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the gist of his theory is that the reason some of Beethoven's marked tempos seem so unplayably fast (as in the case of "Hammerklavier") is because ACTUALLY, back in the day, people meant for TWO beats of a metronome to equal ONE beat of the song (e.g. a beat was a single "back-and-forth" swing on the swinging pendulum thing); therefore, everything with a marked tempo prior to ~1900 or so should actually be played HALF as fast

in some cases, the result actually is sort-of kind-of interesting, in a thought-exercise-y way—like, hearing something that's normally performed whizbang-fast, like Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude," slowed all the way down , lets you hear some nuances/interesting bits that you may not have noticed before

but in most cases... lmao. the result seems... so self-evidently incorrect and bad? like, i don't think you can really do a "Hammerklavier" at tempo, but you certainly want to be a hell of a lot CLOSER to the marked tempo than the version he came up with!

which, if it were just his personal preference, that's whatever, people have weird taste all the time

but this dude is DETERMINED to prove that his version of thing is CORRECT and THE ACTUAL WAY THESE PIECES WERE ORIGINALLY PLAYED

and BY GOD is he going to flood Youtube with his recordings of "authentic / original tempo" versions of everything in an attempt to prove his point

(hence my stumbling upon him!)

his determination to prove his theory is fascinating to me ESPECIALLY in the case of Beethoven/Chopin/etc, because the chain of oral history for those composers isn't THAT long ago... like, Cortot is one of Chopin's "grand-students" and we have lots of recordings of *him* playing, and it seems really implausible Cortot would've RADICALLY veered from Chopin's original tempo in EVERY SINGLE RECORDING we have of his lol. like, this is not true for most attempts at piecing together history! oral stuff is really unreliable a lot of the time! BUT in this case that counts as Pretty Good Evidence Against The Authentic Sound Guy, to me

i considered doing a deep dive-y post where i'd dig more into This Whole Thing™, because, like, was i missing something? IS it possible ppl 200 years ago were listening to music in this bafflingly different way? what do Actual Musicologists think (i am just some shitposter)?