IT vivace tempo core term Support my free tools
- Abbreviation
- viv.
- Tempo
- 168–176 BPM Click to play the tempo A practical modern guide range; other tables give a notably slower 132–168 BPM. Historically Vivace named a lively character more than one fixed speed.
What the sources say
| Source | BPM |
|---|---|
| LOUIS Pressbooks, Music Appreciation | 168–176 |
| Symphony Nova Scotia | 132–140 |
| Humanities LibreTexts (Kuznetsova) | 132–140 |
| BBC Music Magazine | 156–168 |
How is vivace played?
Create rhythmic spring, brightness and forward life rather than chasing a bare number. Treccani places Vivace above Allegro and below Presto, but modern reference tables span roughly 132–176 BPM and beyond, so metre, figuration, period, composer and qualifiers remain decisive. The word comes through Italian from Latin vivax and vivere, “living,” which explains its character-first force. It can stand alone as a movement heading or appear in compounds such as Molto vivace, Allegro vivace and Vivacissimo; each construction adjusts the degree and context of the animation.
How does vivace sound?
Sparkling, buoyant and full of vitality, lighter and more animated than a square allegro.
Taken across every source I could verify, vivace spans roughly 132–176 beats a minute — a wide spread, from Symphony Nova Scotia and a companion source at 132–140, through the BBC's guide at 156–168, up to a Pressbooks source that reaches 176. Not a small gap. My own preference sits at the upper end, 168–176: livelier than most of the alternatives, and the range I actually use above. The musicologist Clive Brown, who has studied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performing practice in detail, offers a reason for the scatter rather than a tie-breaker: in his account, words like vivace tracked the metre, the period, the composer, and the character of a piece, not one fixed absolute speed. Use whichever end of the range suits the music in front of you, just don't mistake either number for something inherited whole from the composers themselves.
In context
The scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is headed Molto vivace and includes a Presto contrast, a score-level example of the word governing an entire fleet-footed movement. Vivace long predates Mälzel’s metronome, so its continuing job is to communicate lively character as well as approximate speed; later BPM tables translate that tradition differently rather than fixing one inherited number. Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Dictionary of Abbreviations and the Olivetti Italian dictionary independently attest viv. as the compact form.