(It.: ‘at a walking pace’, ‘easy-going’, ‘fluent’, ‘uniform’; present participle of andare, ‘to walk’).
A tempo (and mood) designation, often abbreviated to and.e and sometimes even ad.e, particularly in the 18th century. Though one of the most common tempo designations in the 19th century, its entry into musical scores was relatively late, and its use in the 17th and 18th centuries was often as an indication of performance manner rather than of tempo. For Brossard (1703) and Grassineau (1740) it referred primarily to bass lines and specifically to what are now (aptly) called ‘walking’ bass lines. One of the very few tempo or expression marks in J.S. Bach's keyboard music is andante for the B minor prelude in book 1 of the ‘48’, which has just such a bass line. Andante there and in many other 18th-century sources is not a tempo designation but an instruction for clear performance of the running bass, and a warning not to play inégale. The anonymous A Short Explication (London, 1724) says: ‘Andante, this word has respect chiefly to the thorough bass, and signifies, that in playing, the times must be kept very just and exact, and each note made very equal and distinct the one from the other’. And Brossard's definition included the comment ‘cheminer à pas égaux’ as though specifically to preclude inégalité. With this in mind, Walther's additional observation (1732) that it could also apply to upper parts is particularly interesting.
Andante was first unequivocally described as a tempo designation by Niedt (1706), who called it ‘very slow’ (‘gantz langsam’), though Mattheson corrected this in the revised second edition to a more orthodox definition. But it does not appear, for instance, in the graduated list of tempo marks at the end of A Short Explication (1724), where the space between largo and allegro is occupied by Vivace: andante is given only as a method of performance, as cited above. Andante seems to have been fully accepted as a tempo designation only with Leopold Mozart (1756). It was a gentle relaxed tempo for Haydn and for W.A. Mozart, who wrote to his sister on 9–12 June 1784: ‘none of these concertos has an Adagio, but just Andantes’ (‘sondern lauter andante seyn müssen’). This comment also exemplifies the common use of andante as a noun, describing a slow movement of only moderate solemnity.
Più andante and molto andante, found particularly in Brahms and Schubert, usually indicate something rather slower than andante, though many of the same ambiguities obtain as for Andantino. Perhaps the most startling use of molto andante is in the finale to Act 2 of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the moment when the Count has unlocked the closet door and revealed – to everybody's surprise and comic relief – not Cherubino but Susanna, who plays on the situation with biting sarcasm in a 3/8 section whose tempo designation molto andante is surely used to denote an extremely controlled and ironically measured tempo contrasting with the preceding allegro. Yet taken literally, molto andante would mean faster than andante, whereas andante vivace inplies a lively style of playing an andante.
As one of the five main degrees of movement in music named by Rousseau (1768) and later theorists, andante became ubiquitous in the 19th century and appeared with all kinds of qualifications from andante sostenuto and andante con moto to andante religioso (Liszt, final section of Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne) and even in macaronic forms such as andante très expressif (Debussy, opening of Clair de lune).
I. Herrmann-Bengen: ‘Andante, Moderato, Tempo giusto, Tempo ordinario’, Tempobezeichnungen (Tutzing, 1959), 175–86
W. Gerstenberg: ‘Andante’, GfMKB: Kassel 1962, 156–8
For further bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.
DAVID FALLOWS