Chopin’s tempo rubato in context

Abstract

Tempo rubato has been defined in many different ways during the last two hundred and fifty years. Its broadest definition concerns the practice of speeding up and slowing down within a passage. Hugo Riemann, for example, specifies that ‘Tempo rubato is the free treatment of passages of marked expression and passion, which forcibly brings out the stringendo–calando in the shading of phrases, a feature which, as a rule, remains unnoticed.’ The non-synchronised rubato that Leopold Mozart described was referred to in a number of eighteenth-century treatises, many of them (such as Leopold Mozart’s) discussing the performance of soloists accompanied by an orchestra. There are some indications that the non-synchronised style of rubato practised by the Mozarts and others was declining in popularity by the beginning of the nineteenth century, possibly in favour of other types of rubato.

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