In the first decades of our century an ear for fine rhythmic nuances of dance music scarcely existed any longer, while at the same time, in concert-music, a greater wealth of rhythm was developing.  Never were people inspired by more rhythmically flat dance tunes than those of the waltzes, schottisches, etc., which, for example, were danced in the twenties.  The ear for the fine shades of “danceableness” in musical rhythm had at that time become absolutely dulled and had fallen asleep; now it is perceptibly awakening once more.  Our polkas, mazurkas, etc., based on the clearly defined original rhythm of the national folk-dances, are promising harbingers of this.  But is there not an important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the age of Louis XIV. 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.  This kind of trill sounds to us amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called “false shakes” a hundred and fifty years ago.  Incidentally it may be remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear it has become an absolute abomination and barbarity.