(It.: ‘at ease’, ‘leisurely’).
A tempo designation whose meaning has changed substantially over the years. Early forms of the word in musical scores include adaggio (Monteverdi, 1610; Cavalli, L'Elena, 1659) and adasio (Frescobaldi, 1635; Erasmus Kindermann, 1639). In the 18th and 19th centuries it was often abbreviated to ado and adago. The form ad agio is also found, though not in musical contexts.
Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, iii, 2/1619/R) equated it with largo and lento, translating all three as langsam; in the preface to his Sonnata's of III Parts (1683) Purcell said that it and grave ‘import nothing but a very slow movement’. Monteverdi seems to have used the word in this sense in the six-voice Magnificat of his 1610 collection, where he gave the organist the instruction ‘Et si suona Adaggio, perchè li soprano cantano di croma’ (‘play slowly because the sopranos sing quavers’). Banchieri was probably the first to use it specifically as a tempo designation, rather than just part of an elaborate explanatory sentence, in ‘La battaglia’ from L'organo suonarino (1611). For him, as for many other early users of adagio, including Domenico Mazzocchi (1626, 1638) and Carlo Farina (1627), it was the slowest tempo.
But it is likely that Frescobaldi meant adagio in its literal sense of ‘at ease’ or even ‘as you wish’, both in the prefaces to his two 1615 volumes and in the music of his 1635 Fiori musicali: the musical context suggests that a freer, less metrical style of playing was expected for the sections so marked. And something of the kind was also implied by Brossard (Dictionaire, 1703), who translated it as ‘comfortable, at one's ease, without hurrying’, but added that it usually meant ‘slowly, dragging the beat a little’. As late as 1732 J.G. Walther (Musicalisches Lexikon) implied the same (see Comodo).
The ambiguity of the word lies in its position as one of the first words in music to mean ‘slow’ and its equally widely accepted position as the second of the five main degrees of movement in music (as described, for instance, by Rousseau, Dictionnaire, 1768), lying between largo, the slowest, and andante: Rousseau (article ‘Mouvement’) translated adagio as modéré. Throughout the 18th century there was an unvoiced disagreement among the theorists as to whether adagio, largo or grave was the slowest tempo; in his own copy (now in GB-Lbl) of Grassineau's Musical Dictionary (1740), Burney corrected the definition of adagio as ‘the slowest of any except grave’ to ‘the slowest of any’. Broadly speaking, Italian writers and composers seem to have regarded it as the slowest tempo, whereas French musicians saw it as being faster than largo.
But by the 19th century adagio was generally agreed to be the slowest tempo, while largo was used to suggest something more grand, and grave became more serious but was rarely slower as well. Only adagissimo (or adagiosissimo) was slower: it had been used by Bach at the end of his D minor Toccata and of the chorale prelude O Mensch, bewein; and it replaced the earlier adagio adagio, which appears in works by Martino Pesenti (1639, 1647) and was equated with largo by Brossard (1703), who translated it as très lentement (although he translated largo as fort lentement).
Adagio was also used as a noun, perhaps more frequently than any other tempo designation except allegro. It meant any slow movement: Bruckner, for instance, gave it as the title for the slow movement in most of his symphonies, but gave something else entirely as the tempo designation (sehr feierlich, sehr langsam etc.); and Haydn, in the autograph of his Symphony no.96, wrote at the end of the first movement segue adagio, though the next movement is in fact marked andante.
Also in the same sense, adagio meant for Baroque composers any slow movement that would normally be embellished. Quantz (Versuch, 1752) devoted an entire chapter to the subject ‘Von der Art das Adagio zu spielen’, and included the comment:
The adagio may be viewed in two ways with respect to the manner in which it should be played and embellished; that is, it may be viewed in accordance with the French or the Italian style. The first requires a clean and sustained execution of the air, and embellishment with the essential graces, such as appoggiaturas, whole and half-shakes, mordents, turns, battemens, flattemens etc., but no extensive passage-work or significant addition of extempore embellishments. … In the second manner, that is, the Italian, extensive artificial graces that accord with the harmony are introduced in the adagio in addition to the little French embellishments. … If the plain air of this example is played with the addition of only the essential graces already frequently named, we have another illustration of the French manner of playing. You will also notice, however, that this manner is inadequate for an adagio composed in this fashion.
But customs change, and Leopold Mozart (1756) had the following to say:
Some people think they are bringing something wonderful to the world when they thoroughly distort an adagio cantabile and turn a single note into a few dozen. These music-butchers thereby manifest their poor judgment and tremble when they must hold out a long note or play even a few notes cantabile without mixing in their accustomed, nonsensical and laughable doodling [fick fack].
A similar feeling is expressed more ironically in Joseph Riepel's Grundregeln der Tonordnung (1755, chap.2, p.110):
Pupil: Now tell me quickly whether a little piece like this can be used any more or not at all?
Teacher: Why not? Just write the word ‘Solo’ on top and mark it adagio. A violinist will decorate it with embellishments; in fact it will be a thousand times preferable to him than if a composer should cobble together a solo for him without understanding the violin.
As late as 1802 Koch, in his Musikalisches Lexikon (article ‘Manieren’), implied that the practice was still common by expressing the opinion that adagios were embellished only to cover up the weaknesses of a performer who was not able to sustain a line so slowly. But already in 1789 Burney could write in the third volume of his History:
It was formerly more easy to compose than to play an Adagio, which generally consisted of a few notes that were left to the taste and abilities of the performer; but as the composer seldom found his ideas fulfilled by the player, adagios are now more chantant and interesting in themselves, and the performer is less put to the torture for embellishments.
For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.
DAVID FALLOWS