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Dedication
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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List of Illustrations
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Notes
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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11 - Winkel’s Prototype
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
Near the start of August of 1815, a box was delivered to the offices of the Royal Dutch Institute of the Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam containing the prototype of a novel musical timekeeper and a letter describing the apparatus. It had been posted by a thirty-eight-year-old named Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (1777–1826), a clockmaker from the small, rural German town of Lippstadt, Westphalia, north of the Ruhr Valley, who had since emigrated to the Dutch capital. Winkel had been born to a clockmaker, though by the time he was five both his mother and father were dead. Little else is known about Winkel’s early life, beyond his being an orphan and a Lutheran, and his becoming a free citizen in 1799, following the completion of a clock making apprenticeship. Only in 1816 do his whereabouts again resurface, the year he moved from a house located north of central Amsterdam to a purchased house in the Reguliersgracht on the opposite side of the city center.
How long Winkel had already been living in the capital by this point is no better understood than his specific reason for coming here. Whether he was aware that Amsterdam had been attracting a steady flow of newcomers for a century, a consequence of its openness to immigrant populations, Winkel was certainly operating under the assumption that such an environment offered a budding clockmaker far more opportunity than provincial Lippstadt. Curiously, the prototype itself provides one critical piece of information regarding Winkel’s whereabouts, for here the inventor had affixed an inscription reading “Discovered by D. N. Winkel on 27 November 1814 in Amsterdam.” This suggests that he had been living in the city for some time prior to purchasing his house in the Reguliersgracht and gives us pause to wonder if his pendulum might have been the inspiration behind his move to the city in the first place?
The instrument Winkel presented to the Royal Dutch Institute was, in essence, an inverted or double-weighted pendulum, a radical approach destined with time to revolutionize musical timekeeping, although who or what initially inspired his design has been lost to us.
Hands
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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10 - Hammers, Dials and Barrels
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
In 1785 the following advertisement appeared in a London daily:
The Chronometer, or Musical Time Beater, is an instrument which has long been wanting, to ascertain and measure accurately the different beats, or portions of time into which musical compositions are divided, and the great utility of such an invention in assisting and enabling young practitioners in that science to play in time, cannot be doubted.
The Chronometer has met the general approbation of the most eminent professors of music, and many other gentlemen who have been pleased to inspect it; the inventor is therefore induced to offer it to the patronage of such ladies and gentlemen as choose to honor him with their subscriptions on the following conditions.
The Chronometer will be neatly finished, in a small compass, so as to stand upon a harpsichord, piano-forte, etc., and be portable in the pocket.
The price to subscribers will be from three to five guineas and upwards, according to the elegance of the finishing, agreeable to the desire of the subscriber. One half to be paid at the time of subscribing, and the remainder on delivery of the instrument.
The instrument will be delivered to the subscribers in the order their names are received, as soon as one hundred and upwards are subscribed for.
Subscriptions are received by the inventor, Mr. W. Pridgin, watch-maker, York … Mr. J. Denton, watch-maker, Hull, at which places the instrument may be seen.
The apparatus advertised was being offered by William Pridgin (dates unknown), a clockmaker from York who had apprenticed for seven years with another maker by the name of William Thornton, himself a student of noted clockmaker Henry Hindley. Pridgin, who worked out of a shop located in York’s Coney Street, remained professionally active there until around 1793, prior to relocating to Hull. According to Pridgin’s advertisement, his “time beaters” were both reliable and accurate, having passed muster with musicians and inspectors alike. The maker also put a premium on both convenience and cost; unlike Breguet, Pridgin was more than willing to finish the instrument according to the taste of the buyer and adjust cost accordingly.
13 - Composers’ Calibrations
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
As with most relationships, that which developed between composers and the metronome over the course of the nineteenth century was sometimes productive and at other times yielded less positive results. Nevertheless, every composer post-Beethoven had to come to terms with the device in one way or another, even if that meant choosing to forsake it. Beethoven, of course, was “free” of Maelzel’s metronome for the majority of his life, and if we imagine his career truly getting underway following his arrival in Vienna in 1792, some twenty-five years were still to elapse before he obtained his first metronome. Whether we regard his developing connection to the instrument at this point as obsessive or simply a preoccupation, Beethoven’s plan to metronomize all his work, both past and present, reflects a level of intensity in excess of that experienced by most composers. To put matters into perspective, we might begin by considering two other German composers, each born about a decade and a half after Beethoven: Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), who died a year before Beethoven, and Louis Spohr (1784–1859), who outlived both by some twenty years.
Weber rocketed to international fame in 1821, with the luminous success of what is arguably the first important German romantic opera, Der Freischütz, a score that drew inspiration from nature and German folksong. Two years later, when Weber came to Vienna to conduct the premiere of his latest opera, Euryanthe, he called on Beethoven. Beethoven had previously voiced his astonishment over the striking originality of Der Freischütz and now Weber wrote that he was received “with an affection that was touching; he embraced me most heartily at least six or seven times … this rough, repellent man actually paid court to me, served me at table as if I had been his lady.” It is a striking image, Beethoven waiting on another and doing so with humility, and we are left to wonder if during the course of their time together their conversation might have turned to their respective impressions of Maelzel’s invention?
1 - Hand and Heart
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
The series of stunning marble reliefs with which the artisan Luca della Robbia (c. 1400–1482) decorated his fifteenth-century organ loft were never meant to serve as historical artifacts. To their Florentine creator, they were simply spirited youths engaged in musical activities intended to adorn the front of his cantoria—the name by which the organ loft would subsequently become known on account of its eventual use as a singing gallery. The project, Luca’s first known commission, was begun in 1431 and would take the better part of the next seven years to complete. When finished, the cantoria would be installed within the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florentine Duomo.
Whatever thoughts Luca may have harbored about his marble youths or his personal contribution to the Duomo have long been lost to us. Without doubt the sculptor recognized the value of his labor, yet as a hired artisan he might just as easily have considered the fulfillment of the commission but a stepping-stone to the next project. Furthermore, for all his talent and stunning command of his medium, Luca would also have been only too aware that his loft would literally be overshadowed by what was to soar above it, the incomparable dome of Brunelleschi then nearing completion. Today, however, we can appreciate Luca’s gracefully hewn panels not simply for their artistic significance but for what they tell us about musical communication. They are, in essence, time capsules detailing the subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—act of rhythmic timekeeping from a distant past.
A member of Florence’s artistic elite whose circle included Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca had more than earned the Duomo commission. In fact, the artist had already proven himself in a completely different medium when, still in his twenties, he collaborated with Ghiberti on the latter’s famous bronze Baptistry doors. Luca then moved on to marble. It was his scenes carved for Giotto’s campanile, the bell tower adjacent to the Duomo, that likely brought the sculptor to the attention of Vieri de’ Medici, a distant relative of the powerful banking dynasty who subsequently commissioned the organ loft.
6 - New Systems
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
That Sauveur and Loulié had been on a collision course for some time must have been evident to both men, for in 1696, around the time their research commenced, Loulié’s Élements ou Principes de Musique, the musical primer dedicated to his former student, the Duke of Chartres, appeared in print. Sauveur would familiarize himself with this work, particularly its closing pages, which featured a description and a diagram of what Loulié deemed his chronomètre, his musical timekeeper. Whether or not Loulié consulted with Sauveur about the instrument’s design, we might easily imagine Loulié’s device sparking in Sauveur no small pang of envy or jealousy. The musician, not the scientist, had been the first to propose a means of accurately measuring musical time. For his part, Sauveur would come to regard Loulié’s concept as faulty and short-sighted and was inspired to realize what he believed was a more practical solution.
Part I of Loulié’s Élements was a simple singing manual for children, covering basic musical knowledge—the seven notes of music, the C clef, accidentals, note names and so on, “elements” Loulié would have frequently taught others during his experiences as a tutor. Part II was intended for more advanced students, covering the concepts of scales, clefs and meter, all of which Loulié proudly proclaimed were “presented in a very methodical and novel manner.” Students and teachers alike no doubt found the first two portions of Élements of great value but it is in Part III, by far the most advanced, that Loulié’s most memorable contributions lie. At the start of this final section Loulié outlined his concept for a monochord, a device about the size of a spinet, with immovable bridges at either end, across which one or more strings could be strung and stretched to the desired tightness with pegs. Another bridge, this one moveable and placed toward the center, would stop the string at a desired length or division, allowing for the study of pitch and vibration.
Of course, the study of a vibrating string was hardly a novel undertaking.
2 - Motion and Rest
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
To those living during the Renaissance, an age marked by exploration and self-reliance, the connection between the human and musical pulse must have seemed only natural. Bridging the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, the era’s rebirth or reawakening of human knowledge percolated in fourteenth-century Italy before spilling out across all of Europe in the centuries that followed. Aristotelian arguments, once accepted as authoritative and propagated by medieval scholars, were exposed one by one, throwing wide the door to a reexamination of the world’s workings. Everything, in short, was open for intellectual reevaluation and reconsideration, from ancient Greek and Latin texts, any number of which were then being rediscovered, to the nature of religion, the acceleration of falling bodies, the circulation system or the physics of a vibrating string. Gazing skyward, polymaths probed the heavens and comprehended that while man may have been the measure of all things, Earth was but a cog in the cosmic wheel. This explosion of intellectual and humanistic thought was visible and audible in all aspects of life, from the design of cities and the shapes of its buildings to the paintings, sculptures and music filling the cathedrals and palatial courts.
Of the seemingly infinite variety of ideas born of the fifteenth century, perhaps none exerted stronger influence in a greater variety of disciplines than the printing press. Texts, previously available only in expensive and time-consuming, hand-copied versions could now reach unprecedented numbers of readers. The printing press may have been the brainchild of Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg, but the device was beautifully suited to the flurry of activity thriving in Italy, where an international legion of engineers, philosophers and musicians found themselves in the employ of wealthy courts, including those of the Medici, Este and Gonzaga families, or religious institutions, whether the Vatican or a rural monastery. By the end of the fifteenth century, some two hundred printing presses were operating in Venice alone. Some of the most important work was being done by Aldo Manuzio, whose Aldine Press released more than 150 titles, including ancient Greek and Latin texts of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Homer and Euripides, and his fellow Italians Dante and Petrarch.
15 - New Currents
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
For all his shrewd business sense, Maelzel failed to protect his five-year patent of 1815. How this came to be is lost to time. Most likely Maelzel was simply caught up with a variety of pursuits, whether building or repairing automatons or barnstorming with his various mechanical devices. By now the metronome’s day-to-day business affairs were being overseen by Jean Wagner, Maelzel’s Parisian manufacturer, so perhaps each man assumed the other would follow up with the work of reviewing and renewing the patent. Regardless, the patent expired in 1820, paving the way for developments that were to eventually take musical timekeeping into the modern age. In 1825, the year Maelzel set sail for America with the Turk, an Amiens clockmaker by the name of Bien-aimé Fournier—sometimes referred to simply as Bienaimé—took advantage of the lapse and filed a patent for a design of his own.
That November Bienaimé was granted a five-year patent— no. 1813—for his métronome perfectionné. As opposed to Maelzel’s streamlined pyramid design, Bienaimé’s metronome took the form of a rectangular box that featured a dial on the front, calibrated from 30 to 208, and a collapsible pendulum that extended through the top of the box (fig. 15.1). While Bienaimé’s mechanics revealed his watchmaking expertise—his pendulum, for instance, was regulated by a fusée, a cone-shaped device incorporated into clocks and watches to help regulate the force of the mainspring as it wound down—the “perfected” element of Fournier’s patent referred to the device’s ability to be programmed for a variety of meters, including duple, triple and compound, such as 6/8. Furthermore, a bell, rather than percussive clicks, marked off the various beats of each measure, with the first beat of each bar sounding louder than those that followed. The device’s user would never be in doubt as to which signal indicated the downbeat.
In time, Wagner began manufacturing a similar bell model for Maelzel, though neither the Maelzel or Bienaime versions would endure, probably on account of their respective cost and complexity.
7 - Curiosities and Chronometers
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
Among the countlessly fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century European cultural life were the cabinets of curiosities—collections of eclectic objects their accumulator found to be of particular interest, whether archeological findings, plant or animal specimens, geological treasures, scientific instruments, religious artifacts, paintings or books. While such cabinets were often the domain of wealthy monarchs, many more modest collections were the products of amateurs who nevertheless possessed the financial means to travel and collect objets d’art, souvenirs or instruments of science from around the globe. Among the most celebrated cabinets was that of Belsazar Hacquet, a surgeon and professor of anatomy, whose Ljubljana collection was visited by European nobility, including the Holy Roman Emperor. Hacquet’s cabinet not only featured an anatomical theater but contained in excess of four thousand items, reflecting in particular his extensive botanical and mineralogical interests. Somewhat more modest was the Cabinet de curiosités of Joseph Bonnier de La Mosson, with its prized natural history collection, located in Paris’ fashionable Boulevard Saint-Germain. Unfortunately, Bonnier’s widow was forced to sell off the collection to cover her late husband’s debts. Occasionally, however, such collections outlived their founders and blossomed into magnificent museums, such as the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera (Russia’s first museum), the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Strasbourg’s Musée Zoologique.
Beyond collections of natural history, jewels, armor or religious relics, curiosity cabinets tended to feature a wide variety of scientific or mechanical instruments, tools often used by their collectors with which they helped further research of all types. And because of their scientific origins, musical chronometers were occasionally also found in these cabinets (a term used to describe the repositories for such collections and only later the furniture itself). We have already met a collector of such a device, Germany’s Johann Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach, whose diverse Wunderkammer included a numerous array of scientific, mathematical, optical and mechanical tools and the chronomètre Feuillet discussed previously. Following Uffenbach’s death, his Kammer passed through a series of hands before making its way to the University of Gottingen.
Frontmatter
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Measure
- In Pursuit of Musical Time
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Follows the fascinating story of musical timekeeping, beginning in an age before the existence of external measuring devices and continuing to the present-day use of the Smartphone app.
Afterword: Object of Destruction
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
In 1923 the Surrealist artist Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890– 1976), better known as Man Ray, wound up a metronome in his Paris studio and set to painting, regulating the speed of his strokes according to the device. The faster it ticked, the faster he painted. “If the metronome stopped then I knew I had painted too long, I was repeating myself, my painting was no good and I would destroy it.” Man Ray intensified the experience by clipping a photo of an eye to the metronome, creating the illusion of being watched while he painted. “One day I did not accept the metronome’s verdict, the silence was unbearable and since I had called it, with a certain premonition, Object of Destruction, I smashed it to pieces.”
In 1932 Man Ray remade the concept on paper, now modified with a photograph of the eye of his former lover. What was formerly an objective device passing judgement on his work now took on personal meaning for the artist, one that no longer simply determined the rate of his brushstrokes but represented a connection to his romantic psyche: “Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”
Upon Germany’s 1940 invasion of France, Man Ray fled Paris and returned to the United States, the country of his birth. Though his Object of Destruction was lost, he remade it five years later for a New York gallery. Now retitled Lost Object, it was mistakenly labeled Last Object by a printer, a mistake that stuck. Then, in 1957, Last Object or Object of Destruction met its fate at a Paris exhibition dedicated to Dadaism and Surrealism, when protesters grabbed Man Ray’s device, ran outside with it and destroyed it. The work would undergo a final transformation when Man Ray replaced the eye with an image that opened and closed with each swing of the pendulum.
5 - Court and Académie
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
In February of 1653 a thirteen-hour ballet entitled Le Ballet de Nuit was performed in Paris’s Salle du Petit Bourbon, the largest room of the Louvre, home to the royal Bourbon family. The costumed spectacle featured dancers, singers, acrobats, machinery and a fourteen-year-old Louis XIV dancing in five of the numbers. In the final piece, the young king appeared in the role of Apollo, the Sun King. Louis, of course, would foster the image, while his love of dance served to establish the foundations of classical ballet and proved a major influence on French musical life. The marathon ballet also featured a gifted musician and dancer, Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632–87), who had left his native Italy for France at the age of fourteen. Having since become an all-but-indispensable figure at court, Lulli was appointed royal composer of instrumental music less than a month later. In another eight years he would become a naturalized French citizen and change the spelling of his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully.
In 1669 Louis would establish the Academie Royale de Musique, the Royal Opera, of which Lully was also placed in charge and for which he would compose a new tragédie en musique nearly every year. Generally based on Greek mythological texts and featuring continuous music and large ballet numbers (thus playing into the Sun King’s love of dance), Lully’s tragédies mark the true beginnings of French opera, a genre he all but personally created and a monopoly he fiercely protected. Through sheer brilliance, political astuteness and generous favors from Louis, at least until the latter became repulsed by his music director’s lack of discretion and homosexuality, Lully moulded himself as the dominant and wealthiest composer in France.
Despite Lully’s impressive reputation and command of all matters musical at court, the Opera appears to have experienced its share of challenges. As a contemporary French visitor lamented, “How many times must we practice an opera before it’s fit to be performed; this man begins too soon, that too slow; one sings out of tune, another out of time; in the meanwhile the composer labors with hand and voice and screws his body into a thousand contortions and finds all little enough to his purpose.”
12 - Maelzel’s Metronome
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
We will likely never know the extent of the discussion that took place in Amsterdam between Nicolaus Winkel and Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in the year 1815 or even how that interaction came to be. The inventors certainly spoke of musical chronometers, as both were then traveling the same path. At some point Winkel showed Maelzel his revolutionary chronometer design, soon to be forwarded to the Royal Institute. We can only imagine Maelzel’s reaction to what was before him, Winkel’s elegantly simple solution to centuries’ worth of thought and labor. It was, in its own way, a miraculous conception, even in its present, rather inelegant, state of existence. Whether or not Maelzel reflected upon the inferior quality of his own apparatus, he immediately sensed the commercial potential of Winkel’s double-weighted design and offered to purchase the mechanism outright. Winkel declined.
Undaunted by Winkel’s refusal, Maelzel quickly set out for Paris, where he would procure a new musical timekeeping patent. Fusing his own system of calibration with Winkel’s design approach, the new dual-weighted mechanism would operate according to seconds of time. Crafting a description and an accompanying illustration for a French patent, Maelzel’s initial narrative amounted to no more than a few short paragraphs, explaining the various elements of the spring-driven movement: its main 150-tooth wheel, a 33-tooth escape wheel, its deadbeat escapement and weights and its beats-per-minute calibration as indicated on a scale of Maelzel’s design located behind, not on, the pendulum. The application included one other critical piece of information— the first use of the term métronome, Maelzel having combined the ancient Greek words for measure (metron) and rule or law (nomos).
On 14 September 1815, Maelzel’s metronome was awarded a French patent, no. 696, its first. Less than three months later, on 5 December, came the second, this one from England (fig. 12.1). The extra days and weeks had provided its inventor time to compose a far more detailed depiction of the device. Maelzel’s narrative now spilled out over the course of eight pages and included such details as its diminutive one-foot size and audible beat, with “each vibration being marked by the tick or drop of the escapement, without any hammer or other apparatus for that purpose.”
Index
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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8 - Revolutionary Minds
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
If performers like Quantz failed to embrace the possibilities the pendulum had to offer the musical world, many others regarded it as the long-awaited answer. Still, the question remained: how best to put the bob and line to use? Among those convinced of the efficacy of the pendulum as a musical tool was England’s William Tansur (1706–83), or Tans’ur, a figure largely forgotten yet whose influence was felt as far away as America, on account of his success as a composer of hymn tunes and anthems. In 1746 Tansur published A New Musical Grammar, a conservative didactic tutor fashioned as a dialogue between “Master” and “Scholar” that strongly reflected its author’s undeniable attraction for the pendulum. Revised and reprinted as The Elements of Musick Display’d, Tansur’s treatise remained in demand well into the nineteenth century, most likely on account of its appeal to church musicians.
Despite acknowledging the existence of house clocks, Tansur continued to champion the pendulum, “one of the nicest Pieces of Art that late Times have discovered … from which, those excellent Machines called Clocks and Clock-Work are made and regulated.” He dedicated no less than an entire chapter (five pages) to the topic. As we shall see, Tansur was drawn to the pendulum at least in part because its lengths were so easily divisible. The farsightedness of his approach rested in his reliance upon one second of time as the unit and as such, his design was as fully conceived as any of the period.
Tansur advocated for a pendulum measuring 39 and 2/10 inches from the “Point of Suspension to the Center of the Ball,” which then “vibrated 60 times in one Minute,” what he referred to as The Royal Standard. Concurrently, Tansur took into consideration the pulse rate of the human heart, that is, “the 60th part of a minute, or nearly the space between the beat of the Pulse and Heart; the Systole or Contraction answering to the elevation or lifting up of the hand, and its Diastole or Dilation, to the letting it down, & etc.”
Preface
- Marc D. Moskovitz
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Summary
Within a year of Beethoven’s death in 1827, the composer’s friend and music publisher Tobias Haslinger set out to establish a complete edition of his works, for which Haslinger planned to include metronome markings. This latter aspect was not without its complications, for although Beethoven had been completely won over by the revolutionary timekeeper in the final decade of his life, he died before metronomizing the majority of his scores. The publisher, therefore, entrusted this portion of the project to several musicians closely associated with the late composer’s musical circle: violinists Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Karl Holz and pianist Carl Czerny.
Both violinists were intimately familiar with Beethoven and his music. Schuppanzigh had led various string quartets that worked intensely with the composer and had served in the guise of concertmaster for a number of significant Beethoven orchestral premieres, including that of Wellington’s Victory (a work that played no small part in the metronome’s larger history, as we shall see), and Holz had played second violinist to Schuppanzigh as a quartet member and served as Beethoven’s factotum during the last period of the composer’s life. Carl Czerny had come to Beethoven as a piano student in 1801 and continued working with him on and off for two years, after which the two maintained a close relationship (Czerny, as it so happened, served as piano instructor to Beethoven’s nephew Karl, a figure we will meet again during the period Beethoven set out to metronomize his Ninth Symphony). And because Czerny had studied any number of Beethoven’s works with the composer—according to the pianist, he could also play all of Beethoven’s piano music from memory—he was as informed as anyone about the appropriate tempos of his teacher’s repertoire for piano.
Sadly, Haslinger’s planned release of Beethoven’s oeuvre was compromised when a number of publishers refused to cede their rights to Beethoven’s scores. In 1846 Czerny moved ahead with a similar, if less ambitious, undertaking. The pianist’s Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano Forte School included the publication of metronome markings for nearly all of Beethoven’s solo piano music, along with those for works for piano and one other instrument.