Did baroque composers think of ritardando on their compositions?

Question

I've been always told that whenever I play any baroque piece on the piano, I should take special care when attending to, for example, the amount of right pedal I should use. It sounded perfectly normal when it was explained to me, because there was no such thing as a "right pedal" during baroque era, or anything similar to it.

But when it comes to other things like the use of ritardando at the end of a movement on a suite, or at the end of a whole piece, I hesitate, because it doesn't seem to be a standard way to play it (if there is some), and I've heard opposite opinions about it. Some argue (the purists) that nobody should play a ritardando, because there is not explicit information in the piece that encourages you to do so; others say that though it's not a resource you should employ whenever you have the chance, there are moments where the music "forces" you to do so.

If I had to declare myself a follower of any of the opinions above, I'm more inclined to the second one. I can't imagine Bach creating the dramatic atmospheres he creates without thinking in slowing the tempo a little bit at the end of the phrase. But anyway, there's still some dispute about it, so my question is the following:

Is there any record that shows us whether baroque performers played ritardando or not?

Answer 1

Baroque music was all about expressiveness, and the rhythm was not necessarily meant to be held as strictly as the Renaissance tactus. Wheat Williams has mentioned historically informed performance, and as he says, these things are debated academically. But there is some good indication that Baroque composers did think of slowing down at the end of pieces. In fact, it is often explicitly notated with an Adagio over the last few bars of a movement. You see this especially frequently in Handel and Corelli, especially in sonatas and concerti. A similar use of adagio occurs towards the end of the 3rd movement of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto No. 1, followed by an "a tempo" with the recapitulation of the main theme.

Aside from the use of "adagio" (or often, in tandem with it), you'll also see places where there is a fermata placed on a half-cadence a few bars before the end, which is followed by one or more rests (during which a cadenza may be improvised) and finally the close of the original phrase. Another way in which ritardandos could occasionally be notated was by actually using longer note values. In triple time, this frequently involved a so-called hemiola at the cadence.

Turning to documented sources, I found Robert Donington's "Baroque Music: Style and Performance : a Handbook" (1982) on Google books, which has a section on "Flexibility in Baroque Tempo". No doubt there has been much research in the intervening 30+ years, but even here, he quotes multiple sources as requiring liberties to be taken with the tempo -- sometimes faster, and sometimes slower -- as determined by the taste of the performer. He quotes Frescobaldi as saying:

Cadences... are properly to be very much drawn out...

Jean Rousseau said that:

there are people who imagine that imparting the movement is to follow and keep time; but these are very different matters.

Quantz is quoted as saying:

the performance should be easy and flexible...

A few pages later, there is a section titled "Notated Rallentandos", where he mentions a piece by Locke in 1675 that explicitly instructs "soft and slow by degrees" and discusses the use of "adagio" at the end of a movement (which I already mention above). He claims these types of instructions were used when a greater-than-usual slowing affect was desired, because "It was not... usually thought necessary to indicate anything so musically obvious." He further claims that ending a piece without such a slowing "is a special and not normal affect."

Here's an example from Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 2, Movement I (Andante larghetto) which utilizes a number of these techniques at once. You see a fermata (on a first inversion vii dim!), followed by a brief pause and resumption of the phrase, followed by an adagio, and finally ended with a dotted figure that uses note values twice as long as the preceding figures. This is not to say that every Baroque piece ends with such a dramatic coda, but rather to show that the concept of slowing down at the end of a piece was very much a familiar Baroque gesture, even without the use of the term "ritardando". The relevant section starts about 2:47 in this video.

Answer 2

Questions like this cause endless debate among scholars. The basic fact is that sheet music from the Baroque era tends to have a great deal less detail and specificity about interpretive matters than sheet music written in later eras. Bowing directions for strings are never given; the only dynamic markings used are often just "p" and "f", and there are no crescendos or decrescendos. Expressive indications like "accelerando", "ritardando" or "rubato" simply aren't written in the score. Yet this begs the question -- with so many obviously expressive matters omitted, does that mean that musicians never used them?

We are certain that musicians in the Baroque were expected to put a great deal of their own expressiveness and interpretation into the music, and that included improvising solo passages with much more freedom than classical musicians did in the 20th century, even when they were performing music written in the Baroque era.

With regard to your question about ritardando and matters of tempo, we cannot be sure in most cases. Obviously they were not able to make audio recordings back then. We have only to study what critics in the actual era wrote when they reviewed concerts, and what musicians and composers of the era wrote in treatises on musicianship.

All of this comes under the heading of historically informed performance of the Baroque era. Sometimes it is just called early music; there are university music schools with whole departments devoted to the study of early music and how to perform it, and you can get a degree in early music performance.

The historically-informed performance movement, a scholarly attempt to re-evaluate and research how musicians played those pieces, only got started around the 1970s. There is a Wikipedia article on Historically Informed Performance but I would not take anything in this article as gospel, as the musicians in the movement itself today find endless opportunities to debate all of it.

Now as to your piano playing: The piano did not come into wide practical use until the latter half of Mozart's short life, after the Baroque movement hand ended, so the piano does not figure into Baroque music at all.

All Baroque keyboard music was written for the harpsichord or pipe organ. None of these instruments had the ability to create dynamic contrast from the keyboard. You could not make a crescendo or decrescendo by playing the keys harder or softer. You could not make one note louder or softer than another with your fingers. So if you see a Baroque keyboard piece and it has different dynamic markings or crescendos or decrescendos in the score, you can be assured that the composer did not use those markings; they were added by editors centuries later, with modern piano players in mind.

You refer to the "right pedal" by which I think you mean the damper pedal, which is used to create the sustain effect. You are right in understanding that there was no keyboard instrument in the Baroque with this capability. So simply put, if you decide to use the damper pedal on your piano when you are playing a Baroque keyboard piece, you must understand that you are doing something that the composer would not have even been able to conceive of. You may make your own artistic decision to add some sustain in places, but when you do this you are not doing it in the Baroque manner.

Furthermore, keyboard instruments in the Baroque era were tuned very differently. They were not tuned in the modern fashion, which we call 12-tone equal temperament. In the modern fashion, the distance between the pitches of one key and the key next to it -- what we call a half-step -- are almost exactly the same all the way up and down the keyboard. But in the Baroque era they did not do it this way. The different keys described many different intervals of pitch between them. Some half-steps were closer together than those of the modern piano, and some were wider apart. This is a complex subject. There were many different schemes of what is collectively referred to as meantone temperament.

Well, now that I have introduced you to the topic of historically-informed performance practice of the Baroque era, you can look for resources and do some research on your own. You can read the opinions of the scholars and decide how you want to use their ideas yourself. And see if you can get to play a real harpsichord in a historic mean-tone tuning while you are at it.

Answer 3

Wheat Williams covered the basics of historically-informed-performance quite well.

I want to add that unmeasured preludes (not uncommon in Baroque music) indicate that Baroque composers did have a concept of give-and-take in regards to tempo. (You can look at examples of preludes here or here to see what the music looked like.)

So, while the purists may say that if it's not written in you shouldn't perform it that way, realistically performers who work extensively with Baroque music have to make some artistic decisions. Hopefully we do so in an informed way, with the knowledge that our performances are not for Baroque audiences but for modern audiences and must be meaningful to them.

Since many of the Baroque forms are originally dances, I try to think of what a dancer would do at any particular moment. Sometimes I don't slow down much, but I take a little pause before the last chord. Sometimes I do slow down (but probably not as dramatically as with a 19th century piece). Sometimes I delay my ritardando until the last measure or even the last beat or two. Sometimes I just take time with the last chord, letting it unwind slowly. There are no absolutely right answers, but there are also many options beyond ritardando and no ritardando.

Answer 4

"Historically informed" practitioners will tell you all kinds of stuff overgeneralized from a narrow modern point of view. For example, that dynamics in keyboards are a modern invention. Clavichords were perfectly capable of nuanced dynamic play, and larger instruments like harpsichords had several manuals and registration possibilities in order to allow for dynamic changes.

What baroque composers left us with are mostly "scripts": the material needed for performances mostly done under their own supervision. Composing was not an independent profession. Bach tended to spell out a lot more than some of his contemporaries and predecessors in terms of embellishments and accompaniment (he did not use the baroque variant of lead sheets, figured bass, all that much). But that's partly because much of what he spelled out has actual harmonic function and is "part of the music" rather than its performance.

At any rate, when you are playing baroque counterpoint, the functional harmonies are often progressing at a much faster pace than once per measure, so the opportunities for using the pedal in accordance with the music are quite limited. Not because of any historically motivated rules but because it would mash together complex and nuanced harmonic progressions.