“I am not in the habit of altering my compositions once they are finished,” Beethoven wrote to a friend, “. . . for I hold firmly that the slightest change alters the character of a composition.” It was this sense of the logic of a score that caused him to annotate his works meticulously with expression, tempo, and dynamics instructions so that the conductor would know precisely what was expected of him—no more, no less. And he felt so strongly that a composer’s tempos should be respected that he once suggested to a critic that all performers should be provided at cost with metronomes.
What Berlioz remarked in disgust about Wagner’s conducting—“sempre tempo rubato”—could have been said in the same tone by Beethoven. And certainly he would have been happy with Jean Baptiste Lully, who many years before had conducted with a heavy stick which he pounded on the floor to ensure instrumental and rhythmic precision. There is, after all, enough passion in a Beethoven score to restrain a conductor from interjecting his own orgasms. For the great conductor, there is no need to do his setting-up exercises in performance.
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