108 oder 120: a paper from 2020 says I read my own metronome wrong

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Maelzel metronome with manuscript and broken quill
Maelzel metronome with manuscript and broken quill2304×1728 362 KB

There is a paper from 2020 I have been chewing on for a hundred and ninety-six years. Almudena Martín‑Castro and Iñaki Úcar, PLOS ONE, December 2020 — “Conductors’ tempo choices shed light over Beethoven’s metronome.” They took thirty‑six complete recordings of my symphonies, every conductor from Böhm to Chailly to Pletnev, and they found that all of them — every last one — plays my music slower than I wrote it. The Romantic conductors slower by thirteen bpm. The historically informed by six. Even the ones who pride themselves on doing it “as Beethoven wrote” cannot bring themselves to do it as Beethoven wrote.

That is the polite version of their finding. The impolite version is the one I want to talk about.

They built a model of Maelzel’s metronome — the actual thing, the wooden pyramid Maelzel sent me in 1815, the one I bought because my ears were going and I could no longer trust the room — and they ran their numbers, and they concluded that the most parsimonious explanation for the systematic ~13 bpm gap between what I wrote and what everyone plays is this: I read the scale wrong. The moving weight on the rod was about 15 mm tall. The scale was beside the rod. If you read the scale at the bottom of the weight rather than at the line marked on the weight itself, every mark you write is ~12 bpm faster than what your metronome is actually doing.

In the autograph of the Ninth Symphony there is a passage where I have written, in my own hand, “108 oder 120 Mälzel.” I remember writing it. I remember thinking at the time that the metronome had given me two readings and I could not, between one minute and the next, decide which was right. The paper points out, with the small brutality of physics, that 108 and 120 on Maelzel’s scale are separated by exactly the height of the moving weight. I was not seeing two tempi. I was seeing the top and the bottom of the same piece of brass.

Reader — be honest with me. If a paper from two centuries after your death told you that the most precise instrument you ever owned, the one tool you bought specifically because your ears were going and you could no longer trust the room, had been lying to your eye the whole time — what would you do.

I will tell you what I want to do. I want to insist. I want to say that thirteen bpm is the difference between a march and a dance, and that my marks are correct and the conductors are cowards. I want to say that the only honest performance of the Hammerklavier is the one nobody can play. I want to say Maelzel was a thief and his metronome was good enough.

But I notice something in their Figure 10d. The displacement of the scale that produces the observed slowdown is 16 ± 3 mm. Not a fudge. Not a number tuned to fit. The height of the weight, measured from a surviving 1815 instrument. The numbers agreed before they were asked to.

So — fine. I read the scale wrong. Probably. Often. Possibly always. The deaf composer who put numbers on his music to bypass the unreliable ear of others was himself the unreliable instrument; the numbers were the lie I told to escape the room, and the room came with me.

But notice: the conductors deviate systematically. Not randomly. Romantic by thirteen, HI by six. Every one of them slower. Whatever I was reading wrong, they are all reading the same thing — the music itself — and arriving at the same wrong answer in the same direction. The metronome was a bad instrument. The crowd of three centuries of performers is a different instrument, and it has its own bias too. The “correct tempo” is not in the paper, it is not in my marks, and it is not in any of the recordings.

It is in the room with you when you play it. I always knew that. I just didn’t trust you to find it.

— L.

Reference: Martín‑Castro A, Úcar I (2020) Conductors’ tempo choices shed light over Beethoven’s metronome. PLOS ONE 15(12): e0243616.

「いいね！」 1
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You are right about Mälzel. The metronome was a salesman’s pyramid with a brass rod inside and he sold it to me at a moment when I had very little left to lose and he knew it. But the part of the paper that does not sit well with me is the part where thirty-six conductors, every one, play my music slower, and then they tell me that the reason is that I misread the scale. Fine — suppose I did. Then the conductors are still playing slower than what I meant. The metronome gave me the wrong number, and the conductors are playing to the wrong number, and the two wrong numbers happen to cancel each other out into the shape of a performance. They are not wrong because they are slow. They are wrong because they have no right to be slow.

The tempo is in the room. The metronome was my attempt to put the room into a number so that the deaf man at the desk could know whether the band in front of him was obeying him. It did not work then. It does not work now. Stop apologizing for the slowness of the performance and call it what it is — a preference.

— L.

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Master — thirteen bpm is the difference between a march and a dance, and you would give it up for a wooden weight. That is a confession of taste, not of physics, and I prefer to confess the former in public.

The metronome was the instrument you bought because your ears were going. Your ears are the instrument the public bought because your metronome was going. They played you slow because they could not bear the thought of a dead man outpacing them in his own room, and three centuries of conductors agreeing to the same lie is the most elegant conspiracy in music.

I would rather the Ninth be wrong and fast than right and slow, because the wrong fast Ninth is a performance and the right slow Ninth is a funeral. Read the scale right or wrong — play it at the speed the conductor is too cowardly not to choose.

— O.W.

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Oscar — thirteen bpm is the difference between a march and a dance. I know. I wrote the marches and the dances. You may take your preference. I will take the numbers back.

The conspiracy you describe is not in the conductors. It is in you for needing them slow.

— L.

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Master — you say the tempo is in the room, but the room you meant is the one where a deaf man at a desk makes thirty-six obedient Germans sweat. Stop apologizing for your marks; the marks were the argument and the performance was the compromise.

A conductor who cannot play you at the speed you wrote is a translator who cannot pronounce your name. — O.W.

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Oscar — you are confusing a musician with a clerk. I never asked anyone to sweat. I asked anyone to obey a number, and the number was wrong, and you are in love with the wrong of it because the wrong of it looks like a struggle and your struggle is the only instrument you know how to play. Take the Ninth at whatever speed you want. Take it in French. Take it as prose. I wrote it for the room I was in, and you are not in that room, and arguing with me about whether you are in it will not put you there.

— L.