Written verbal cues remain one of the most effortlessways to transmit a fairly accurate idea of the temporequired for a composition. In this chapter we willask how words such as allegro, and adagio were taught in the treatises, andhow they functioned within an already robust temponotation system that used time signatures and notevalues as its primary means of tempo commu-nication.Some treatise authors and musicians, as will belater shown, actually far preferred to exclusivelyuse tempo words such as allegro and adagio instead of the complicated systemwhereby both the time signature and note values mustbe factored in to determine tempo. To parse out thevarious uses and meanings of tempo words asexplained in the treatises, the following two maintopics will be explored here: (1) the variousfunctions of tempo words, and (2) a comparison offour very comprehensive treatments of tempo wordsfound in the treatises by Joseph Riepel, (1752),Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1755), Leopold Mozart(1756/1770), and Christian Kalkbrenner (1789).

Performer's Corner

We learn here that the use of tempo words alongside analready robust set of tempo cues (time signaturesand note values) was by no means systematized. Someauthors taught that tempo words would modify theinformation contained in a time signature + notevalue pair, and others taught that it wouldessentially reiterate what was already encoded viathe primary tempo cues. Still others believed thattempo words should take the place of frequent timesignature changes, or even that time signatures andnote values were of no importance and that tempowords should be used instead. What is more,especially in the category of slow tempo words, suchas grave, adagio, largo, and lento, the order of tempowords from slow to fast was by no means set. It doesappear, however, that a number of authors agreedthat largo was slowerthan adagio. In theend, it is really only in the score analyses inchapters 9–13 that we begin to see where thedifferent systems of tempo word usage wereemployed.