Musical Timing in the Adagio from Brahms’ Violin Concerto, Op. 77: an Empirical Study of Rubato in Recorded Performances Dating From 1927 to 1973 Edward Cross Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Arts and Cultures March 2014 Abstract The inter-war period of the twentieth century represents something of a ‘golden age’ in solo violin playing. In addition to an unprecedented degree of technical prowess, a huge amount of variety existed between different performers, with the majority of well-known artists exhibiting their own unique sound and manner of delivery. One area of expression in which a divergence of approach is most evident is that of musical timing, whereby performers utilise what is generally termed ‘rubato’ in order to convey either the structure or emotional character of the music. This thesis utilises specialised computational methods of empirical analysis in order to investigate how rubato is used in thirty recordings of the Adagio from Brahms’ Violin Concerto, Op. 77, made by eminent performers who were active during this period. By comparing these recordings in detail, the principle aim is to ascertain just how much performers differ in their approaches to musical timing and, conversely, where there is some degree of common practice. Literary sources pertaining to rubato from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries are also scrutinised, in order to determine to what extent these written descriptions of rubato relate to use of the device in real-life performances. Key stylistic traits are identified and categorised, in order to inform performers who are looking to incorporate something of this twentieth-century style of rubato into their own playing. To date, the vast majority of empirical studies of performance have been conducted in the field of music psychology, with musicological approaches tending to favour close- listening methods in order to identify key stylistic traits. This study has attempted to use both empirical analysis and close-listening in tandem, which allows for the identification of common timing patterns across all thirty recordings, as well as the detailed examination of idiosyncrasies within their respective musical contexts. Sonic Visualiser software has been used to create a number of innovative video examples that incorporate tempo graphs with the original recorded sound, in order to see and hear what is happening in the music simultaneously. i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisory team at Newcastle University, Bethany Lowe and Kirsten Gibson, for their help and encouragement over the course of this project. More generally, I am also most grateful for the patience and support offered to me by my family and friends. ii Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Written Evidence of Rubato in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries 33 1.1 Attitudes to Rubato 34 1.2 Types of Rubato 45 1.4 Joseph Joachim 63 1.3 Summary 70 Chapter 2. Working with Recordings 75 2.1 Recordings and Associated Issues 75 2.2 Empirical Performance Data 86 2.3 Problems in Determining Note Onset Times 101 Chapter 3. Comparative study of Rubato in Recorded Performances of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, Adagio, Made Between 1927 and 1973 114 3.1 Entire Movement 119 3.2 Bars 32 to 46 130 3.3 Bars 48 to 49 156 3.4 Bars 52 to 54 166 3.5 Bars 56 to 63 171 3.6 Bars 64 to 87 180 3.7 Bars 90 to 102 212 3.8 Coda 226 3.9 Discussion 232 Conclusion 268 Appendix A Facsimile of autograph score 283 Appendix B List of video examples 284 Appendix C Annotated score 287 Bibliography 290 Discography 298 iii Introduction All the most important things – the tempo, the total conception and structuring of a work – are almost impossible to pin down. For here we are concerned with something living and flowing that can never be the same even twice in succession. That is why metronome markings are inadequate and almost worthless; for unless the work is vulgarly ground out in barrel-organ style, the tempo will have already changed by the second bar… What matters is that the whole should be alive, and, within the bounds of this freedom, be built up with irrevocable inevitability.1 The period between the two world wars is often referred to somewhat nostalgically as the ‘golden age of violin playing’, due to the proliferation of talented and distinctive violinists who were either already well-established or in the process of forging their careers at this time.2 This thesis examines thirty recordings of the Adagio from Brahms’ Violin Concerto, Op. 77 by players who were active during this period, in order to scrutinise the manner in which these performers utilise rubato – one of the key constituents of musical expression – in this kind of late-Romantic repertoire. The thirty recordings that are utilised date from 1927 to 1973; although this time frame extends beyond the inter-war period in question, it allows for the inclusion of performances by key figures such as Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Henryk Szeryng and Isaac Stern who did not record this particular piece until later in their careers. The vast majority of existing literature pertaining to violin playing of the inter-war period is largely biographical, with little emphasis being placed on specifics of performing style.3 This study takes a different approach, utilising innovative empirical methods of computational analysis in order to offer detailed stylistic insight into the way in which 1 Bauer-Lechner, N. (1923) Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler, p. 46. 2 Wen, E. (1992) ‘The twentieth century’, in Stowell, R. (ed.) The Cambridge companion to the violin, p. 84. 3 Roth, H. (1997) Violin virtuosos: from Paganini to the 21st century. and Schwarz, B. (1983) Great masters of the violin. are fairly typical of the existing literature; although they offer a large amount of useful historical and anecdotal information, details concerning the specifics of individual players’ performing style are scarce and tend to be somewhat generalised. 1 these performers manipulated musical time. Analytical evidence is examined in the light of literary sources pertaining to rubato from the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, in order to demonstrate how these written descriptions relate to use of the expressive device in performance. Key stylistic traits are identified and subsequently categorised, with a view to ‘informing’ performers who are looking to incorporate something of this style of rubato into their own playing. A number of hypotheses will be tested, including the generally-held view that tempo was treated far more flexibly at the beginning of the twentieth century and gradually became more uniform over time, thus creating a greater degree of similarity between different performers. Issues of structural delineation will also be examined – in particular Neil Todd’s model of ‘phrase final lengthening’ – in the context of Brahms’ Adagio, in order to demonstrate how approaches vary throughout the half-century of recorded evidence.4 This introductory chapter deals with a number of key areas of interest, beginning with the importance of rubato in the performance of late-Romantic music. Subsequent sections, concerning contemporary approaches to analysis and the study of performance, are intended to place this study into a wider musicological context, as well as giving some background to the methodology that has been chosen for analysing performances. Rubato in Nineteenth-Century Music. Dictionary definitions of the term ‘rubato’ that date from the nineteenth- and early- twentieth centuries are far from consistent in their descriptions of the device, as will be examined further in chapter one; it should be noted that in the context of this study the term ‘rubato’ is used in a very general sense to describe flexibility of tempo, both on a small or large scale. 4 This model is outlined in Todd, N. (1985) ‘A model of expressive timing in tonal music’, Music Perception, 3(1), pp. 33-58. 2 Of all the elements of musical expression, timing is arguably the most important in that it governs the rate at which musical events occur over time, thus determining the overall pacing of a musical narrative. Bruno Repp describes musical timing patterns as forms of movement: ‘they govern the variable rate at which the musical sound structure unfolds. Dynamic patterns are part of the sound structure itself. They are part of what is unfolding, whereas timing governs how this unfolding is taking place.’5 Gustav Mahler’s opening description of musical timing as being something that is ‘living and flowing’ rather than a metronomically-rigid template for performance is a sentiment that strikes a particular resonance with nineteenth- and early twentieth- century musical writings. Franz Liszt, for instance, urges that ‘one must not stamp music with a uniform balance, but speed it up or slow it down with spirit and according to the meaning that it possesses.’6 Rubato is arguably the most crucial ingredient – the “sine qua non” – in the interpretation of nineteenth-century music, which presents the performer with numerous structural issues, such as how to relate sections or shape individual phrases.7 John Rink discusses the ‘particular temporal problems’ involved in creating a necessary sense of cohesion, both within and between different levels in the music’s structural hierarchy: Vital for intelligible, effective performance, it means giving the music a sense of shape in time by devising a hierarchy of temporally defined musical gestures from the small to the large scale. While playing, the performer engages in a continual dialogue between the comprehensive architecture and the “here- and-now”, between some sort of goal-directed impulse at the uppermost hierarchical level (the piece “in a nutshell”) and subsidiary motions extending down to the beat or sub-beat level, with different parts of the hierarchy activated at different points within the performance.8 5 Repp, B.