Between Performance and Notation: How did Carl Reinecke understand Mozart’s piano concerto No.26 K.537?

Mako Kodama

　Carl Reinecke (1824-1910) was a German composer, pianist, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and professor at the Leipzig Conservatory. His piano performances were admired by Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt, and he was reputed as "the greatest and most sincere Mozart player of his time."However, you may be surprised on listening for the first time to his performances preserved on piano rolls, since there is noticeable use of expressive practices such as manual asynchrony, unnotated arpeggiation, and rubato (flexibility of rhythm and tempo), which is quite far from the kind of performance style that is considered good today. 　This research clarifies the features of the performance practices audible in early piano rolls, such as those by Reinecke. It focuses on how he arranged and notated the Larghetto from Mozart's Piano Concerto No.26 K.537 for piano solo, how he performed it on piano roll (1905), and how he described the performance of the movement in his book Zur Wiederbelebung der Mozart'schen Clavier-Concerte (1891). The discrepancies between the three source materials give an insight into the implied performance practices of Reinecke’s time and his tacit knowledge. The research culminates with personal experimentation and reflection on how these performance practices can expand the freedom and possibilities of the author’s performances.

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Chapter 2: Ingredients to Make that Performance More Flexible in Early Recordings

“The Italian word rubato means robbed or stolen. Tempo rubato is stolen time.” Richard Hudson.¹

In this research, we discuss two types of rubatos: the earlier type and the later type. Nowadays, we usually understand tempo rubato as the local tempo

modification of the entire musical substance. If we slow down our playing somewhere in a passage, we need to accelerate somewhere else to make up for the delayed

time. This is the basis of the later rubato. On the other hand, the earlier type of rubato depends on the independence of each part: The melody alters its

tempo and rhythm according to the expression, while the accompaniment keeps a more or less strict tempo. As a result, the parts are not played together. Richard Hudson explains:

Keyboard music incorporates this earlier type of rubato during the second half of the eighteenth century. Eventually, however, the expression tempo rubato begins

to refer to rhythmic alterations not only in the melody but in the tempo of the entire musical substance. For at least the first half of the nineteenth century both

types of rubato exist concurrently, but later in the century, the earlier type disappears. It is the later type of rubato, finally, that continues to live in Western art

music and is the type most familiar to us today.²

What Hudson states generally holds true, but we can still hear many examples of early tempo rubato in early recordings on piano rolls in the early 20th-century, which gives us an insight into how the people played going back to the 18th century, if not earlier.

How Adolph Christiani describes the rubatos in his book The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (1885)³ is extremely interesting. He recognized that

there are several types of rubato, and they should be executed in different ways:

Rubato maybe described in several ways:

1. Any temporary retardation or acceleration is rubato.
2. Any negative grammatical accentuation (for example, syncopation), by which the time becomes robbed of its regular accents, is a rubato.

That capricious and disorderly mode of performance by which some notes are protracted beyond their proper duration and others curtailed, without, however,

changing the aggregate duration of each measure, is rubato. [...] The last mode, which is, in fact, the real rubato, as it is unusually understood, will receive

particular notice. This latter mode of performance is the rubato of Chopin; very beautiful and artistic when in its proper place and limitation, but very ugly and

pernicious when out of place, or exaggerated.

It may be executed in two ways:

1. Both hands are in sympathy with each other,i.e., both hands accelerating or retarding together.
2. Or the two hands not in sympathy,i.e., the accompanying hand keeping strict time, while the other hand alone is playing rubato.

The latter way is the more beautiful of the two and is the truly artistic rubato.⁴

The first type of rubato he mentions is the later type of rubato, and the second and third are the earlier types of rubato. The first type of execution shows the later

type of rubato, and the second is the earlier type of rubato. It is noteworthy that he considers the earlier type of rubato to be the real, true and artistic one. He also

refers to Chopin's employment of the earlier rubato in his performance. Others made similar comments, so these were the prevailing views of pianists at the time, as

we will see in the next section, 2.3.

1. Hudson, Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato, 1.

2. Ibid.

3. Adolph Christiani, The principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (New York: Harper&Bros., 1885).

4. Ibid, 299.

2.2 Two Types of Rubatos: “Earlier and Later”

Next: Chapter 2.3 Earlier Type of Rubato and Rhythmic Alteration

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