Am 08.09.2020 um 17:55 schrieb howard posner:
On Sep 8, 2020, at 3:18 AM, Rainer <rads.bera_g...@t-online.de> wrote: According to a source I cannot remember the Sonata lasted 55 minutes when played by Liszt.
He wrote presque une heure - even slower. Playing everything as asked for by Beethoven makes 32 minutes. As far as I know there is not a single recording that lasts 32 minutes only. I am not really interested in Liszt's tempo and I am convinced that some modern players can play faster than Liszt. I am interested in other people's opinions regarding the metronome markings in those days. Some pieces by Czerny are ridiculously fast in modern interpretation. Some Pieces by Schumann are totally ruined unless played at half the speed. On the other hand Chopin#s etudes played at half the speed sound somewhat boring. I simply do not know... See for example https://youtu.be/7PwoFoZTTHU Sometimes his arguments are not really convincing nor are his music examples, but there is certainly some truth in it. Rainer PS Even Korstick is slower :) And a certain Alfred Brendel said "Das vorgeschriebene Tempo des ersten Satzes zumal ist von keinem Spieler, und sei es der Teufel persönlich, auf irgendeinem Flügel der Welt auch nur annähernd zu bewältigen."
Liszt said something of the sort in a letter written 40 years after the performance Berlioz reviewed. For all we know, he hadn’t played it in years and didn’t recall accurately. Or he took the fast movements slower as time went on. Or he took the slow movement, or the sections that don’t have metronome markings, more slowly. And for all we know, Berlioz didn’t mean to say specifically that Liszt played at Beethoven’s indicated metronome markings, only that he didn’t play around with the tempo once he started. And even if he did, maybe Berlioz, sitting in a theater with the sheet music but without a metronome, couldn’t tell the difference between quarter note = 144 and quarter note =130. This all pretty much exemplifies the problems of discussing tempo in the pre-recording age. I haven’t found any source saying Lizst was unable to play the sonata at the indicated tempi. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
