TOSCANINI'S BEETHOVEN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23411, 29 July 1939, Page 14 (Supplement)

TOSCANINI'S BEETHOVEN

Everything that moves, from the caterpillar tliat climbs an inch of stalk to the 'plane that lias meanwhile covered five miles of air, has a tempo, said a writer in the London Observer last month. This tempo is measured by taking some constantly recurring unit, such as the time.the insect takes to go his own length, or the engine to make one revolution (or, in music, the bar or a fraction of it), and counting the number of these that occur in a minute. Putting U for the unit and assuming, say, 80 repetitions of it in a minute, the tempo is then recorded as "U~*80." An instance: the first movement of Beethoven's eighth Symphony contains 485 bars (including the repeat). and is marked "U=69"; and the duratiou of that movement under Signor Toscanini in a recent performance was 8.65 minutes. To divide the bars by the tempo gives the duration, and by the duration gives the tempo. Hen.ce Beethoven's duration is 7.03 minutes, and Toscanini's tempo was CJ=57.