What does allegro mean in music?

Expression & tempo

Allegro

Italian, "cheerful"

Allegro is a tempo marking meaning fast and lively, conventionally around 120 to 156 beats per minute, and it is the most common opening tempo in the classical repertoire.

The word means cheerful rather than fast, and that is a real instruction rather than an etymological curiosity: an allegro is meant to have character, not merely speed. Composers who wanted speed alone wrote presto.

The metronome range is a convention rather than a rule, and it moved over time, a Haydn allegro and a Mahler allegro are not the same tempo. Qualifiers refine it: allegro moderato is held back, allegro assai is very fast, allegro ma non troppo is fast but not too much so, and allegretto is a shade slower and lighter than allegro proper.

In multi-movement works the first movement is so often an allegro that the movement itself is sometimes referred to by the marking.

Tempo: Tempo is the speed of a piece, given either as an Italian term such as Allegro or Adagio or as a precise metronome marking in beats per minute.
Andante: Andante is a tempo marking meaning a moderate walking pace, conventionally around 76 to 108 beats per minute, between the slow adagio and the moderate moderato.
Adagio: Adagio is a slow tempo marking, conventionally around 66 to 76 beats per minute, indicating music played at ease and with space rather than merely slowly.
Metronome: A metronome is a device that sounds a steady pulse at a chosen number of beats per minute, used to establish and gradually increase tempo in practice.

Every term in this glossary is taught in context somewhere in Arco's curricula, on the staff, on the keyboard, and on your own fingerboard at the same time.

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