Excerpt from Tempo Rubato and Other Essays

There is in musical terminology no word under cover of which quite so many sins are committed as under tempo rubato. Chopin deservedly receives the credit for having discovered it, but many who thus credit him hold very strange ideas about it. There are those who suffer with a technic too unreliable to keep them steady in prolonged rapid passages and when they run away with the tempo they palm their weakness off as "tempo rubato." Then there are those who believe that the use of tempo rubato begins with the works of Chopin and that it must not be employed in any music written before him. There are also the arch-pedants who insist that tempo rubato not only begins but also ends with Chopin's compositions. All of which is, of course, pure cant, the bulwark of ignorance and bigotry.

If Chopin coined the term tempo rubato, his coinage was certainly not particularly happy, he could scarcely have hit upon words more ambiguous and less descriptive of their object. "With freedom of time" (tempo libero), "vacillating or wavering time" (tempo vacillando), or "undecided time" (tempo indeciso), would have done as well and would have been more easily understood by nations that do not speak Italian, of which - by the way-Chopin's knowledge was very limited.

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