In Praise of Slow

by Carl Honore

  Music can have a similar effect. Singing and playing instruments, or listening to others do so, is one of the oldest forms of leisure. Music can be exhilarating, challenging, stirring. Or it can soothe and relax, which is precisely what more of us are seeking nowadays. Using music deliberately to unwind is not a new idea. In 1742, Count Kaiserling, then the Russian ambassador to the Saxon court, commissioned Bach to write some music to help him overcome his insomnia. The composer came up with the Goldberg Variations. Two and a half centuries later, even the man in the street uses classical music as a tool for relaxation. Radio stations devote entire programs to gentle, calming works. Classical compilations with words like “relaxing,” “mellow,” “chill-out” and “soothing” in the title are flying off the shelves.

  Listeners are not the only ones hankering after a slower tempo. A growing number of musicians—around two hundred at last count—believe that we play a lot of classical music too fast. Many of these rebels belong to a movement called Tempo Giusto, whose mission is to persuade conductors, orchestras and soloists everywhere to do a very unmodern thing: slow down.

  To find out more, I fly to Germany to attend a Tempo Giusto concert. On a windless summer evening, a small crowd files into a community centre on the outskirts of Hamburg. Posters on the door promise a familiar program of sonatas by Beethoven and Mozart. In the modern, sun-lit auditorium, a grand piano stands alone beneath a bank of windows. After settling into their seats, the spectators make their final preparations for the show, switching off their mobile phones and clearing their throats in the ostentatious manner favoured by concert-goers the world over. The buildup reminds me of every recital I have ever been to—until the pianist walks in.

  Uwe Kliemt is a compact, middle-aged German with a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye. Instead of sitting down at the keyboard to start the concert, he stands in front of his gleaming Steinway and says to the audience: “I want to talk to you about slowness.” Then, as he does at concerts across Europe, he delivers a mini-lecture on the evils of speed worship, adding emphasis by waving his spectacles like a conductor brandishing a baton. A murmur of approval ripples through the audience as Kliemt, who also happens to be a member of the Society for the Deceleration of Time, utters a neat summation of the Slow philosophy. “It is pointless to speed up everything just because we can, or because we feel we must,” he declares. “The secret of life is always to look for the tempo giusto. And nowhere is that more true than in music.”

  Kliemt and his allies believe that musicians began playing faster at the dawn of the industrial era. As the world sped up, they sped up with it. In the early nineteenth century, the public fell in love with a new generation of virtuoso pianists, among them the supremely gifted Franz Liszt, who played with dazzling dexterity. For the virtuoso, cranking up the tempo was one way to flaunt his technical brilliance—and give the audience a thrill.

  Advances in instrument technology may have also encouraged faster playing. In the nineteenth century, the piano came to the fore. It was more powerful and better suited to running notes together than were its predecessors, the harpsichord and the clavichord. In 1878, Brahms wrote that “on the piano … everything happens faster, much livelier, and lighter in tempo.”

  Mirroring the modern obsession with efficiency, musical teaching took on an industrial ethic. Students began practising by playing notes, rather than compositions. A long-hours culture took hold. Modern piano students can spend six to eight hours a day tickling the ivories. Chopin recommended no more than three.

  In Kliemt’s view, all of these trends helped to fuel the acceleration of classical music. “Think of the greatest composers in the pre-twentieth-century canon—Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms,” he says. “We play them all too fast.”

  This is not a mainstream view. Most people in the music world have never heard of Tempo Giusto, and those who have tend to scoff at the movement. Yet some experts are open to the idea that classical music suffers from too much speed. There is certainly evidence that we play some music faster than before. In a letter dated October 26, 1876, Liszt wrote that he took “presque une heure” to play the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata op. 106. Fifty years later, Arthur Schnabel needed just forty minutes. Today some pianists rattle through the same notes in thirty-five minutes.

  Early composers scolded musicians for succumbing to the virus of hurry. Mozart himself threw the odd tempo tantrum. In 1778, he fired off a blistering letter to his father after hearing Abbe Vogler, a leading musician of the day, massacre his Sonata in C Major, KV 330, at a dinner soiree. “You can easily imagine the situation went beyond endurance, since I could not suppress to communicate to him, ‘much too swift,’” wrote the composer. Beethoven knew exactly how Mozart felt. “There lies a curse on the virtuosos,” he once moaned. “Their practised fingers are always off in a hurry together with their emotion, sometimes even with their mind.” A distrust of accelerated tempo carried into the twentieth century. Mahler is said to have told budding conductors to slow down, rather than speed up, if they felt the audience was growing bored.

  Like the broader Slow movement, the musicians in Tempo Giusto are not against speed itself. What they object to is the very modern assumption that faster is always better. “Speed can give you a great feeling of excitement, and there is a place for that in life and in music,” says Kliemt. “But you have to draw the line, and not always use speed. It is stupid to drink a glass of wine quickly. And it is stupid to play Mozart too fast.”

  Yet finding the “correct” playing speed is not as easy as it sounds. Musical tempo is a slippery concept at the best of times, more an art than a science. The speed at which a piece of music is played can vary with the circumstances—the mood of the musician, the type of instrument, the nature of the occasion, the character of the audience, the venue, the acoustics, the time of day, even the room temperature. A pianist is unlikely to play a Schubert sonata in exactly the same way in a packed concert hall as she does for a few close friends at home. Even composers are known to vary the tempo of their own works from one performance to the next. Many musical compositions work well in more than one speed. Robert Donington, a British musicologist, puts it this way: “ … the right tempo for a given piece of music is the tempo which fits, as the hand fits the glove, the interpretation of that piece then being given by the performer.”

  But surely the great composers laid down what they considered the “right” tempo for their music? Well, not exactly. Many left behind no tempo markings at all. Almost all the instructions we have for the works of Bach were added by pupils and scholars after his death. By the nineteenth century, most composers denoted tempo with Italian words such as presto, adagio and lento—all of which are open to interpretation. Does andante mean the same thing to a modern pianist as it did to Mendelssohn? The arrival in 1816 of Maelzel’s metronome failed to settle the matter either. Many nineteenth-century composers struggled to convert the gadget’s mechanical tick-tock-tick-tock into meaningful tempo instructions. Brahms, who died in 1897, summed up the confusion in a letter to Henschel: “As far as my experience goes every composer who has given metronome marks has sooner or later withdrawn them.” To make matters worse, editors down the ages made a habit of adding and altering tempo instructions on the music they published.

  Tempo Giusto takes a controversial route to working out the true intentions of earlier composers. In 1980, W. R. Talsma, a Dutch musicologist, laid the movement’s philosophical foundations in a book called The Rebirth of the Classics: Instruction for the Demechanization of Music. His thesis, derived from an exhaustive study of historical records and musical structure, is that we systematically misinterpret metronome markings. Each note should be represented by two ticks of the pendulum (from right to left and back again) rather than, as is the common practice, a single tick. To honour the wishes of pre-twentieth-century composers, therefore, we should cut playing speeds in half. Talsma, however, believes that slower
pieces—think Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”—should not be slowed down quite so much, if at all, because since the early industrial era musicians have played them more slowly, or at the original tempo, in order to heighten their sentimentality and to accentuate the contrast with the faster passages. Not all Tempo Giusto members agree, though. Grete Wehmeyer, a German composer and author of the 1989 book Prestississimo: The Rediscovery of Slowness in Music, thinks that all pre-twentieth-century classical music, fast and slow, should be played at half the speed commonly used today.

  Tempo Giusto musicians side with either Talsma or Wehmeyer, or they fall somewhere in between. Some pay less attention to metronome markings, focusing more on other historical evidence and what feels right. Everyone in the movement, however, agrees that a slower tempo can bring to light the inner details of a piece of music, the notes and nuances that give it its true character.

  Even skeptics can be swayed. Today, the leading exponent of Tempo Giusto in orchestral music is probably Maximianno Cobra, the Brazilian-born conductor of the Europa Philharmonia Budapest Orchestra. Though Cobra’s 2001 recording of Beethoven’s legendary Ninth Symphony takes twice as long as mainstream renditions, it garnered some favourable reviews. One critic, Richard Elen, conceded that “there is a great deal of inner detail that this performance reveals, which usually whizzes past so fast that you can hardly hear it.” Even though he disliked the slow approach, Elen grudgingly accepted that it might be closer to what Beethoven intended, and rated Cobra’s performance “extremely good.”

  This begs a question: If indeed we do play some classical music faster than our ancestors did, is that really such a bad thing? The world changes, and sensibilities change with it. There is no escaping the fact that we have learned to love a faster musical tempo. The twentieth century was all about boosting the beat, with ragtime giving way to rock ‘n’ roll, disco, speed metal and eventually techno. When Mike Jahn published How to Make a Hit Record in 1977, his advice to would-be pop stars was that 120 beats per minute was the optimum tempo for a dance track. Anything more than 135 beats per minute, he said, would appeal only to speed freaks. By the early 1990s, drum ‘n’ bass music and jungle music were belting along at 170 beats per minute. In 1993, Moby, a titan of techno, released what the Guinness Book of World Records anointed the fastest single of all time. “Thousand” clocked in at a dizzying 1,000 beats per minute, and reduced some listeners to tears.

  Classical music has also evolved. Extreme variations in tempo came into fashion in the twentieth century. Orchestras are also much louder today than they were in the past. The way we consume the classical repertoire has changed, too. In a busy, fast-paced world, who has time to sit down and listen to a symphony or an opera from start to finish? More often we reach for the edited highlights on a compilation CD. Terrified of boring their listeners, classical music radio stations jazz up their broadcasts with fast-talking DJs, Top Ten countdowns and trivia contests. Some favour shorter pieces and faster renditions; others trim the pauses that composers write into their scores.

  All this affects the way we experience music from the distant past. If 100 beats per minute set pulses racing in the 1700s, it is more likely to induce a yawn in the era of Moby. In order to sell CDs and fill concert halls in the twenty-first century, maybe musicians do have to play some of the classics at a higher tempo. And maybe that is not the end of the world. Even Kliemt does not wish to outlaw faster playing. “I don’t want to be dogmatic and tell everyone exactly how they should play, because there is room for variation,” he says. “I just think that if people are given a chance to listen to their favourite music played more slowly, and they listen with an open mind, then they will know in their hearts that it sounds better.”

  My head is humming with the great tempo debate as Kliemt finally sits down at the piano in Hamburg. What follows is a cross between a concert and a seminar. Before each piece, Kliemt plays a few bars in the faster tempo favoured by mainstream pianists, and then replays the same segment at his own slower pace. Then he talks about the differences.

  The first piece on the program is a well-known Mozart sonata, C Major, KV 279. I often listen to a recording of it made by Daniel Barenboim. Kliemt kicks off by playing a bit of the sonata in a tempo familiar to the modern ear. It sounds good. Then he slows down to what he regards as the tempo giusto. His head bobs dreamily as his fingers caress the keys. “When you play too fast, the music loses its charm, its finer points, its character,” Kliemt tells us. “Because each note needs time to develop, you need the slowness to bring out the melody and the playfulness.” Slowed down from the norm, Sonata KV 279 sounds odd at first. But then it starts to make sense. To my untrained ear, at least, the tempo giusto version sounds richer, more textured, more melodious. It works well. According to the stopwatch I have smuggled in to the concert, Kliemt gets through the three movements of the sonata in twenty-two minutes and six seconds. On my CD, Barenboim cranks out the same notes in fourteen minutes.

  Like Talsma, Kliemt believes in slowing down the faster classical pieces and leaving the slower ones more or less as they are. Yet he maintains that playing in tempo giusto means more than just reinterpreting metronome markings. You have to get inside the music, feel out every contour, discover the natural beat of the piece, its eigenzeit. Kliemt puts great stock in matching musical tempo to the rhythms of the human body. In 1784, Mozart published a famous sonata called “Rondo alla Turca,” the Turkish March. Most modern pianists play the piece at a rollicking speed best suited to running, or at least jogging. Kliemt gives it a slower tempo that evokes soldiers marching. Dance is another touchstone. Many early works of classical music were written for dancing, which meant the powdered aristocrats of yesteryear had to be able to hear the notes in order to know when to make the next step. “In Mozart’s time, music was still like a language,” says Kliemt. “If you play it too quickly, nobody will understand anything.”

  The concert continues. Kliemt gives the same treatment to the final three pieces, a Mozart Fantasie and two Beethoven sonatas, and all three sound marvellous, not slow or ponderous or dull. After all, a musician can lower the tempo and still give the impression of speed and vivacity by playing in a highly rhythmic manner. Does slow Mozart sound better than fast Mozart? Inevitably, that is a matter of taste. Just as it is when pop stars play “unplugged” versions of their high-tempo songs on MTV. Maybe, in this fast-paced world, there is room for both. Personally, I like the Tempo Giusto style. But I also still enjoy listening to Barenboim play Mozart and Beethoven.

  To find out what Josef Public thinks, I conduct a straw poll after the Hamburg recital. One man, an elderly academic with wild hair, is unimpressed. “Too slow, too slow, too slow,” he mutters. Others, however, seem delighted by what they have heard. Gudula Bischoff, a middle-aged tax inspector in a cream suit and floral blouse, is a long-time admirer of Kliemt. She credits him with opening her eyes to the genius of Bach. “When you hear Uwe play, it is beautiful, a completely new way to hear music,” she says, with a dreaminess not normally associated with tax inspectors. “Because you can hear the notes when he plays, the melody comes out much better, and the music seems more alive.”

  Kliemt has made at least one convert this evening. Among the spectators queuing up to meet him after the recital is Natascha Speidel, an earnest twenty-nine-year-old in a white turtleneck. As a violin student, she is used to rattling through pieces in the tempo favoured by mainstream players. “In music schools, technique is a big priority, so there is lots of fast playing,” she tells me. “We hear things played fast, we practise fast and we play fast. A quick tempo feels comfortable to me.”

  “What did you think of Kliemt?” I ask.

  “Wonderful,” she says. “I thought a slow tempo would make it boring, but it was the opposite. The music was much more interesting because you can hear many more details than you can at a higher tempo. At the end, I looked at my watch and thought ‘Wow, two hours already.’ The time went a lot faster than I
expected.”

  Speidel will not, however, be rushing out to join the Tempo Giusto movement. She still likes playing fast, and she knows that slowing down would hurt her grades at music college. It could also scupper her dream of landing a job in an orchestra. “I can’t choose at the moment to play slowly in public, because people expect a faster tempo,” she says. “But maybe I will play more slowly on my own sometimes. I will have to think about it.”

  For Kliemt, that in itself is a triumph. A seed of slowness has been planted. After the crowd melts away into the balmy evening, we linger in the parking lot, savouring the blood-orange sunset. Kliemt is in high spirits. Sure, he knows Tempo Giusto faces an uphill battle. With back catalogues to sell and reputations to protect, the heavyweights of classical music have little time for a movement that claims they have spent their whole lives playing and conducting in the wrong tempo. Even Kliemt himself is still refining his search for the tempo giusto. Finding the right speed can involve a lot of trial and error: some of his current recordings are faster than the ones he made ten years ago. “Maybe when I was just starting out with the idea of slowness I took it a bit far,” he says. “There is still much to debate.”