# Allegro (Italian, "cheerful")

Source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/allegro

**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.

Canonical source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/allegro