Time, Please!
Time, in music as in life, is inexorable, and dominates a musician's existence. Orchestral and opera conductors beat time in order to achieve precision of ensemble. The invention of that quintessential musical timekeeper, the metronome, by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in the early 19th century was welcomed by composers who were now able to quantify their desired tempos. Beethoven imitated its ticking in a vocal canon and his Eighth Symphony, while 150 years later György Ligeti went further, scoring a work for 100 metronomes and nothing else.
Read more…In the hands of musical pedagogues such as Carl Czerny, however, it became an instrument of torture ("Repeat these two bars 40 times without a break, at the prescribed speed"). With 'Tempo rubato' (flexibility of pulse), according to the best authorities, any time "stolen" has to be given back by a compensatory slowing-down. Musicians' obsession with time can have beneficial side-effects: without looking at his watch, the famous Hungarian-American conductor Eugene Ormandy always knew to the minute what time of day it was.
Maurice Ravel loved mechanical gadgets - his villa in Montfort l'Amaury was full of bric-a-brac - and composed with a watchmaker's precision. Not without reason are timepieces prominent in his two one-act operas: a grandfather clock with a broken pendulum in 'L'Enfant et les sortilèges' (The Child and the Spells), and a roomful of clocks all ticking in harmony in 'L’Heure espagnole' (a title difficult to translate into English: "The Immoral Hour" was suggested by the music critic Ernest Newman). The storylines of ballets such as 'Cinderella' or 'The Nutcracker' and song lyrics (Rachmaninov) refer to striking clocks, as of course does the music to which they are set. Of course, clocks do not only strike, they chime as well, as in Vierne's evocation of the Big Ben clock in the City of Westminster. Operatic characters associated with clocks include Olympia in Offenbach's 'Tales of Hoffmann', a mechanical doll who needs to be wound up regularly. The Marschallin in Richard Strauss's 'Der Rosenkavalier' already, at the age of 32, sees herself as an old woman and stops the clocks to prevent – once again, the inexorable passage of time.
Incidentally, the sobriquet "Minute Waltz" is not Chopin's, who could not have anticipated modern race-against-the-clock sports. However, a performance lasting almost twice as long is by common consent more appropriate to this music.