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Updated: June 8, 2025
Hanslick, the eminent Viennese critic, referred to it thirty years ago, as "a morbid unsteadiness of tempo." Mendelssohn, who always liked a "nice, swift tempo," repeatedly expressed his aversion to Chopin's rubato. Nevertheless, traces of it may be found in the rhythms of the classical school.
In Chopin's music there are many pianists, many styles and all are correct if they are poetically musical, logical and individually sincere. Of his rubato I treat in the chapter devoted to the Mazurkas, making also an attempt to define the "zal" of his playing and music. When Chopin was strong he used a Pleyel piano, when he was ill an Erard a nice fable of Liszt's!
And it seems as if the fact that there was less room for formal and emotional innovations in the waltz than in the other forms, had somewhat affected Chopin's imagination. For, although the most popular of his works, his waltzes are, with a few exceptions in which the rubato prevails, less characteristic than his other pieces. Nevertheless, they are charming, every one of them.
In it he would no doubt have given many valuable hints regarding the correct use of the rubato.
He fashioned many charming turns of expression, introduced an occasional tempo rubato, foreshadowed the intellectual element in music and laid the corner-stone of modern piano-playing. The style of Scarlatti is peculiarly the product of Italian love of beautiful tone, and what he wrote, though without depth of motive, kept well in view the technical possibilities of the harpsichord.
He loathed false sentiment, and a man whose taste was formed by Bach and Mozart, who was nurtured by the music of these two giants, could never have indulged in exaggerated, jerky tempi, in meaningless expression. Come, let us be done with this fetish of stolen time, of the wonderful and so seldom comprehended rubato.
All his compositions must be played in this peculiarly accented, spasmodic, insinuating style, a style which he succeeded in imparting to his pupils, but which can hardly be taught without example. As with the pedal, so with the rubato, Chopin often neglected to mark its use in later years, taking it for granted that those who understood his works would know where to apply it.
He emphasized important syllables by dwelling on them, thus producing that dramatic rubato which Wagner considered of such great importance in his operas that, when he brought out "Tannhäuser" in Dresden, he actually had the words of the text copied into the parts of all the orchestral players, in order that they might be able to follow these poetic licenses in the dramatic phrasing of the singer.
Rubato literally means "robbed," and it is generally supposed that the peculiarity of Chopin's style consisted simply in this, that he prolonged certain notes in a bar at the expense of the others robbing from one what he gave to his neighbor. But this is a very inadequate conception of the term. Chopin's rubato means much more than this.
Accordingly, all his compositions ought to be played with that kind of accented, rhythmical balancement, that morbidezza, the secret of which it was difficult to seize if one had not often heard him play. Let us try if it is not possible to obtain a clearer notion of this mysterious tempo rubato. Among instrumentalists the "stolen time" was brought into vogue especially by Chopin and Liszt.
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