Show Notes
In this episode, we revisit one of the most revealing texts in nineteenth-century music history: Gottfried Wilhelm Fink’s 1839 article on Mozart performance. Fink does not complain about minor nuances. He describes contemporary Mozart performances as wildly distorted, rushed, and destructive to the music itself. To show how far performance practice had drifted, he turned to Tomášek and had Don Giovanni metronomized according to what Mozart’s own tempi were thought to have been. The implications are enormous. If Tomášek’s metronome marks are read in the modern single-beat sense, then the performances Fink condemns in 1839 would have to have been even faster than those already extreme numbers. That does not merely stretch credibility. It collapses into absurdity. The episode argues that this source only makes coherent sense from a whole-beat perspective, and that Fink’s article is therefore devastating evidence against the modern single-beat reading of nineteenth-century metronome marks. We also discuss Fink’s striking claim that listeners had already become accustomed to distorted speed, and how relevant that feels today. The episode ends with concrete listening examples from Don Giovanni and Beethoven, showing just how quickly the single-beat universe becomes musically and physically implausible.
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