The Short

Ex. 3.33. Spohr, String Quartet op. 82/2/iv
Ex. 3.34. Spohr, Faust, no. 5
employed sf or fz even more rarely, apparently preferring the accent mark > as an exact equivalent. 165
Rinforzando (rinforzato, rf, rfz, rinf, rfp)
NOTATION OF ACCENTS AND DYNAMICS 87
In scores of the 1760s and 1770s ‘rinforzando’ is not infrequently found in contexts that show it to be essentially
synonymous with ‘crescendo’; but perhaps, as discussions of the term by some theorists suggest, it may have been
used to indicate a more intense increase in volume than ‘crescendo’ or ‘crescendo il forte’. Both ‘crescendo (il forte)’
and ‘rinforzando’ were sometimes used in the same work, for instance by Jommelli. It seems likely that Jommelli's
terminology was not merely casual; the musical contexts in which these terms are used by him in L'Olimpiade suggest
that ‘rinforzando’ was intended to signal a particularly rapid and powerful crescendo, or perhaps an exceptionally
forceful
165 See below, ‘The Accent Hairpin’.