saltarello

Saltarello comes from the Italian saltare, to jump or leap, from Latin saltare, which itself comes from salire (to spring). The diminutive suffix -ello makes it 'a little jump.' The dance is attested from the fourteenth century: a saltarello melody appears in a manuscript now held in the British Library (Add MS 29987), the earliest known example of a named, notated dance tune in European music history. The page is about seven hundred years old. The jumping was older than the notation.

The saltarello was danced throughout the Italian peninsula in the Renaissance. It was fast, in triple time, and featured the characteristic hopping and leaping steps its name promised. Like the galliard in France, the saltarello was the vigorous counterpart to more sedate dances. It was often paired with a slower dance — a bassa danza (low dance, meaning feet stay close to the ground) followed by a saltarello (high dance, meaning the feet leave the ground).

In the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn encountered the saltarello during his Italian travels and used it as the final movement of his 'Italian' Symphony (1833). The movement is marked Saltarello: Presto and captures the dance's energy in orchestral form. For many listeners, Mendelssohn's saltarello is the only context in which they encounter the word. The fourteenth-century dance lives inside a nineteenth-century symphony.

In southern Italian folk traditions — the tarantella of Naples, the pizzica of Puglia — the saltarello's hopping, spinning energy survives in modified form. The specific dance called saltarello is still performed in the Abruzzo and Lazio regions. Musicians play it on organetto (button accordion) and tamburello (frame drum). The little jump is still happening.