HONORÉ, C.

(2005): "Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed",

Harper Collins ebooks.

l e i s u r e : t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f b e i n g at r e s t

his tiny apartment, Suzuki paints watercolours of every-

thing from bowls of fruit to Microsoft manuals. His latest
effort is of Mount Fuji on a spring morning. In his study,
the easel stands just a couple of feet from his computer, yin
and yang, work and play, in perfect harmony. “Painting
helps me find a balance between fast and slow, so that I feel
more calm, more in control,” he says.
Music can have a similar effect. Singing and playing
instruments, or listening to others do so, is one of the old-
est forms of leisure. Music can be exhilarating, challenging,
stirring. Or it can soothe and relax, which is precisely what
more of us are seeking nowadays. Using music deliberately
to unwind is not a new idea. In 1742, Count Kaiserling,
then the Russian ambassador to the Saxon court, commis-
sioned Bach to write some music to help him overcome his
insomnia. The composer came up with the Goldberg
Variations. Two and a half centuries later, even the man in
the street uses classical music as a tool for relaxation. Radio
stations devote entire programs to gentle, calming works.
Classical compilations with words like “relaxing,” “mel-
low,” “chill-out” and “soothing” in the title are flying off
the shelves.
Listeners are not the only ones hankering after a slower
tempo. A growing number of musicians—around two hun-
dred at last count—believe that we play a lot of classical
music too fast. Many of these rebels belong to a movement
called Tempo Giusto, whose mission is to persuade con-
ductors, orchestras and soloists everywhere to do a very
unmodern thing: slow down.

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To find out more, I fly to Germany to attend a Tempo

Giusto concert. On a windless summer evening, a small
crowd files into a community centre on the outskirts of
Hamburg. Posters on the door promise a familiar program
of sonatas by Beethoven and Mozart. In the modern, sun-
lit auditorium, a grand piano stands alone beneath a bank
of windows. After settling into their seats, the spectators
make their final preparations for the show, switching off
their mobile phones and clearing their throats in the osten-
tatious manner favoured by concert-goers the world over.
The buildup reminds me of every recital I have ever been
to—until the pianist walks in.
Uwe Kliemt is a compact, middle-aged German with a
spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye. Instead of sitting
down at the keyboard to start the concert, he stands in
front of his gleaming Steinway and says to the audience: “I
want to talk to you about slowness.” Then, as he does at
concerts across Europe, he delivers a mini-lecture on the
evils of speed worship, adding emphasis by waving his spec-
tacles like a conductor brandishing a baton. A murmur of
approval ripples through the audience as Kliemt, who also
happens to be a member of the Society for the Deceleration
of Time, utters a neat summation of the Slow philosophy.
“It is pointless to speed up everything just because we can,
or because we feel we must,” he declares. “The secret of life
is always to look for the tempo giusto. And nowhere is that
more true than in music.”
Kliemt and his allies believe that musicians began playing
faster at the dawn of the industrial era. As the world sped

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up, they sped up with it. In the early nineteenth century, the
public fell in love with a new generation of virtuoso pianists,
among them the supremely gifted Franz Liszt, who played
with dazzling dexterity. For the virtuoso, cranking up the
tempo was one way to flaunt his technical brilliance—and
give the audience a thrill.
Advances in instrument technology may have also
encouraged faster playing. In the nineteenth century, the
piano came to the fore. It was more powerful and better
suited to running notes together than were its predecessors,
the harpsichord and the clavichord. In 1878, Brahms wrote
that “on the piano . . . everything happens faster, much live-
lier, and lighter in tempo.”
Mirroring the modern obsession with efficiency, musical
teaching took on an industrial ethic. Students began prac-
tising by playing notes, rather than compositions. A long-
hours culture took hold. Modern piano students can spend
six to eight hours a day tickling the ivories. Chopin recom-
mended no more than three.
In Kliemt’s view, all of these trends helped to fuel the
acceleration of classical music. “Think of the greatest com-
posers in the pre-twentieth-century canon—Bach, Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn,
Brahms,” he says. “We play them all too fast.”
This is not a mainstream view. Most people in the
music world have never heard of Tempo Giusto, and
those who have tend to scoff at the movement. Yet some
experts are open to the idea that classical music suffers
from too much speed. There is certainly evidence that we

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play some music faster than before. In a letter dated

October 26, 1876, Liszt wrote that he took “presque une
heure ” to play the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata op.
106. Fifty years later, Arthur Schnabel needed just forty
minutes. Today some pianists rattle through the same
notes in thirty-five minutes.
Early composers scolded musicians for succumbing to
the virus of hurry. Mozart himself threw the odd tempo
tantrum. In 1778, he fired off a blistering letter to his father
after hearing Abbe Vogler, a leading musician of the day,
massacre his Sonata in C Major, KV 330, at a dinner soiree.
“You can easily imagine the situation went beyond
endurance, since I could not suppress to communicate to
him, ‘much too swift,’” wrote the composer. Beethoven
knew exactly how Mozart felt. “There lies a curse on the
virtuosos,” he once moaned. “Their practised fingers are
always off in a hurry together with their emotion, some-
times even with their mind.” A distrust of accelerated
tempo carried into the twentieth century. Mahler is said to
have told budding conductors to slow down, rather than
speed up, if they felt the audience was growing bored.
Like the broader Slow movement, the musicians in
Tempo Giusto are not against speed itself. What they object
to is the very modern assumption that faster is always bet-
ter. “Speed can give you a great feeling of excitement, and
there is a place for that in life and in music,” says Kliemt.
“But you have to draw the line, and not always use speed.
It is stupid to drink a glass of wine quickly. And it is stupid
to play Mozart too fast.”

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Yet finding the “correct” playing speed is not as easy as it

sounds. Musical tempo is a slippery concept at the best of
times, more an art than a science. The speed at which a piece
of music is played can vary with the circumstances—the
mood of the musician, the type of instrument, the nature
of the occasion, the character of the audience, the venue,
the acoustics, the time of day, even the room temperature.
A pianist is unlikely to play a Schubert sonata in exactly
the same way in a packed concert hall as she does for a few
close friends at home. Even composers are known to vary
the tempo of their own works from one performance to
the next. Many musical compositions work well in more
than one speed. Robert Donington, a British musicolo-
gist, puts it this way: “ . . . the right tempo for a given
piece of music is the tempo which fits, as the hand fits the
glove, the interpretation of that piece then being given by
the performer.”
But surely the great composers laid down what they con-
sidered the “right” tempo for their music? Well, not exactly.
Many left behind no tempo markings at all. Almost all the
instructions we have for the works of Bach were added by
pupils and scholars after his death. By the nineteenth cen-
tury, most composers denoted tempo with Italian words
such as presto, adagio and lento—all of which are open to
interpretation. Does andante mean the same thing to a
modern pianist as it did to Mendelssohn? The arrival in
1816 of Maelzel’s metronome failed to settle the matter
either. Many nineteenth-century composers struggled to
convert the gadget’s mechanical tick-tock-tick-tock into

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meaningful tempo instructions. Brahms, who died in 1897,

summed up the confusion in a letter to Henschel: “As far as
my experience goes every composer who has given
metronome marks has sooner or later withdrawn them.” To
make matters worse, editors down the ages made a habit of
adding and altering tempo instructions on the music they
published.
Tempo Giusto takes a controversial route to working out
the true intentions of earlier composers. In 1980, W. R.
Talsma, a Dutch musicologist, laid the movement’s philo-
sophical foundations in a book called The Rebirth of the
Classics: Instruction for the Demechanization of Music. His
thesis, derived from an exhaustive study of historical
records and musical structure, is that we systematically mis-
interpret metronome markings. Each note should be repre-
sented by two ticks of the pendulum (from right to left and
back again) rather than, as is the common practice, a single
tick. To honour the wishes of pre-twentieth-century com-
posers, therefore, we should cut playing speeds in half.
Talsma, however, believes that slower pieces—think
Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”—should not be slowed
down quite so much, if at all, because since the early indus-
trial era musicians have played them more slowly, or at the
original tempo, in order to heighten their sentimentality
and to accentuate the contrast with the faster passages. Not
all Tempo Giusto members agree, though. Grete
Wehmeyer, a German composer and author of the 1989
book Prestississimo: The Rediscovery of Slowness in Music,
thinks that all pre-twentieth-century classical music, fast

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and slow, should be played at half the speed commonly

used today.
Tempo Giusto musicians side with either Talsma or
Wehmeyer, or they fall somewhere in between. Some pay
less attention to metronome markings, focusing more on
other historical evidence and what feels right. Everyone in
the movement, however, agrees that a slower tempo can
bring to light the inner details of a piece of music, the notes
and nuances that give it its true character.
Even skeptics can be swayed. Today, the leading exponent
of Tempo Giusto in orchestral music is probably Maximianno
Cobra, the Brazilian-born conductor of the Europa
Philharmonia Budapest Orchestra. Though Cobra’s 2001
recording of Beethoven’s legendary Ninth Symphony takes
twice as long as mainstream renditions, it garnered some
favourable reviews. One critic, Richard Elen, conceded that
“there is a great deal of inner detail that this performance
reveals, which usually whizzes past so fast that you can hardly
hear it.” Even though he disliked the slow approach, Elen
grudgingly accepted that it might be closer to what Beethoven
intended, and rated Cobra’s performance “extremely good.”
This begs a question: If indeed we do play some classical
music faster than our ancestors did, is that really such a bad
thing? The world changes, and sensibilities change with it.
There is no escaping the fact that we have learned to love a
faster musical tempo. The twentieth century was all about
boosting the beat, with ragtime giving way to rock ’n’ roll,
disco, speed metal and eventually techno. When Mike Jahn
published How to Make a Hit Record in 1977, his advice to

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