Allegretto: meaning and use in music

How is allegretto played?

Choose a sprightly, buoyant pace that keeps Allegro’s animation but tempers its urgency. Treccani describes Allegretto as moderating Allegro’s speed and stresses that such words remain approximate and vary by composer and period; nineteenth-century practice often heard both terms faster than seventeenth-century practice. Modern tables may cluster Allegretto around 112–120 BPM and others lower, so metre, phrasing and any explicit metronome mark outrank a universal range. The marking often suits inner movements whose motion is quick yet measured or song-like.

How does allegretto sound?

A gracious, buoyant motion — brisk and cheerful but held back from the full energy of allegro.

Taken across everything I could verify, allegretto spans roughly 98–120 beats a minute: Symphony Nova Scotia puts it lowest, at 98–109, while a Pressbooks source reaches up to 120. My own preference sits at that upper end, 112–120, which is the range I use above. The musicologist Clive Brown, who has studied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performing practice in detail, treats allegretto the way he treats the rest of the family: as a marker of metre, period, composer, and character, not one fixed universal speed. Both ends of the range can be right at once. What survives across the sources is the relative idea, not the number: allegretto as allegro's calmer cousin, never quite pinned down the way a modern metronome mark would want it to be.

In context

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony labels its second movement Allegretto: a famous measured, processional example whose animation never becomes an all-out Allegro. The term’s diminutive logic is relational rather than numeric, and its historical shift shows why one chart cannot govern every score. Beethoven’s first extant metronome figures occur on the corrected copy of Op. 112 sent in December 1815; his broader symphonic tables followed, so “after 1815” names a transition rather than the birth of exact tempo. Historical dictionaries independently attest allgtto. as a short form, while full Allegretto remains the clearest modern spelling.