andantino

Andantino is the Italian diminutive of andante — itself from the present participle of andare, to go, meaning going or walking at a moderate pace. The suffix -ino in Italian typically makes something smaller or slightly less intense: a libretto is a little book, a violino is a little viola. An andantino should logically be a little andante. But in music, a little andante might mean slightly slower, less intense walking, or slightly faster, quicker than walking, and this ambiguity caused real problems.

The tempo marking andante became standard in Italian Baroque music by the early seventeenth century, replacing verbal descriptions with a term every trained musician was expected to know. When composers began adding diminutives and superlatives — allegretto, larghetto, andantino — they assumed the modifications were self-evident. They were not. By 1802, Johann Friedrich Koch's Musikalisches Lexikon noted that andantino was interpreted differently by different performers and in different national traditions.

Ludwig van Beethoven, who held strong opinions about tempo markings and eventually rejected the metronome as inadequate to musical expression, used andantino inconsistently in his own scores. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart treated andantino as somewhat slower than andante; Beethoven used it as somewhat faster. Charles Rosen, the twentieth-century music scholar, documented the confusion in The Classical Style in 1971: the ambiguity of andantino has never been resolved.

Modern practice generally treats andantino as slightly faster than andante — a brisk walking pace rather than a leisurely one — but performers still exercise individual judgment, which is precisely what the diminutive leaves room for. The unresolved argument is not a failure of musical language; it is a feature of a system that leaves interpretive space between the composer's instruction and the performer's decision. Andantino asks you to walk, and then asks: how quickly do you walk?