1 - Joseph Shiner, Caius 'Chopin was strict about keeping tempo, and the metronome never left his

s piano.' [Mikuli, 1879]. What are the implications of this statement, and how does it relate to the accounts of Chopin's rubato left by those who heard him play? It is not an understatement to say that understanding Chopin's pianism and performing style is absolutely essential to understanding his composed music. His entire oeuvre was conceived at the keyboard, and thus the way in which he played conditioned the way in which he composed in almost every respect. The two sides of Chopin, the pianist and the composer, are inextricably bound together; his ideas concerning pianism; aspects of touch, technique, pedalling, voicing, and sound, feed directly into his general musical aesthetic, or a multi-faceted conception of his 'musical style'. A statement from Moscheles brings this notion into sharp relief; while other pianists performing his compositions degenerate into 'chaotic beatlessness', Chopin displays 'captivating originality.' What follows is even more striking: 'the strange sounding modulations which perplex me [Moscheles] when I play his pieces cease to offend.'1 Two points are made immediately clear. The first is that Moscheles views Chopin's style of performance as singularly advanced and refined. The second infers that Chopin's pianism actually makes sense of the music beyond the multitude of indications which the written score provides, indications to which Moscheles the pianist and interpreter would have also had access. Thus, Moscheles suggests that there is a significant aspect of Chopin's music-making which lies not in the individual articles of composed music that he created and published, but in the spontaneous action of performing them. Rubato is only one of the aspects of Chopin's elusive pianistic style, but it is one of the most important. The various ways in which he manipulated rhythm provoked discussion among his contemporaries, and inspired subsequent generations of imitators. The 'Chopin rubato' became one of the most widely discussed and dissected aspects of his pianism, generally regarded as unique in its application and nuance of expression, and representative of his genius as a musician. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts and score annotations are the only materials useful in attempting to reconstruct an impression of Chopin's pianistic style and his use of rubato, due to an obvious absence of recordings. However, recordings of Chopin's works commonly held to be a viable indication of how Chopin might have played were made by Raoul Koczalski (1884-1948), who studied with Chopin's assistant and pupil Karol Mikuli, a primary authority on Chopin throughout the nineteenth century. Mikuli's reputation was due to his sustained proximity to the composer, as shown by the extensive collection of score annotations, detailed notes of Chopin's comments made in lessons, and
1 Skowron, Zbigniew, 2004: 'Creating a legend or reporting facts? Chopin as a performer in the biographical accounts of F. Liszt, M. A. Szulc, and F. Niecks', in Chopin in Performance: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Artur Szklener (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina), p. 16

2 - Joseph Shiner, Caius interviews of witnesses of Chopin's performances. Considering now the assumed presence of rubato in Chopin's music in some shape or form, the statement which I will examine during the course of the essay seems strange. Mikuli strongly asserts that Chopin was metronomic in his approach to his music making. However, this is not the whole story, for Mikuli goes on to elaborate on Chopin's 'much maligned' tempo rubato, in which 'the accompaniment would keep strict time, while the right hand, singing the melody, would free the essence of the musical thought from all rhythmic fetters.'2 This has been widely assumed to to be the crux of the archetypal Chopinian rubato, in other words, a free cantilena over a steady, regular accompaniment: what scholars have termed 'contrametric rubato'. Various sources and precursors for this technique have been traced. This essay will attempt to reconcile Mikuli's account of 1879, thirty years after Chopin's death, with the varied contemporary accounts of Chopin's rubato; accounts which do not necessarily yield as definite a conclusion as Mikuli implies, in terms of the manifestation of Chopin's 'rubato' and the forms it takes. Therefore, as well as putting Chopin's rubato into context, it will be necessary to do the same for Mikuli. Contextualising the 'Chopin rubato' By the time of Chopin, the concept of rubato in music had both undergone significant transformation and retained striking consistency from its genesis in the treatises of the singer Tosi in 1723. For Tosi, tempo rubato was thought of as a way of heightening expression and of facilitating the communication of more intense passions beyond that indicated by elements present in the score. As Hudson notes, 'the solo voice was usually accompanied only by continuo. Therefore, every small nuance of the voice became conspicuous and expressive.'3 Rhythmic alteration of note values by the singer created both rhythmic and harmonic tensions between the singer and the accompaniment, the latter of which remained in strict time. This became the basic premise of a whole host of theories regarding tempo rubato that came forth during the Baroque and early Classical periods, most often in treatises for voice and violin, since the latter was by far the most common solo instrument of the time. Varying interpretations and nuances within this principle of linear rhythmic manipulation appeared: featuring syncopation, improvised ornamentation, irregular melodic groups, or affective anticipation or delay of a melody note with regard to its corresponding accompaniment note. In the case of keyboard music, practitioners of the 'contrametric' tempo rubato tended, as Hudson again points out, 'to perceive the rubato from the opposite point of view, considering first of all the
2 Martin, Sarah, 2002: 'The Case of Compensating Rubato', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127/1, p. 109 3 Hudson, Richard, 1997: Stolen Time: the history of tempo rubato (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 42

3 - Joseph Shiner, Caius displacement between right and left hands.'4 This was a result of the necessary appropriation of both the accompanying role of the continuo and the free solo line of the voice or the violin onto the two hands of the keyboard player. As a result, contrametric rubato on keyboard instruments gained a reputation as being an advanced technique to accomplish well; to realise a melody with convincingly rubato in the true vocalistic, and thus linear way while simultaneously maintaining a constant and regular accompaniment was difficult, and was therefore often approximated by regular syncopation or other means, whether improvised still labelled 'rubato' or notated in scores. Through the Classical period the contrametric rubato remained the standard definition of the term 'rubato', as shown by letters from Mozart to his father Leopold. Upon Chopin's arrival in Paris, however, the approach to rubato were undergoing a process of change. Around the turn of the century the city was becoming a centre of pianistic activity, with the presence of influential teachers such as Louis Adam and Christian Kalkbrenner. The latter was at the forefront of a 'more 'expressive and liberal school'5, liberal in the general attitude toward rhythm, while the former was a conservative who protested against new developments, his 'classic restraint side by side with the newly emerging freedoms of romanticism.'6 The gradual emergence of the second major form of keyboard rubato, the 'agogic rubato' based on simultaneous alterations of rhythm and tempo shared by the hands would form an important of Liszt's hugely influential musical style. This trend was by no means limited to Paris; critics had noted its presence in Beethoven's performances. However, Chopin entered into this arena as a conservative; his musical background had been immersed in the music and performing techniques of the high Classical and Baroque periods, through his teachers Elsner and ywny. Even though his earlier compositional efforts had taken up the contemporary stylistic mantle of the stile brillante, the focus of Chopin's rubato was on one hand firmly retrospective. The main source of contemporary inspiration for Chopin's rubato came not from the keyboard, but from the opera house. The contrametric rubato practised by leading bel canto singers such as Pasta and Malibran remained close to that of Tosi's affective, linear archetype, and Chopin's appreciation for this idiom betrayed the common root of his keyboard rubato with that of the established vocal tradition. In this case, Chopin's contrametric rubato of cantilena and accompaniment was primarily based in
4 Ibid., p. 237 5 Rowland, David, 1991: 'Chopin's tempo rubato in context', in Chopin Studies 2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 206 6 Hudson, Stolen Time, p. 179

4 - Joseph Shiner, Caius spontaneous performance rather than compositional notation, drawing upon over a century of existing performance tradition and contemporary bel canto. However, his rubato assumed other forms, whether he understood or referred to them as 'rubato' or not. Eigeldinger identifies the first alternative as related to the emerging agogic rubato; the second as deriving from the characteristic rhythms of the Polish mazur.7 The latter may be thought of as a subsection of the former; Chopin reportedly distorted the internal rhythm during performances of the mazurkas to the point where Meyerbeer heard the music in 4/4 rather than 3/4, due to the emphasised (elongated) second beat. The contemporary accounts of Chopin's rubato concerning the agogic type, which will be examined later, vary in their specificity, making it challenging to ascertain to what extent Chopin took account of this far newer thread of pianistic practice. One may label these varying modes of rhythmic manipulation in Chopin 'rubato' but one should ask what the term would have signified for Chopin, as the meaning of the term in keyboard circles was in flux during the first half of the nineteenth century. This difficulty is compounded by the ambiguous representation of rhythmic manipulation in the scores themselves: the fourteen compositions in which he marked the word rubato (or poco rubato, sempre rubato, or languido e rubato), the numerous points at which Chopin uses other words such as stretto, ritenuto etc. to create an expressive effect somewhat akin to agogic rubato, or generic and musical markers suggesting the presence of another rubato type. Concerning the occurrences of the word rubato in the scores and their meanings, Eigeldinger and Hudson have differing views. Eigeldinger asserts that Chopin's rubato takes diverse meanings in the scores, context dependent, sometimes signifying the 'national element', or the agogic element if in the first bar.8 Hudson suggests that the use of the term in the scores is to signify the type for which 'we might seem to have no clue at all in the scores, the earlier [contrametric] type of tempo rubato.'9 However, an aspect of rubato representation which Hudson ignores is that of specifically musical markers. In the broad cantilena-plus-accompaniment textures characteristic of the nocturnes, the works of Chopin with the greatest kinship to Italian vocal writing, the use of contrametric rubato is made implicit through stylistic affinity. In the mazurkas, the national connotation in the genre title is enough to justify Chopin's distinctive rhythmic pliancy. As Eigeldinger observes, this view provides a reasoning for Chopin's abandonment of 'a term which he would have had to employ constantly
7 Rowland, 'Chopin's tempo rubato in context', p. 209, referring to Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques, 1986: Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils, trans. Naomi Shohet with Krysia Osostowicz and Roy Howat, ed. Roy Howat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 120 8 Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, p. 121 9 Hudson, Stolen Time, p. 208

5 - Joseph Shiner, Caius without the slightest assurance of his intentions being correctly understood.'10 The ambiguous ways in which the various types of rubato at Chopin's disposal interrelate in his music account for the diverse ways in which contemporary listeners responded to them. Contemporary reactions Listeners responded to the application of rubato by Chopin the performer, as a constituent part of his overall style of performance, motivated by musical and/or generic markers, prompts in the score, or the pursuit of expression. His rubato was heard in terms of how it related to other aspects of the music, such as harmonic rhythm , texture, phrase structure and melodic rhetoric. It was also intimately bound to perceptions of his overriding style, his prevailing musical aesthetic. Frequent references in this vein are made to notions of poetry, intimacy, improvisation, dreams, and meditative introspection, and predictably the responses run to poetic metaphor to describe what they hear. The most famous example, although not contemporary, is from Liszt: ' the wind plays in the leaves, stirs up life among them, the tree remains the same, that is Chopinesque [contrametric] rubato.'11 The variety in the responses of contemporary listeners ranges from emphasis on particular aspects of Chopin's rhythmic manipulation to critical appraisals of its success, with considerable differences of opinion. Many refer to his contrametric rubato, focusing on the accompaniment's strictness. Frequent motifs are the precision of rhythm, the regularity of the accompaniment, in contrast with the expressivity, the 'free fancy' or 'impatient vehemence' of the melodic line. Others, as a consequence of the conspicuous freedom of the melodic line, dwell on Chopin's flexibility, with various opinions. Some, like Mikuli, stress an 'unshakeable emotional logic justifying itself by a strengthening or weakening of the melodic line, by harmonic details, by the figurative structure.'12 Critics of this rhythmic flexibility focus on the agogic aspects of Chopin's rubato, taking a decisively conservative stance. Mendelssohn, noted for his opposition to marked rubato, states that Chopin indulged in the 'Parisian spasmodic and impassioned style, too often losing sight of time and sobriety'. Berlioz, perhaps an unlikely source for musical conservatism, shared Mendelssohn's stance: 'Chopin chafed under the restraints of time, and pushed rhythmic freedom much too far.'13 It is unclear whether these criticisms refer to true agogic rubato or Eigeldinger's 'national' rhythmic distortions in the mazurkas. Nevertheless, what is clear from all of these different responses to Chopin's various uses of rubato is that rhythmic manipulation was considered a prominent and distinctive feature within his style of
10 11 12 13 Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, p. 122 Ibid., p. 51 Ibid., p. 50 Hudson, Stolen Time, p. 176

6 - Joseph Shiner, Caius performing, one which was idiosyncratic and representative enough of his musical aesthetic to be continued, imitated and corrupted throughout the remainder of the century. Mikuli's assertion in context There is therefore a significant disparity between contemporary listeners' impressions of Chopin's rhythmic manipulation and Mikuli's retrospective assertion made in 1879. One can trace several threads through the testimonials of Chopin's contemporaries: tthe frequently discussed contrametric rubato of the free-cantilena type (Mikuli's 'much maligned' tempo rubato), and the more mercurial elements of agogics, both derived from the Polish mazur rhythms and the more controversial 'Parisian' free type. Mikuli, on the other hand, would have us believe that in all cases Chopin's rubato is to be considered as contrametric, strict in tempo. One can suggest two interrelating trends, present during the intervening years, as crucial to understanding the context of Mikuli's quote. The first is the metamorphosis of the nature of tempo rubato itself in general performance practice. The second is trends affecting the performance of Chopin's works. Not only did Franz Liszt have a large impact on the aesthetics of piano performance in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he also, through his conducting enterprises, helped to broaden the possibilities of the word 'rubato' from solo contexts to orchestral ones. Along with Wagner and his disciples, the high-profile Liszt facilitated the shift in meaning of the word 'rubato' from predominantly a contrametric one to the emergent 'agogic' type. This was more focused on the possibilities of rhetoric latent in tempo and rhythmic manipulation, so that, in Mathias's words, 'its essence is fluctuation of movement as in the art of oration, whereby the speaker, moved by this or that emotion, raises or lowers his voice, and accelerates or draws out his diction.'14 Not only did the agogic rubato become part of the staple diet of the burnished post-Lisztian virtuosi, it became a key part of the high-Romantic subjectivity, based on, in the case of Wagner, transcendental expression. Through the subjugation of bar-lines and elevation of its structural importance through larger-scale manipulation of tempo and rhythm, tempo rubato lost the momentary immediacy and localised tension that was key to its original conception, and became instead a general, overarching practice. In the years after Chopin's death, these trends in pianistic activity shaped the way his works were performed. The now-omnipresent agogic rubato became a common feature of performances, and more specifically, the aesthetic of intimacy and poetry crucial to Chopin performance was diminished. The virtuosity of Chopin's pianism was exaggerated and his music gradually transported to the arena of the
14 Rowland, 'Chopin's tempo rubato in context', p. 208

7 - Joseph Shiner, Caius concert hall, the recital and the competition. Thus the works entered a setting in complete opposition to the mindset in which they were conceived. Pianists who did attempt to maintain and continue the manire de Chopin did so with varying degrees of success. In particular, the unique and spontaneous nuances of Chopin's rhythmic manipulation evaded many performers, who settled to approximate what they had heard, whether directly from Chopin or via accounts of his playing. This manifested itself, however, most conspicuously in imitations of his contrametric rubato. Just as keyboard players had done during the eighteenth century, nineteenth century performers focused on the displacement between the hands, as Saint-Saens noted, 'without understanding its [the rubato's] inner meaning.' This led in turn to the emergence of false trends in expressive pianism, such as 'the striking of the chords with the left hand just before the corresponding notes of the melody', as Klezcysnki noted in 1879.15 It is in these contexts that we must view Mikuli's assertion. By invoking the older style of contrametric rubato, the form of rhythmic manipulation that was the most striking to Chopin's contemporary audiences, Mikuli endeavours to 'correct' the development of a 'false tradition of Chopin playing characterised by a high degree of rhythmic licence.'16 He focuses on the metronomic and regular aspects of contrametric rubato in order to highlight Chopin's distance from the perceived rhythmic lawlessness of prevailing nineteenth-century pianism. Mikuli is also, apparently, the source of his own contradiction, for in another account he refers to Chopin as 'far from being a partisan of metric rigour, frequently [using] rubato in his playing, accelerating or slowing this or that theme.'17 However, one can see that the his assertion had a motive. For Mikuli, then, these two conceptions of Chopin's rubato were not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, in order to make his case for a proposed return to Chopin's original manner clear, special points of emphasis had to be made. Conclusion The implications of Mikuli's statement are twofold. Firstly, it illustrates the seismic change in performance practice which had occurred during the nineteenth century, concerning rhythmic manipulation both in pianistic terms and in broader musical thought. Secondly, it displays a commonality with the majority of contemporary accounts of Chopin's playing; that of a notably high regard for Chopin's performance style. For Mikuli, as well as other listeners who heard Chopin play, the subtleties of all his manners of rhythmic manipulation, be they of the cantilena-type, the mazurtype or the agogic, were evidently special and unique enough to warrant being preserved, either by
15 Hudson, Stolen Time, p. 196 16 Rowland, 'Chopin's tempo rubato in context', p. 209-210 17 Ibid., p. 209

8 - Joseph Shiner, Caius written testimonial or in the continuing performance of his works. ***** Bibliography Bellman, Jonathan, 2000: 'Chopin and His Imitators: Notated Emulations of the True Style of Performance', 19th-Century Music, 24/2, pp. 149-160 Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques, 1986: Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils, trans. Naomi Shohet with Krysia Osostowicz and Roy Howat, ed. Roy Howat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Hudson, Richard, 2005: 'Rubato', Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Accessed 9/2/2012), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ ______ 1997: Stolen Time: the history of tempo rubato (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Martin, Sarah, 2002: 'The Case of Compensating Rubato', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127/1, pp. 95-129 Rosenblum, Sandra, 1988: Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music: Their Principles and Applications (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) ______ 1994: 'The Uses of Rubato in Music, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries', Performance Practice Review, 7/1, pp. 33-53 Rowland, David, 1994: 'Chopin's tempo rubato in context', in Chopin Studies 2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 199-213 Skowron, Zbigniew, 2004: 'Creating a legend or reporting facts? Chopin as performer in the biographical accounts of F. Liszt, M. A. Szulc, and F. Niecks', in Chopin in Performance: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Artur Szklener (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina)