The Secret Life of
Musical Notation: Defying Interpretive
Traditions
- Amadeus Press
From Chapter Three - "...of
Rinforzandi" (p. 103)
When asked to describe the role
of a rinforzando that has been placed
at the end of a crescendo whose destination
is an fff, quite a few musicians
offered a predictable response: it
demands a greater increase in volume.
I had assigned the same connotation
in my own musical vocabulary, but
as I looked anew at the contexts
in which rinforzando appears concurrently
with a crescendo, I began to question
the logic of the redundancy: would
not indicating a crescendo have sufficed?
As to the degree of dynamic intensity,
would the emotional charge of its
context be more instructive than
a generalized duplicative marking?
In Musik-Lexikon, compiled in 1882, Hugo Riemann attributed
dynamic validity to rinforzando, stating that
a strong
crescendo – “ein starkes Crescendo” – is
to be employed.¹ Other authoritative publications
in the second half of the 19th century shared this
position, relating the term to sforzando, crescendo,
and even forte. Its interpretation did not
change in the 20th century: all the reliable encyclopedic
sources I consulted agree that rinforzando indicates
an increase in volume or a localized dynamic swell.
Music theorists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries often referred to the marking’s dynamic
involvement, but the German composer Justin Heinrich
Knecht (1752-1817) seems to have seen in the marking
a broader scope. In Knechts allgemeiner musikalischer
Katechismus (Knecht’s
General Musical Principles), published in 1803, his
definition of what was then a term in its infancy reveals
that rinforzando may have not referred exclusively
to volume:
Rinforzando can
only be applied to a group of several notes to which
one should give a strong emphasis.²
Only
a few years before Knecht’s Katechismus began to circulate, Beethoven had published his Piano
Trios, Op. 1 and Piano Sonatas, Op. 2 – six works
that contain a prolific amount of interpretive instructions
and a profuse application of rinforzando. In my teenage
years, when I approached the study of some of these
pieces, the conventional treatment of the marking was
often so perplexing that I questioned whether a dynamic
role should have been regarded as its only feasible
treatment. The presence of these irrational instances
was often justified by the supposition that the composer
had deliberately intended for certain anomalies to
take place. But how could the dynamic abruptness of
certain rinforzandi, which seemed to hinder and deform
the expression of entire passages, be accepted as manifest
truth? The musicians with whom I interacted or performed
during those years did not seem too perturbed by these
dynamic swells, though they occasionally recognized
their peculiarity. I suspected that these unusual outcomes
were perhaps the result of a system that assigns inalterable
meanings to notational symbols, and that we had allowed
these interpretive traditions to become part of our
language, to be crucial elements of the way we faced
the complex prosody of the music we played. Further,
it seemed to me that the belief that the mechanical
reproduction of these symbols and signs aimed to reveal
the composer’s intentions was often brought to
an extreme and encouraged by teachers and performers
alike – an approach that may have perpetuated
erroneous convictions about a composer’s
language.
[..]
In Chapters One and Two I discussed
how my understanding of what I saw
in print had been based on dogmatic
principles and traditions that had
been instilled in me during my formative
years. I took these conventions at
face value, assuming that there must
have been a truth to the manner in
which generations of musicians who
preceded me had interpreted musical
notation. The musicians with whom
I interacted, the concerts I attended
and the recordings to which I regularly
returned all shaped the way in which
I heard, read and understood music.
I began to communicate those notions
in my deliberations about how a piece
should sound and in my early teaching
experiences, perpetuating beliefs
that, I thought, were respecting
the composer’s intentions. Yet
the substantial conclusions to which I came over time
[...] made me reconsider many occurrences of rinforzando whose mechanical reproduction in its conventional dynamic
attribution did not always seem to correspond to musically
logical solutions. Was our perception of "rinforzando" also
based on an interpretive misconstruction,
I wondered?
An opportunity to address this question
arose while I was working with a
student on the opening page of the
Adagio from Beethoven’s first Sonata from
Op. 2. In this inspired slow movement, a "rinforzando" is
encountered in measure 14, as the
first sixteen-measure episode nears
its close. A new phrase introduces
the relative key of D minor, starting
from the anacrusis of measure 17:
Example 3.1 - L. van Beethoven: Sonata
in f minor, Op. 2, no. 1 - II. Adagio
- mm. 13-18
Beethoven’s only dynamic indication
for this tender, intimate episode
is a pianissimo as the movement begins,
yet the student applied an increase
in volume in its concluding measures – quite
an unusual choice, considering the
poignant lyricism of the passage.
If Beethoven had a particular effect
in mind for this rinforzando, its
meaning eluded me. Was my student’s
interpretation correct? Was he really
supposed to apply a crescendo – a
strong one, if Riemann’s suggestion
were to be followed – at the
end of the opening phrase? Where
would the increase end? Should it
continue through the new phrase that
starts in measure 17? Or should the
emphasis be a localized dynamic one
on the third beat of measure 14,
as some performers interpret it?
By comparison with a crescendo, a
single stress seemed a more reasonable
solution; nevertheless I wondered
what would necessitate its odd presence
in an opening section whose only
dynamic marking is an initial pianissimo.
I then noticed a curious parallel
between this rinforzando and the
opening measures of the second movement
of Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat
Major, Hob. XVI/49, written only
a few years earlier. In measure 15,
the application of the term forzando not to a single pitch but to a cluster
of notes is the only such instance
in the composer’s entire output
for keyboard:
Example 3.2 - F. J. Haydn: Sonata
in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI/49 - II.
Adagio e cantabile - mm. 14-18
My puzzlement only grew. The uncanny
resemblance between this passage
and the one we looked at in example
3.1, I thought, might not be just
a fortuitous occurrence. Did Haydn
also expect a crescendo, as I had
been trained to believe that Beethoven
did? And if so, how could I make
sense of an interpretive instruction
that parted with my musical instinct – indeed,
that seemed incoherent? Further,
as this instance in Haydn’s
Adagio bears such a remarkable similarity
to the passage in Beethoven’s
first Sonata, was I permitted to
assume that the markings forzando and rinforzando had comparable connotations?
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From
Chapter Two - "...of Sforzandi" (p.
70)
[...]
Working with one of my students on
the middle movement of Haydn’s
Sonata in E-flat Major Hob. XVI/49
brought back memories...
From
Chapter Three - "...of Rinforzandi" (p.
103)
When asked
to describe the role of a rinforzando
that has been placed at the end
of a crescendo whose destination
is an fff, quite a few musicians...
From
Chapter Three - "...of Rinforzandi" (p.
115)
[...]
Mozart did introduce rallentando,
and the earliest traceable examples
emerge in 1785 in pieces such as
the Fantasie in c minor, K. 475 and...
From
Chapter Five - "...of Stretti" (p.
181)
Rather accidentally,
the subject of this chapter took
shape as I was comparing pedal markings...
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