(It.: ‘very’).
A word often used in tempo designations (like the approximately equivalent adjective molto) to indicate the superlative. Allegro assai (‘very fast’) is its commonest use, and is found particularly in 19th-century scores. Allegro assai moderato, ‘a very moderate allegro’, appears characteristically at the opening of Act 2 of Verdi's Otello. The Marcia funebre of Beethoven's Third Symphony is marked adagio assai.
But the meaning of the word for Beethoven may not have been consistent. Brossard in his Dictionaire (1703) gave the usual meaning and added that assai could also mean ‘rather’ or ‘moderately’; and although Rousseau roundly chastised him for his ignorant interpretation of the word in terms of the cognate (assez) in his mother tongue, there is considerable evidence that most early uses of the word should be taken in that sense. The anonymous A Short Explication (London, 1724) gives only the meaning ‘moderately’; J.G. Walther (1732) translated allegro assai as ziemlich geschwind (‘fairly fast’); and late in the 19th century Stainer and Barrett's Dictionary translated allegro assai as ‘(lit.) Fast enough. A quicker motion than simple allegro’. Herrmann-Bengen (Tempobezeichnungen, 1959) drew attention to works by R.I. Mayr (1677) and Gottlieb Muffat (1735–9) which may well use assai in this more moderate sense; and Brossard himself is witness that he used it thus in his own first book of motets (1695). Stewart Deas (‘Beethoven's “Allegro assai”’, ML, xxxi, 1950, pp.333–6) argued plausibly that Beethoven also sometimes understood assai to mean ‘moderately’: of his copious evidence perhaps the most striking concerns the main theme's first entry in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, marked moderato in a late sketch but allegro assai in the finished product.
For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.
DAVID FALLOWS