the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to
have been most universally and most highly developed? And with the newly
awakening delight in the _rococo_ the modern ear is again becoming
perceptibly keener as regards the _nuances_ of dance rhythms.
We have grown quicker in tempo in exactly the same proportion as we have
become more elevated in pitch. We live twice as quickly as the
eighteenth century, and therefore our music is performed twice as
quickly. Most of our musicians can no longer play even a Haydn minuet
because they no longer have an ear or a pulse for the comfortable
moderate movement of these compositions. The calm, easy-going _andante_,
in which our classical age portrayed many of its clearest and purest
musical pictures, is a tempo absolutely tabooed by modern Romanticists.
_Comodo, comodamente_, i.e., comfortably, was, a hundred years ago, a
very favorite designation for the manner of performing individual
musical compositions. This superscription has quite disappeared from
circulation in our day, and we are much more apt to mount up to the
_furioso_ than to remain quietly behind with the _Comodo_. The old
masters also had a species of composition with the superscription
"_Furia_," but their fury was not to be taken very seriously, for the
_furia_ was a dance. The French in former times considered the very slow
trill to be especially beautiful.
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