Stephen Johnson gets to grips with classical music’s technical terms

STACCATO IS ONE of those 
musical terms that’s entered common 
parlance. And on this occasion 
common parlance seems to have got
it broadly right. When musicians and 
non-musicians use the word today they 
evidently mean more-or-less the same
thing. Staccato notes or words walk on
tip-toe or jab you emphatically in the
 solar plexus. Gerard Hoffnung’s drawing 
of staccato as a sharply angular man, all
 anglepoise legs and knife-edged boots,
 stiletto toecap barely touching the floor,
 doubly merits Jeeves’s Latin approval: “rem acu tetigisti” - “you have touched it
 with the fine point of a needle”.

Even so, the Italian word staccato does not mean sharp or pointed - as I
once mistakenly presumed in a Milanese
 knife shop. It means detached. When
 the term was first used in music, in the early
 baroque period, its meaning varied, but it 
seems to have been widely understood as an
antonym for legato, which meant bound
 together. A legato phrase was one played
 with one continuous bow or sung with one continuous breath — which is why the word
 is sometimes understood to mean smooth.
Staccato, by contrast, was broken up, but
 that didn’t necessarily mean needle-sharp. If 
a baroque or classical era composer wanted 
that effect, he would probably have written staccatissimo - very or extremely detached.

For around 100 years notation has 
been fairly standardised. A staccato sign
is a dot: shorten the note by about a half. Staccatissimo is more like a tiny 
black wedge: shorten the note by about 
three quarters. Its opposite, legato, looks
 like a horizontal curved bracket stretched 
over the relevant number of notes. It 
wasn’t always so clear. Pointing to one set
 of dots/wedges in the first movement of
 Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, conductor 
Nikolaus Harnoncourt observed, it
 could be staccato, it could be accents,
 it could be the excrement of a fly. And 
what do composers in any age mean 
when they put staccato dots under a
legato line? Surely that’s a contradiction
 in symbols? Not for string players, 
for whom it translates as all in one 
bow, but still detached. The soloist’s 
falling-rising phrase that rounds off
 the slow movement of Brahms’s Violin
Concerto is a classic example: it sounds like a 
voice catching - just a hint of a sob. Which is 
presumably the effect Schubert wanted when
 he marked a long phrase the same way in the 
Scherzo of his D845 Piano Sonata - lovely, but 
difficult to bring off.