Rubato
by Richard Collins
I guess “rubato” means “looseness of beat.” That’s pretty vague, but that’s the nature of rubato. It’s slippery. For instance, we speak of “more rubato” of “less rubato.” Such a puzzle! As if it were some kind of spice you might add to an otherwise bland passage. “More rubato” must mean “more expressive,” but it also might mean “more indecisive,” even “wishy-washy.” How can a single word have so many different meanings?
If you try to become more precise, as if you were writing a dictionary definition, you might say that rubato was “flexibility of beat.” Let’s start with that.
Mozart talked about this flexibility in one of his letters. He was talking about piano music and said that the left hand was steady and the right hand deviated from it, so that the two hands didn’t arrive at the same precise moment. That sounds like jazz, doesn’t it?
The jazz singer sings “behind the beat.” And when she does, we don’t shout, “She’s late! She’s late!” No, we shout, “I love it! I love it!” It’s part of the wonderful mystery of that style of singing that “behind the beat” has become standard. If a jazz singer didn’t sing that way, we would not only be disappointed, but would even say that she didn’t know what she was doing! She was no good!
Sometimes in classical music we want that flexibility of beat, but we are not singers, and are either afraid of playing “behind the beat,” or believe that a more flexible beat should be shared equally between the hands in a piano piece. The right hand is “late,” but the left hand is also “late” in precisely the same degree. By this I mean that the hands play together, they just are more or less unsteady, as they attempt to show the expressivity of a passage.
Try the passage below. It comes from a Mozart sonata, the slow movement of K.311, in D.
(example no. 1)
Can you play it both ways? Or, should I say, all three ways? 1. Straight, even time. 2. Expressively, with rubato in both hands equally. 3. Expressively, left hand even, right hand behind the beat a little, straightening out to coincide with the left hand at the end of the phrase.
You’ve got to be a believer to play the passage the third way! But this is exactly what Mozart was talking about in his letter. The left hand is steady and the right hand moves around it.
Well, I leave it to you to show expressivity your own way. I just wanted you to think about the similarities between the jazz singer and the expressive classical player when they are both “behind the beat.”
I’d like to give another example. Why, in the music of Chopin and Liszt are we confronted with whole handfuls of notes in the right hand with tiny little note heads? 17 or 25, or some other crazy number in one bunch!
Listen to any performance, and you discover that these groups of lyrical, but speedy, notes are played as if they had nothing whatsoever to do with the fairly regular beats of the left hand. This sounds just as it should, we say. The notes are tiny to show us that we are to play them in the style we’ve just been talking about. The composer is indicating to us, by using a smaller size note head, that we are expected to have some license in playing the right hand. It should not be mathematically connected to the left.
That this style of playing was not limited to just florid passages is suggested by the following example. This is from Schumann’s Carnival, a collection of many short pieces, “character pieces,” they are usually called. Each one of these is meant to convey a description or caricature of some sort or another. The one below is called “Chopin.” See how the right hand is designated by small note heads for a few beats? If you can manage to play this little selection, you’ll see that Schumann wanted to show the wonderful expressivity of playing “behind the beat” for these few moments. Try it! You’ll like it!
(example no. 1)
The fact that Schumann was able to show us in this passage how appropriate it was to play the top hand a little after the bottom indicates to me that it was such a common practice at the time that in a caricature it was a necessary part of the style he was demonstrating. If it was in his piece called “Chopin,” then it was probably common practice to perform the music of Chopin in this way. Convinced?
So, now, you might consider searching through the music you are playing, looking for passages that might sound better if they were played with the special right-left rubato. Well, that was my plan, anyway.
My most important lesson in expressive rubato was from an unexpected source. I was a college student, and was working on a French Suite by Bach. We had an extensive record library at the school where I studied, so I went in one day to see what I could find out by listening to the dance suites of Bach. I was dismayed to find that we had no recordings of this music on the harpsichord, only on the piano. That might be okay as a last resort, but I wanted something authentic, something recorded on the instrument it had been written for. So I looked for some other kinds of suites by Bach.
I found the Casals recording of a suite for solo cello. This ought to be authentic dance music, I figured. I had never actually heard a performance by Casals, though I knew he was a famous cellist.
I was stunned! I was amazed! Casals played this music with such fire and passion that it was absolutely filled with rubato. Everywhere! There were so many first beats which were twice as long as the other beats! But it seemed perfectly right!
So I went back to a practice room and tried over some of the two-part inventions I knew, playing them with this exaggerated expressivity I had just heard. It made a strange kind of sense, but it also made me extremely self-conscious, so I played very softly so that no one outside the practice room could hear what I was doing.
I decided early on that this kind of rubato was too extreme for the poor little inventions, but I also discovered that it sounded pretty wonderful if I tamed the irregular pulses down quite a bit, but still left a tiny deviation from the metronomic in the performance. It moved ahead, but it was expressive where needed.
I’ll be the first to say that the Bach suites do not need the same treatment of beat on the piano as they might on stringed instruments. It’s a question of style. On the cello, Casals was of necessity using plenty of rubato, in order to show the implied counterpoint contained in a single line. That is as it should be. That just isn’t necessary on the keyboard.
But I learned from his performance. It taught me that rubato, even if very subtly suggested, is a valuable tool in any style, not just in lyrical, expressive music.
Happy hunting.
Ask me questions, and I will try to come up with some sort of answers.
click me
