(It.: ‘vivacious’, ‘ingenious’).
Spirited, lively. As a tempo mark and as a qualification it has several forms, including spirituoso, con spirito (‘with vivacity’), the adverb spiritosamente and the French adverb spirituellement. Two meanings have been current. The first is the slower one described by Brossard (1703): ‘Spiritoso or spirituosň; one also says con spirito or con spirto. It means with spirit [esprit], with soul, with judgment and discretion. It is also rather like affettuoso’. Similar definitions appear in Rousseau (1768) and Escudier (1844), both of whom placed it in the hierarchy between adagio and andante; and several early 18th-century uses (largo spiritoso, adagio spiritoso) suggest this same meaning.
The second meaning is most clearly expressed by Mozart, who in a letter of 7 August 1782 wrote of the allegro con spirito opening to his ‘Haffner’ Symphony: ‘Das erste Allegro muss recht feurig gehen’ (‘The first allegro must go with real fire’). That meaning, which is the one most commonly used today, stretches back well into the 18th century: there are several movements in Domenico Scarlatti and Rameau, for instance, that are so marked and must be fast. Alessandro Scarlatti's Genuinda (1694) includes the tempo mark allegrissimo e spiritoso.
For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.
DAVID FALLOWS