Brahms was criticised for the ‘unremitting spreading of chords in slower tempi’ in 1865.
This was what the critic of the Karlsrüher Zeitung said about Brahms’s performance of
his D minor piano concerto on 3 November 1865. Florence May reports that when
Brahms gave her piano lessons in 1871 he ‘particularly disliked chords to be spread
unless marked so by the composer for the sake of a special effect’. That Brahms did not
practise what he preached is also revealed by Moriz Rosenthal’s report that when Brahms
played in the 1880s he rolled most of his chords. This was related by Charles Rosen who
had been a pupil of Rosenthal.
The association of speeding up with getting louder seems to have been common in
Brahms’s day. Musgrave and Sherman have considered the performance markings
Brahms pencilled into the autograph score of his piano concerto in B flat major. They
report that those in the finale often indicate accelerations not marked in the published
score and they take place during crescendos that are marked.
Early recordings give many more examples of accelerandos. By examining them Will
Crutchfield has shown that musicians in Brahms’s circle often accelerated during
crescendo passages. Robert Philip has shown that ‘speeding up at points of high tension’
was much more frequent before the mid-twentieth century than it has since become.
On the cylinder recording of part of the first Hungarian Dance that Brahms made in 1889,
one hears, as Will Crutchfield has pointed out, ‘the left hand slightly before the right on
just about all the accented first beats where the texture is melody/accompaniment [but]
never on big accented chords.’
Franz Liszt’s life spanned most of the nineteenth century, the ‘romantic period’ in
musical history, most of it before sound recording. He lived for nine years after Edison’s
invention but, although rumours abound, no cylinder of Liszt’s playing has ever come to
light. It seems he was never approached by Edison’s European emissaries, although
Brahms, Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky were.
In April 1889 Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bülow arrived in Boston and cut a wax cylinder for
Edison, the recording engineer being Edison’s colleague Theodore Wangemann. Bülow
wrote that he recorded ‘Chopin’s last nocturne’, presumably opus 62 no. 2 in E major.
He wrote: ‘Five minutes later it was replayed to me – so clearly and faithfully that one
cried out in astonishment.’ Wangemann played cylinders by other performers for Bülow
who went into raptures and described Edison’s invention as an ‘acoustic marvel’. He was
not satisfied with his own recording, however, claiming that the presence of the machine
had made him nervous. Wangemann had gone to Boston specifically to record Bülow’s
recitals, and other pieces were probably also recorded. Each cylinder was unique and
could not at that time be replicated and it had been Edison’s intention to buy them up.
No Bülow cylinder has ever come to light but, if it did, it would be extremely valuable
evidence of nineteenth century performing practice as showing the extent to which Bülow
used the interpretative devices.