The Short

370 TEMPO TERMS
there was a very marked predilection for extremely fast allegros among a number of composers. In the work of those
composers to whom metre still seems to have been a significant factor, the fastest movement is almost invariably
found in ? (or dubious ?) movements, with semiquavers as their fastest notes, rather than in genuine ? movements with
quavers. This is not surprising if one bears in mind the notion that larger note values did not move as fast as slower
ones.
Beethoven's fastest movements of this kind are those marked ‘allegro con brio’. (His movements marked ‘allegro
molto’, ‘presto’, and ‘prestissimo’ all have the time signature ?, have quavers as their fastest notes, or in one case (the
Septet op. 20) quaver triplets, and do not achieve as rapid an absolute tempo.)The speediest of all, in terms of the
velocity of the fastest functional notes 710 (in this case semiquavers), are the Allegro con brio first movements of the
First and Second symphonies at ? = 112 711 and ? = 100 respectively (though in the case of the First Symphony most of
the semiquavers are repeated notes or short slurred scale passages). A more breathless effect may be created by the
slightly slower first movement of the String Quartet op. 95 at ? = 92 because of the proportion of separately bowed
semiquavers and the more angular patterns in which they occur. The fastest functional notes in these movements
move, therefore, at between 736–896 notes per minute (hereafter npm). Some of Schubert's fastest movements seem,
on the basis of the metronome marks in Alfonso und Estrella, to be equally rapid, with the fastest functional notes in
allegro assai and allegro molto in the dizzying range of 832–96 npm. The movements marked simply ‘allegro’ by both
these composers are never slower than 640 npm; in Beethoven's case they reach 676 npm in the last movement of the
Fifth Symphony op. 67 and the first movement of the String Quartet op. 74 and in Schubert's case 736 npm in no. 2 of
Alfonso und Estrella, though only for a few bars. Cherubini's use of‘allegro‘, in the few works to which he gave
metronome marks, matches Beethoven's and Schubert's; in the Second String Quartet a movement headed ‘Allegro’
has 640 npm, but his fastest metronome tempo of 704 npm was given to a movement in the Fourth String Quartet
marked ‘Allegro assai’.
Rossini's, Spontini's, Mendelssohn's, and Verdi's fastest movements attain a similar range, yet they do not quite reach
the fastest speeds in Beethoven and Schubert (except in the case of some of Mendelssohn's piano figurations).Rossini's
fastest movements in the operas Le Siège de Corinthe, Le Comte Ory, MoÏse, and Guillaume Tell, sometimes marked ‘Allegro
vivace’ but most just ‘allegro’, and with an utterly inconsistent mixture of ? and ?, reach 836 npm;the slowest allegro
vivace has 640 npm. The range for ‘allegro’ alone is enormous:
710
The expression ‘functional notes’ is taken here to exclude tremolando or ornamental flourishes.
711
As explained in Ch. 9, the ♭ time signatures for this movement and the Allegro con brio of the Septet op. 20, which also has semiquavers, seem anomalous, and both
movements seem really to have been intended to be in ♩.