Sehr schnell: meaning and use in music

How is sehr schnell played?

Take a markedly fast tempo, clearly quicker than the context’s plain schnell, and keep it rhythmically legible. The phrase intensifies urgency toward the fast end of the local scale, but it does not equal one universal presto or prestissimo range. Its construction is broadly comparable with Italian intensifiers such as molto allegro or the contrast between presto and prestissimo, yet the score—not the analogy—sets the speed. Jentsch prints Sehr schnell as a complete movement heading, and similar German wording can appear either as a heading or a local change. Preserve the high-speed instruction without adding automatic brightness, dynamics or articulation.

How does sehr schnell sound?

Markedly rapid and urgent — the German equivalent of pushing from allegro into presto.

Sehr schnell mirrors sehr langsam from the other direction: very, plus schnell, heightening urgency rather than specifying a metronome value. DWDS links schnell loosely to allegro, presto, vivace and vivo, but only as loose associations, never as equivalences, and never with a number.

In context

Duden defines schnell through high speed or tempo, and Jentsch’s Piano Quintet, Op. 50 prints Sehr schnell as the complete heading of its finale. The phrase belongs to nineteenth- and twentieth-century vernacular German score practice, in which composers built precise, longer instructions instead of relying only on Italian: Schumann’s Schnell und spielend and Mahler’s Kräftig, bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell place the same base word inside character-plus-tempo phrases. Sehr clearly intensifies plain schnell in the batch term, broadly as Italian molto can intensify a fast word. Comparisons with presto, prestissimo or molto allegro remain practical analogies rather than exact equivalences, and the result need not automatically sound brighter. No fixed BPM or stable general abbreviation was established, so the phrase remains written out.

Equivalent terms

• IT molto allegro
• IT presto
• FR très vite
• EN very fast
• DA meget hurtigt