Wim Wenders is definitely a crank and can safely be ignored.
There are many, many indications of this. These are neatly gone through
on this youtube channel:
Note that WW has banned people for referring to this channel in his
comments section.
I don’t want to drag this message out too much trying to disprove a
crank, but at least a couple of notes (all from the youtube channel
recommended above):
-
There are many, many references to proper metronome usage in the
19th century, mostly in didactic literature. There is only one
reference to Wim Wenders’ counting method, and that is in one of
Maelzel’s patent applications where it specifically says that the
practice championed by Wenders is wrong. -
It is true that there are a few problematic metronome markings from
the 19th century, but adjusting all metronome markings to accommodate
these creates thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of problems that did
not exist before. Out of the frying pan and into the nuclear holocaust.
A better approach is to examine the few problematic markings
individually, and indeed there are solutions for many; for example, some
are clearly misprints and, for Beethoven, there are some indications
that the metronome might have been running about 20% too fast. -
The tempos that Wenders champions are too slow. Even he cannot
maintain them when he tries to demonstrate them. -
Also - this is a fatal objection - at some point in history, Wenders
requires that all musicians decided to double the tempos they had
previously been using. Nowhere in the copious literature is there the
slightest whisper about this. (Compare the screams in the resent
literature when Glenn Gould played Bach a bit slower than anyone else.)
We have recordings by pupils of some of the composers that Wenders uses
as demonstrations - did they really double the tempos that their
teachers wanted? And nobody said anything about this, ever?
Strictly flat-earth stuff.
S