# Faster tempo



## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

I'm in my 80s and grew up listening to classical music and I always have classical music playing most of the day. Recently I have noticed on some pieces which I have been hearing for decades, the tempo they are being played at now is significantly faster - almost breathless sounding. Has anyone else noticed this? I just listened to Mozart's Rondo alla turca and I've never heard it played so fast as that before.


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## haziz (Sep 15, 2017)

Period performance, or period inspired performance practice?

Welcome to TalkClassical!

You may want to ask the mods to move this to the general discussion forum.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

It's a well known phenomenon that time speeds up the older you get.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

cbrundage said:


> I'm in my 80s and grew up listening to classical music and I always have classical music playing most of the day. Recently I have noticed on some pieces which I have been hearing for decades, the tempo they are being played at now is significantly faster - almost breathless sounding. Has anyone else noticed this? I just listened to Mozart's Rondo alla turca and I've never heard it played so fast as that before.


People play at all sorts of speeds nowadays, but they tended to play even faster during the first half of the 20th century.


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## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

Not quite sure what you meant, haziz.

I mistakenly posted here but the general discussion is where I should have posted - thanks.


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## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

chu42 said:


> People play at all sorts of speeds nowadays, but they tended to play even faster during the first half of the 20th century.


 I didn't know this. I guess I would have to check the dates of the recordings.


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## Chatellerault (Apr 4, 2017)

cbrundage said:


> Not quite sure what you meant, haziz.
> 
> I mistakenly posted here but the general discussion is where I should have posted - thanks.


I suppose haziz refered something like the HIP recordings. HIP - Historically informed performance.

"historically informed performance is largely derived from musicological analysis of texts. Historical treatises, pedagogic tutor books, and concert critiques, as well as additional historical evidence, are all used to gain insight into the performance practice of a historic era."

So, there is a scholarly basis, or at least these interpreters want us to believe there is. I can't help thinking the faster tempo also says something about our time as well, our attention span in times of twitter and music streaming, just like The Flintstones says more about 1960s America than about the stone age. It's an extreme example, of course, but do you know what I mean?


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## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

Chatellerault said:


> I suppose haziz refered something like the HIP recordings. HIP - Historically informed performance.
> 
> "historically informed performance is largely derived from musicological analysis of texts. Historical treatises, pedagogic tutor books, and concert critiques, as well as additional historical evidence, are all used to gain insight into the performance practice of a historic era."
> 
> So, there is a scholarly basis, or at least these interpreters want us to believe there is. I can't help thinking the faster tempo also says something about our time as well, our attention span in times of twitter and music streaming, just like The Flintstones says more about 1960s America than about the stone age. It's an extreme example, of course, but do you know what I mean?


Yes, just what I was wondering. Just as I find movies, TV commercials, etc., are annoying because they seem geared to a low attention span, flashing through shots so fast they are almost subliminal, I wondered if the fast tempo of some of the classics now isn't due to the same reason. I literally feel out of breath sometimes.

And thank you for the explanation. I'm afraid I am just a musically uneducated but enthusiastic listener.


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

Chatellerault said:


> I suppose haziz refered something like the HIP recordings. HIP - Historically informed performance.
> 
> "historically informed performance is largely derived from musicological analysis of texts. Historical treatises, pedagogic tutor books, and concert critiques, as well as additional historical evidence, are all used to gain insight into the performance practice of a historic era."
> 
> So, there is a scholarly basis, or at least these interpreters want us to believe there is. I can't help thinking the faster tempo also says something about our time as well, our attention span in times of twitter and music streaming, just like The Flintstones says more about 1960s America than about the stone age. It's an extreme example, of course, but do you know what I mean?


The HIP movement can go to absurd lengths sometimes:
--Norrington has conducted Mahler
--Gardiner and Norrington have conducted Brahms 
--Herreweghe has conducted Bruckner


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

Have you tried listening to Mozart on fortepiano (the pianos that are like the ones in the late 18th to early 19th centuries)?


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Probably to do with the early to mid-20th century slowing of early music, mostly Baroque and Classical before the historically informed performance practice address the imbalance a little. By the time I started listening to classical music, HIP was already standard practice.

Old way of slow Bach:


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

cbrundage said:


> I'm in my 80s and grew up listening to classical music and I always have classical music playing most of the day. Recently I have noticed on some pieces which I have been hearing for decades, the tempo they are being played at now is significantly faster - almost breathless sounding. Has anyone else noticed this? I just listened to Mozart's Rondo alla turca and I've never heard it played so fast as that before.


Current renditions of Mozart's Rondo alla Turca have become a contest to see who can play it the fastest as if t were Rimsky's _Flight of the Bumblebee_. The finest version ever was by Glenn Gould who played it slower than anyone and captured all kinds of subtle textures. It's the difference between "art" and "acrobatics".


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## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

Lovely! Much different from what I heard the other day!


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## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

Supposedly then, I have been listening to historically informed music for about 50 years but the change I have noticed seems to be recent.


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## Axter (Jan 15, 2020)

Well, on the other hand under Arturo Toscanini’s baton the tempi of a lot pieces I heard were faster than todays performances.
I think general preferences towards speed and loudness is like fashion and goes through cycles. 
Right now (this year and perhaps through 2022) Christian Thielemann and VPO are recording a full Bruckner Symph. cycle. I am curious how it will sound.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

This speeding up is real - and would make a fascinating research topic. No doubt the HIP movement influenced it, but there's more to it I feel. If you go back and listen to recordings dating back nearly 100 years and compare them to recordings made 60 to 50 years back, the slowing down is clear. Across all genres. In recent years performers have swept away the cobwebs and restored a vitality to music that slow tempi were draining away.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

The five minute history of conducting might indicate that it all comes down to Toscanini vs. Furwangler; the former being steady, solid, faithful to the music, bouncy, crisp and clean; the latter being expansive, expressive, intense, and contemplative. Of course, there's plenty of crossover in there, and even Toscanini (so I read) conceded when asked that the greatest living conductor, apart from himself, was "Furtwangler". So if we had a giant chalk board and put Toscanini on end and Furtwanger on the other, it would be a difficult, maybe impossible task, to place our favorite conductors past and present somewhere along the continuum. And to say that Toscanini is to the North Pole as Furtwangler is to the South Pole, or Toscanini is to the Joker as Furtwangler is to Batman, may not even be an entirely accurate analogy, either.

Toscanini and Furtwnager


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I don't find Furtwangler all that slow. You want polar opposites: Toscanini and Celibidache. But even then it wouldn't be entirely accurate, since the Celibidache who was working when Toscanini was still alive was a brilliant, impassioned, exciting young man who got glacially slower as he aged (and put on the pounds). Maybe someone would compile a list of recordings of the Brahms 1st, from the early 1920 recordings up to now. I would venture to say that somewhere around 1960 you'll see the minutes creep up and up.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

ORigel said:


> The HIP movement can go to absurd lengths sometimes:
> --Norrington has conducted Mahler
> --Gardiner and Norrington have conducted Brahms
> --Herreweghe has conducted Bruckner


I don't get it. Why should those musicians not play those composers? The reason might be in what they do with it but I can think of many recordings of big Romantic repertoire conducted by Herreweghe that are excellent (and not especially fast) and, although I am not a big fan of his, Gardiner's Brahms is widely lauded. Norrington is more difficult (usually down to his not using the rubato we are used to in Mahler) but there are too sides to the man's music making. Some of what he has done with Romantics in Stuttgart is really good and not notably "perverse" even for traditionalists.

As for speed being a product of the HIP revolution, it is worth remembering that Harnoncourt has never been scared of slow tempi, including with Baroque music.


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## cbrundage (Mar 26, 2021)

Interesting - I just heard the Mozart Turkish Rondo played again but this time slower and it was so much more enjoyable, so maybe it is up to the taste of those picking which version of a piece of music is played.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

isn't Rene Leibowitz a big influence in the "faster is more 'real'" field that hardly gets mentioned nowadays? 

i think he was one of the first to try to do a Beethoven cycle along the lines of his metronome marks, and he also did a lightning fast Schubert 9th along that time that's still pretty easy to find


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

The first Beethoven Symphony 5 recording, made in 1912:






The overall length is 28:44, whereas most modern recordings are more than half an hour.

It's amusing that pseudo-intellectuals like Wim Winters think Romantic-era conductors performed them at half this speed.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

chu42 said:


> The first Beethoven Symphony 5 recording, made in 1912:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


i can't explain the half-speed Beethoven thing as anything other than literal cult behavior


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