(It.: ‘comfortable’, ‘convenient’).
A word used both as a tempo designation in its own right and as a qualification to other tempo marks. It is also spelt commodo. Frescobaldi mentioned a battuta commoda in the preface to his Toccate e partite of 1615 but in no particularly technical sense. J.G. Walther (Musicalisches Lexicon, 1732) defined the adverbial form commodamente ‘nach guter Bequemlichkeit’ (‘good and comfortably’), adding that it was ‘so viel, als Adagio’ (‘the equivalent of adagio’); but he was presumably there taking Adagio in its literal sense, ‘at ease’, for there is nowhere else any apparent suggestion of comodo being anything but a fluent and agreeably fast tempo. Leopold Mozart (1756) defined tempo commodo as the same as Tempo giusto: both of them ‘lead us back to the piece itself’. The rondo of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E op.14 no.1 is marked allegro comodo. Andante comodo and a tempo comodo are relatively common; comodamente (the adverb) and comodetto (the diminutive) appear in 18th-century scores.
For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.
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