Drängend: meaning and use in music

How is drängend played?

Make the pulse, phrasing and musical weight lean forward with urgency. Mahler glossaries align drängend with “pressing forward” and often with stringendo, but Brahms’s instruction “Drängend, doch nicht schnell” shows that added pressure need not mean simply playing faster. Mahler grades the effect precisely in compounds such as zart drängend, unmerklich drängend, heftig drängend and drängend bis zum Schluss. Let the surrounding qualifier and later tempo or character marking determine the degree and duration instead of imposing a mechanically even acceleration.

How does drängend sound?

An insistent forward lean — the music presses ahead with mounting urgency, gathering tension as it goes.

In context

Drängend is among the characteristic words in Mahler’s German performance vocabulary and appears throughout his symphonic writing; Symphony No. 1 includes “Drängend bis zum Schluss.” The Ratz/Füssl critical edition of Symphony No. 5 also places Drängend in the Adagietto’s closing passage, an edition-specific reading. It is commonly used as the German comparison for Italian stringendo, but the two should not be treated as mechanically identical in every context.

Equivalent terms

• FR en animant
• FR plus pressant
• IT stringendo
• IT incalzando
• EN pressing forward