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What are we actually measuring?
Flexibility can be quantified in many ways, often with strikingly different results. For this chart,
each performance was divided into ten sections, and the average tempo for each section was obtained.
Then the average change from section to section was determined, and mapped against the performance date.
For future reference, note that we are comparing sections approximately 90 seconds in length. This will be important later.
Analysis. Given the results, it seems what
we are measuring here is less 'flexibility' than a particular kind of 'drama':
- Furtwängler and Mengelberg account for
most of the 'very dramatic' cases. This is partly because each takes one passage extraordinarily slowly: for Furtwängler
it's the end of the development, from m.338; for Mengelberg it's the second half of the exposition (from m.83, along with the corresponding
music in the recapitulation).
- There is a well-defined
lower limit, but what it signifies is not clear. It's not measurement error.
Some conductors (such as
Bernstein,
Karajan,
Knappertsbusch, and
Jochum) seem to get steadily 'less dramatic' over time. This may be maturation, or it may be boredom.
British conductors tend to dwell near the lower limit,
but they are more often described as 'undramatic' than 'inflexible'.
(Barbirolli,
Boult,
Beecham,
Coates,
Davis,
Gardiner,
Goodman,
Hogwood,
Kovacevich,
Loughran,
Mackerras,
Marriner,
Morris,
Norrington,
Sargent,
Wood).
No such clustering is apparent with other countries of origin, such as
Italy (Abbado, Giulini, Muti, de Sabata, Toscanini)
or
Russia
(Barshai,
Fedoseyev,
Ivanov,
Kondrashin,
Koussevitzky,
Mravinsky,
Titov).
Next we will look at smaller segments.
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