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Updated: June 8, 2025
Again play him lawlessly, with his accentual life topsy-turvied, and he is no longer Chopin his caricature only. Pianists of Slavic descent alone understand the secret of the tempo rubato. I have read in a recently started German periodical that to make the performance of Chopin's works pleasing it is sufficient to play them with less precision of rhythm than the music of other composers.
Rubato should be employed, for, as Kleczynski says, "Here everything totters from foundation to summit, and everything is, nevertheless, so beautiful and so clear." But only an artist with velvety fingers should play this sounding arabesque. There is more limpidezza, more pure grace of line in the first Impromptu than in the second in F sharp, op. 36.
We get a very lucid description of Chopin's tempo rubato from the critic of the Athenaeum who after hearing the pianist-composer at a London matinee in 1848 wrote: "He makes free use of tempo rubato; leaning about within his bars more than any player we recollect, but still subject to a presiding measure such as presently habituates the ear to the liberties taken."
"You are right, I think, and so does Tante, evidently," Karen continued, "about the tempo rubato in the Mozart. It is strange that Monsieur Ivanowski doesn't feel it." "Ah! but that is it, he does feel it; it is only that he does not think it," said Herr Lippheim, now running his fingers through his hair. "Hear him play the Mozart. He then contradicts in his music all that his words have said."
In his writings he at first indicated this manner which gave so individual an impress to his virtuosity by the term tempo rubato: stolen, broken time a measure at once supple, abrupt, and languid, vacillating like the flame under the breath which agitates it, like the corn in a field swayed by the soft pressure of a warm air, like the top of trees bent hither and thither by a keen breeze.
From Chopin, Liszt and all the world after him got that tempo rubato, that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the time, and those arabesque ornaments which are woven like fine embroidery all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in others are mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative phrases and poetic commentaries on the text.
'The left hand, said Chopin, 'must be like an orchestral conductor; not for a moment must it be uncertain and vacillating." Thus his playing, free from the fetters of tempo, acquired a unique charm; thanks to this rubato, his melody was "like a vessel rocked upon the waves of the sea."
Her voice is itself an instrument of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra. One seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente, and just where the tempo rubato comes in. She never forgets that art is not nature, and that when one is speaking verse one is not talking prose.
That one must not be doubtful about the rhythm-determining syllables, that one should feel the breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm, that one should lend a fine and patient ear to every STACCATO and every RUBATO, that one should divine the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in the order of their arrangement who among book-reading Germans is complaisant enough to recognize such duties and requirements, and to listen to so much art and intention in language?
Nor need it be brutally banged; the fundamental tone must be cared for, the subsidiary harmonies lightly indicated. The rubato in the valses need not obtrude itself as in the mazurkas. Opus 18, in E flat, was published in June, 1834, and dedicated to Mile. Laura Harsford. It is a true ballroom picture, spirited and infectious in rhythms. Schumann wrote rhapsodically of it.
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