Adagio (music)
Adagio (in the sense of "slow") is one of the oldest musical tempo designations that came up at the beginning of the 17th century. Adagio means “comfortable, comfortable” in Italian , but over time it has acquired the meaning of calm, slow, yes very slowly (but not as slow as largo ) for music , especially in Germany, while in Italy because of the literal sense of the word too today adagio is more like what we understand by andante . In baroque music , e.g. B. in Handel , tempo markings are by no means precisely defined. In his sonatas for flute and basso continuo , for example, Handel describes a larghetto for recorder in the version for flute as an adagio . This corresponds to the tradition of the baroque conception of music, according to which there is no absolutely valid tempo of a piece of music: rather, the timing depends on the individuality, the skill of the performer as well as on the instrument, the line-up and the acoustic conditions.
The term adagio occurs both within a piece of music for a few notes and at the beginning of a movement to determine the tempo for its entire duration, so that an adagio is usually understood to mean a whole movement of a sonata, symphony or quartet, etc. In works of pre-classical and Viennese classics , the Adagio is often the second set, but exceptions are not rare ( 9th Symphony of Beethoven and since then more often); Such a sentence is called an adagio even if it contains a more moving part (Andante, Piu mosso, etc.).
The superlative Adagissimo , "extremely slow", is rare. The diminutive form Adagietto means: quite slowly, i.e. H. not as slow as Adagio ; as a heading it usually indicates a slow sentence of short duration, e.g. B. in Mahler's 5th Symphony .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans-Peter Schmitz in: Georg Friedrich Händel: Eleven sonatas for flute and figured bass. 4225.
literature
- Hugo Riemann , Alfred Einstein : Hugo Riemanns Musiklexikon . 11th edition. Max Hesses Verlag, Berlin 1929, p. 7th f .