Ep.22: Pushing the Brakes in Music of the Past?

In this new episode, we return to a concept that is constantly invoked in 19th-century music — and just as constantly misunderstood today: tempo rubato.The word itself suggests freedom, flexibility, even licence. But when we look closely at historical sources, a very different picture emerges. Together, we ask a simple but uncomfortable question: what if much of what we now call rubato is not expressive freedom at all, but a way of compensating for tempos that were set too fast to begin with?Our point of departure is a striking passage by William Mason, who describes hearing Chopin played with such exaggerated rubato that entire measures were effectively added to the music — a practice that audiences praised, but that Mason dismissed as being “mathematically out of time.” For Mason, true rubato was not about slowing everything down, but about losing and regaining time within a stable temporal framework.From there, we trace two fundamentally different meanings of tempo rubato:* the older practice, rooted in bel canto and common throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, in which the accompaniment remains strictly in time while the melody breathes freely;* and the later, modern notion of rubato, where the basic tempo itself expands and contracts, often without compensation.We place these ideas in a broader historical context, drawing on Czerny, Schindler, Schumann, and — crucially — Chopin’s own pupils, whose testimonies leave little doubt about how rubato was understood and practiced in his circle. Again and again, the same principle returns: the left hand is the clock.What emerges is not a romantic myth of unrestricted freedom, but a demanding discipline — one that only works when the underlying tempo is solid, playable, and proportionate. In that light, rubato stops being an excuse, and becomes something far more precise and powerful.This episode is part of our ongoing attempt to reconnect tempo, technique, and expression — and to show that many of the “solutions” of modern performance practice may in fact be symptoms of a deeper misunderstanding.If you’d like to support the podcast and go deeper into these discussions, you can subscribe to Authentic Sound on Substack. For €5/month, subscribers get access to the video version of the podcast. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wimwinters.substack.com/subscribe