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Updated: June 8, 2025
Karasowski relates that when one of Chopin's French pupils played his compositions and the auditors overwhelmed the performer with their praise, the master used often to remark that his pupil had done very well, but that the Polish element and the Polish enthusiasm had been wanting. After revealing the mystery of Chopin's tempo rubato, Liszt writes in his book on this master:
This dramatic rubato is, of course, a very different thing from the freedom which Italian singers often allow themselves on favorable high notes, which they prolong, not in order to emphasize an emotion but to show off the beauty and sustaining power of their voices. Scaria, unfortunately, was never heard in opera in this country.
But there is another epoch-making feature of Chopin's style, which is less easy, especially to Germans, because it is a Slavic characteristic; I mean the tempo rubato. This is a phrase much used among musicians, but if pressed for an exact definition, few would be able to give one. Let us see first what Chopin's contemporaries have to say of the way in which he himself treats it.
There is a third peculiarity of Chopin's style which may be included under the name of rubato, namely, his habit of "robbing" the note, not of its duration, but its accent. Every student of music knows that the symphony and sonata are called "idealized dance forms," because they are direct outgrowths of the dances that were cultivated originally in Italy, France, and Germany.
He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the RUBATO license the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will and the music she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing sense of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous eyes, and then
Perhaps the importance of the rubato in Chopin cannot be more readily realized than by his concession that he could never play a Viennese waltz properly, and by the fact that sometimes, when he was in a jocular mood, he would play one of his mazurkas in strict, metronomic time, to the great amusement of those who had heard him play them properly.
It was a passage simple to read and played simply, but with both delicacy and understanding, and without any of that rubato or other affectation by which young Lechetizsky was already beginning to mar his style. It was music pure, almost classical the work not of a virtuoso, but of a composer. And Rubinstein, leaning against the wall, his eyes on Ivan's face, felt his humor change.
Still, in the majority of his compositions, there is no room for the rubato, which cannot be said to have found a home in German music till it was assimilated by the Schumann school, under the influence of Chopin. Since then, it has leavened the spirit of modern music in a manner which has never been sufficiently emphasized.
The orchestra played their tone-poem faultlessly as to notes. Like so many machines, the instruments performed each its allotted part. But, oh, Heavens! the effect! Expression: fire, poetry, understanding piano, fortissimo, crescendo, rubato there was absolutely none. Never had thing so dead, so stiff, so hideous, so discordant, been heard in that opera-house.
But it is not an invention of theirs or their time. Vol. Above all, however, we have to keep in mind that the tempo rubato is a genus which comprehends numerous species. In short, the tempo rubato of Chopin is not that of Liszt, that of Liszt is not that of Henselt, and so on. As for the general definitions we find in dictionaries, they can afford us no particular enlightenment.
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