Warum werden Lieder immer schneller gespielt?

Hi.

The deum of Charpentier is one of my body and stomach pieces. LOL. I can most of the alto recorder I and the bass 😄.

I just counted some recordings.

Parlement de Musique 1:24 (imho best pace, very good recording)

Seraphic fire and the Sebastians under Patrick Dupre Quigley 1:29 (imho best recording of all times, but Prelude measured something arg)

Herve Niquet with Croatian Baroque 1:11

Vincent Dumestre 1:06

So it goes much faster and today 1:21 is no longer fast but central.

Look at the brook you can also speed up something lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC–tl2JV68

Or the controversial Sir Roger Norrington accelerates Schubert a bissl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzcFQOyNHZU

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The question was why.

There is the story that classical music has become faster. So that since the end or even the middle of the 20. It has become faster and faster. Because of xyz I don’t need to give it back, because it’s not true, the opposite is true: Almost all sources give the information about Tempi from the 18th. 19. and partly early 20. Century draw the picture that classical music was played significantly faster in the past and it was played in the 20th The century gave a phase in which everything was slowed down enormously. Many conductors know that and they are influenced by the historical performance practice try to play “originaltempi”.

As soon as there are metronomes, Beethoven is one of the first ones who did this – the information is often rapidly and sometimes technically impossible on modern wings. In addition to confusion and admiration and rejection, the metronomes previously perceived as mistaken, in particular Beethoven and Czerny, have even fired the conspiracy theory, the old ones would have used the metronome half as fast, i.e. two blows had been a blow at that time. The most famous representative of this (wrong and non-permanent) “double beat theory” is Wim Winters.

In truth, they weren’t insane, they had faster piano mechanics (Wiener Mechanik) and like– also have orchestra – very fast to play.

Baroque music has certainly not used serious tempi in fast sentences with the usually extremely slim ensembles.

In the Te deum, for example, you can find in the autograph hints of a hidden/implicite double-church which, in principle, can easily be interpreted in such a way that Charpentier has counted not more than 8 singers for the work. The smaller your ensemble the faster…at least tends. [[fun fact, the performance material of the Christmas oratorium under Bach’s own leadership, for example, is preserved. There are 4 (!!!) Singings have been written]]

With a choir of 4 or 8 it is much hard to build gravity, it is nothing with choral breathing. As an equivalent to the “shortness” of the old violin bows- baroque arches are much shorter and convex instead of concave, which has further shortened the area in which the sheet stroke has full force – which invite you to play quickly. They also grab even faster and facilitate fast sixteenth chains. They are built for stressed articulation not for melting lines. The small old pauks have an explosive drum-like stop, bare reverberation and unpadded sharp-edged wooden bats… which are more banjos than guitars to bring a comparison.

At Te deum may come that…. I can’t look through this but… so the original name of the first sentence is “Prelude”. Sometimes you find the name Marche en rondeau. The structure of the Preludes is the one of the Ritornell marches in France. I guess this has fired some people to choose real marching pace. I think this is rather a mistake, but I like the piece quite quickly and also with the French Inegalite (a slight swing). The pauks have to dance 🤗

In this video you will find some examples of fast and especially extremely flexible tempi even around 1900

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPW9ENtNKA