Trouble is, Henry would have been but 14 years old when Beethoven popped his clogs.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Smart answer to this question appears to be Henry. It is he who claimed Beethoven to have said the 9th should last 45 minutes. See https://www.quora.com/In-Beethovens-...epeats-are-not and serch for "Henry Smart". Trouble is, Henry would have been but 14 years old when Beetoven popped his clogs.

Hmmm. There are two Henry Smarts (father & son) who were associated with Beethoven - the father died in 1823, so if Ludders did say this to him, it was whilst he was in the very first stages of writing the piece. The son was born in October, 1813, so Ludders would have passed on the information to an (at most) thirteen-and-a-half-year-old boy.

(Henry Smart snr was, besides being leader of the Philharmonic Society orchestra, part proprietor of a brewery. Just sayin' ... )

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3369302?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents