Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination for Free Online

time apparently favored
     faster tempi—Carl Czerny, for instance, published tables of metronome markings for
     works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven indicating such. 65 On the other hand, both Czerny and Beethoven were setting tempi at the piano, not
     in rehearsal with a full orchestra, and the sharper attack and quicker decay of the
     piano might have encouraged faster tempi. 66
    And then, there is the tricky business of Beethoven’s advancing deafness. A Beethoven
     relying more on the
sight
of the metronome’s swinging pendulum than its
sound
might have experienced a psychological phenomenon called saccadic chronostasis: watching
     a clock tick can produce the illusion that it’s ticking ever so slightly slower than
     it actually is. 67 Another toss-up: musical training improves accurate tempo perception, but deafness
     inhibits it. 68
    Possibly the first person to notice that the ears were betterthan the eyes at judging intervals of time was a German physician named Karl von Vierordt,
     whose main claim to fame was figuring out how to measure blood pressure; he invented
     the forerunner of the modern sphygmomanometer. He was also curious about how the brain
     makes sense of time, publishing a book about it in 1868. Out of his experiments (performed
     mainly on himself), he formulated Vierordt’s Law, a fairly robust rule of thumb that
     says that humans almost universally underestimate long periods of time, while overestimating
     short ones. This logically implied the existence of an “indifference point,” where
     our perception crosses the line between under- and overestimation: one spot on the
     continuum where our perception of an interval of time is exact. 69
    The indifference point is not an uncontroversial subject (experimental parameters
     seem to affect it to a somewhat unruly degree, scientifically speaking), but—and here’s
     where it gets interesting vis-à-vis Beethoven—the most commonly cited figures for
     the indifference point are between 625 and 700 milliseconds. 70 On a metronome, that would correspond to between 86 and 96 beats per minute—almost
     exactly the range of Romantic and post-Romantic performances of the first movement
     of the Fifth. Also, the 550-millisecond beat that Beethoven’s 108-bpm marking prescribes
     is right in the middle of the range in which people are most sensitive to tempo discrimination. 71 In other words, in psychological terms, Beethoven’s marking for the Fifth
is
too fast—perhaps
deliberately
too fast. Based on Vierordt’s Law, 108 bpm will always feel like it’s running away
     from us, the next beat always falling just before our overestimation wants to place
     it; and, what’s more, 108 is right where that’s liable to discombobulate us the most.
     All those plodding conductors might have been in search of rhetorical importance—or
     they might merely have been instinctively nudging the Fifth’s tempo back toward the
     indifference point, each successive downbeat coming where they expect. Consciously
     or not, Beethoven gave the Fifth atempo marking that exacerbated the symphony’s sense of disorientation; consciously
     or not, ever since they got their hands on it, conductors have been trying to ameliorate
     it.
    The 108 threshold reentered the musical world with the early-music movement, once
     its practitioners gained the confidence to classify Beethoven as a candidate for historically
     informed performance. 72 The early-music philosophy, with its focus on period instruments, textual fidelity,
     and “letting the music speak for itself” (as one sometime skeptic put it), 73 nonetheless, like Toscanini’s machine-like clarity, reflected contemporary needs
     as much as Beethoven’s; it was both a construct made possible by modern scholarship
     and an assertion of authenticity in an increasingly manufactured, consumerist culture.
    The whole concept of “authenticity” fascinated the existentialists, especially Jean-Paul
     Sartre, as a