These isolated and sequentially labeled passages, which correspond in order with the
fermatas indicated by Strauss, address a wealth of piano-technical issues that were meant to showcase the prowess of Wittgenstein's left hand.
(In print, EPILOGUE opens with a visual cue, a neat graphic designed by Ben: imagine a snippet of 5-line music staff notation, page-center, topped and mirror-bottomed with
fermatas.)
Why not stretch the
fermatas and expand the flourishes?
Other analytical issues involve the treatment of repetitions, upbeats,
fermatas, pauses and metrical changes occurring within individual movements.
Her decorator's sense aims for French touches - the severity of her newly dyed eyebrows, like freshly inked
fermatas; her choice of accent pieces, the glass decanter, the two ornamental mirrors.
Instinctively they took Beethoven seriously--not as a god, not as a fad, but as a brother who could speak for them--and it may be this attitude, rather than any particular approach to sforzandos or
fermatas, that has been passed along behind the desks for the past couple of centuries.
There was little attempt at emulating late 18th-century performance practice beyond some ornamentation added at
fermatas by the principal singers.
These signs are vast and cover phrasing but also dynamics such as crescendo and diminuendo, descending glissandi, ritardandos,
fermatas, accelerandos and much more.
As an example, think of the opening horn statement in the first movement of Mozart's first horn concerto, or the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (after the first two
fermatas).
This renders subtleties of rubato and other tempo alterations, including ritardandos, accelerandos and
fermatas, difficult to coordinate.
Gerard Wyss, who also accompanies Edith Mathis, Cecilia Bartoli and Nicolai Gedd, is a chamber musician who succeeds in blending the sound of the piano with the human voice, and has a feeling for the structure of phrases and that mini-second
fermatas so important in Haydn's songs.
If there are unwritten notes and
fermatas, the distributions can be obtained only with a dosimeter during performance.
The added grace notes and
fermatas in this fragment come from the Composite Element Matrix (Example 9), the construction of which is found beginning on page 88 of my D.M.A.
The third chapter deals with improvised decoration at
fermatas, and full-scale concerto cadenzas, with Czerny providing an example of his own for Beethoven's First Piano Concerto.
