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How is rubato played?
Relax strict rhythmic placement for expressive phrasing, allowing selected notes, beats or spans to linger or press forward while the larger musical direction remains intelligible. The familiar metaphor of borrowing time and giving it back describes balance, not a rule that every delay must be repaid mechanically within the same bar. Historical contrametric rubato lets a melody float against a comparatively steady accompaniment; structural or agogic rubato slows and accelerates the whole performing body. Choose the practice that fits the composer, period, texture and notation. Rubato may shape a phrase or a broader passage and remains in force until a tempo, tempo giusto, in tempo, another tempo mark or the end of the span restores stricter time.
How does rubato sound?
The melody seems to breathe and speak, leaning into and away from the beat so the music sounds spontaneous and emotionally pliant rather than metronomic.
In context
Performance-practice research distinguishes two main rubato traditions: melody-against-pulse flexibility and whole-texture tempo flexibility. The practice predates Chopin and is discussed across sources from early music through C. P. E. Bach and Mozart, but Chopin made the contrametric, singing-melody model central to the modern imagination of rubato; later Romantic and early twentieth-century performers and composers, including Rachmaninoff, continued broader forms of the practice. The word is normally written in full, and the isolated Rub. attestation is too weak for production.