> 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.
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
