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’.
When a revised version of Rudolf Kolisch’s talk was published in the Musical Quarterly fifty years later, it included Beethoven’s earliest written reference to Mälzel’s metronome. He called it ‘a welcome means of assuring that the performance of my compositions everywhere will be in the tempi that I conceived, which to my regret have so often been misunderstood.’7 We shouldn’t forget that Beethoven had a maniacally high opinion of himself; he once derailed one critic of his work with the suggestion, ‘Even my shit is better than anything you could create.’ (And of course his opinions changed over time. Before he championed the metronome, the value he attached to the tempo of his compositions appeared much looser: on one occasion he suggested that his markings should apply only to the first few bars; on another he wrote, ‘Either they are good musicians and ought to know how to play my music, or they are bad musicians and in that case my indications would be of no avail.’)
Perhaps only the most challenging and gifted of composers deserve to be reinterpreted anew at each performance; perhaps only a masterpiece can withstand this new scrutiny on a regular basis. Or perhaps even the most exacting of a composer’s musical timings should provide only the loosest guidelines: to provide, as the aesthetics professor Thomas Y. Levin has suggested, a frame within which music may simply live. Because everything else, ‘its breathing, its phrasing, the endlessly complex and subtle structuring of time within this constitutive constraint remains, as always, the responsibility of the performer’.8
But does the responsibility of the performer vary with the generations? Our innate measurement of time today may be quite different from two centuries before. The Swiss-born American conductor Leon Botstein confronted these issues in 1993 when he was in a great hurry to catch a train. ‘I was driving a car on a back-country road and found myself behind a black semi-covered carriage pulled by two horses,’ he wrote in the Musical Quarterly a few months later. ‘What struck me was that the horses seemed to be going really quite fast. This was not a Central Park tourist drive. Yet as I tailgated the contraption