The Short

TEMPO TERMS 373
seems to have been virtually synonymous with ‘andante sostenuto’. Wagner used ‘sostenuto’ as a tempo term in its
own right in Der fliegende HollÄnder, for sections which he marked with metronome marks comparable to the generally
rather slow andantes (andante ? ? = 50–76; sostenuto ? ? = 50–69).
Brahms also used ‘sostenuto’ as a tempo term: an instance is the Un poco sostenuto which opens his First Symphony.
This, however, led to confusion with his employment of the very similar term ‘Poco sostenuto’, in a quite different
sense, for the last seventeen bars of the first movement. In October 1881 he wrote to his publisher, Simrock,
requesting him to change ‘Poco sostenuto’ to ‘Meno allegro’ since, he observed, ‘people always take the tempo of the
introduction’. 715 But the change was never made, though Brahms himself pencilled it into his own copy. Elsewhere,
Brahms frequently used ‘sostenuto’ and ‘poco sostenuto’ in the sense of‘meno mosso’ or ‘allargando’, for instance in
the last four bars of the third movement of his Second Symphony. At the beginning of the development section of the
first movement of his G major Violin Sonata he wrote ‘poco a poco più sostenuto’; the fact that in this case he
required a slower tempo, not merely a different expression, is demonstrated by the direction ‘poco a poco tempo I 0’ just
before the recapitulation. And similar instructions to return to the original tempo are found in much earlier works, for
instance towards the end of the first movement of the 1854 version of the B major Piano Trio. J. A. Fuller Maitland
identified this usage of ‘sostenuto’ with what he called the ‘romantic’ school, but it was certainly used in the same sense
at an early stage in the nineteenth century. 716
Spontini clearly understood ‘sostenuto’, when appended to other tempo terms, to mean slower, hence in Olympie, Act
II, no. 4 he headed the section ‘Andante espressivo sostenuto’ with the metronome mark ? = 56; later in the number he
wrote ‘Meno sostenuto’ and gave the metronome mark ? = 72. In Berlioz's music, too, the term is used, in
combination with ‘adagio’, ‘larghetto’, and ‘andante’, to indicate slower tempos than usual. Spohr employed the tempo
term ‘andante sostenuto’ on a couple of occasions (the male-voice partsongs op. 44 no. 1 and op. 90 no. 4), in both
cases with metronome marks that equate with those he gave for movements headed ‘adagio’. Mendelssohn, on the
other hand, does not seem to have used it in this way, but rather as an expression marking, perhaps calling for
extremely legato execution. His use of the term in the Second Symphony (Lobgesang) op. 52, for instance, appears not
to have been intended to affect the speed. He gave the same metronome mark(? = 100) to the Andante and to the
Andante sostenuto assai, both of which movements are in 2/4 and contain similar note values.
715
Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, ed. Max Kalbeck, x (Tutzing, 1974), 192.
716
Art. ‘Sostenuto’, Grove's Dictionary, 3rd edn., ed. H. C. Colles (London, 1927).