(It., diminutive of andante, but current only in musical contexts).
A tempo and mood designation nowadays considered a little faster than andante; but Rousseau (1768), for instance, described it as an andante with ‘a little less gaiety in the beat’. This ambiguity, which stems from whether andante is perceived as a fast or a slow tempo, troubled Beethoven, who wrote to George Thomson, his Edinburgh publisher, on 19 February 1813:
In future, if there are any andantinos among the melodies you send me for setting, I would beg you to indicate whether that andantino is intended to be faster or slower than andante, because that word, like many others in music, is of such imprecise meaning that on one occasion andantino can be close to allegro and on another almost like adagio.
Zaslaw (‘Mozart’s Tempo Conventions’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, 720–33) provided convincing evidence that for Mozart and his contemporaries andantino was normally slower than andante: Rousseau (1768), Wolf (1788), D.G. Türk (1789), Mason (c1801), Clementi (1801), Starke (1819) and Hummel (1828) all agreed on that; moreover Türk and Hummel went so far as to draw attention to it and to castigate those who thought otherwise. 19th-century practice appears to make andantino faster, and for Brahms in defining the tempo of the third movement of his first Symphony it was adjacent to allegretto.
In earlier editions of Grove Ebenezer Prout mentioned three movements in Mendelssohn's Elijah, the first of which, ‘If with all your hearts’, is marked andante con moto, the second, ‘The Lord hath exalted thee’, merely andante, and the third, ‘O rest in the Lord’, andantino: all three have the same metronome mark, crotchet = 72. As Prout remarked, it illustrates the ‘uncertainty which prevails in the use of those time-indications’; but it is also a consequence of the different texture and density of the music which in turn directly influence tempo, performed tempo and perceived tempo.
There seems little evidence for the commonly found assertion that andantino can refer to a somewhat shorter andante movement (see I. Herrmann-Bengen, Tempobezeichnungen: Ursprung, Wandel im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Tutzing, 1959, p.181).
For bibliography see Andante and Tempo and expression marks.
DAVID FALLOWS