Adagio comes from ad agio, “at ease”, and that is a better guide than the number: an adagio is unhurried rather than heavy. It is the standard marking for a slow movement in a sonata, a symphony or a concerto, which makes it the tempo most listeners have heard the most of without ever knowing its name.
It is also the marking most often qualified. Adagio sostenuto asks you to sustain, adagio cantabile to sing, adagio ma non troppo not to overdo the slowness. The qualifier usually tells you more about how to play the movement than the tempo does.
One of the pieces below is a useful lesson in reading marks rather than titles: Barber’s Adagio for Strings is called an adagio but is marked Molto adagio, and is very often performed slower still.
Pieces marked adagio
The middle column is the marking exactly as it is printed, qualifiers and all — which is usually more instructive than the word on its own.
| Piece | Marked |
|---|---|
| Beethoven — Piano Sonata No. 14 “Moonlight”, 1st movement | Adagio sostenuto |
| Mozart — Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, 2nd movement | Adagio |
| Barber — Adagio for Strings | Molto adagio, espressivo cantando |
Where adagio sits
The markings on either side, with the ranges the reference tables give them. They overlap, and that is not an error in the table — it is what the words are like.
| Marking | BPM | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Lento | 40–60 BPM | broadly |
| Larghetto | 60–66 BPM | rather broadly |
| Adagio | 66–76 BPM | slow and stately |
| Andante | 76–108 BPM | at a walking pace |
| Moderato | 108–120 BPM | moderately |
The full ladder, from larghissimo to prestissimo, is on the index page.
How much to trust the number
Three things are true of every range on this site, and of every tempo table anywhere else:
- They are ranges, not values. Adagio is a band 10 BPM wide, and both ends of it are correct.
- They varied by era. The words are centuries older than the metronome — Maelzel patented his in 1815, long after composers were writing adagio at the top of a page — so the numbers were fitted to the vocabulary afterwards, by people who disagreed. A Baroque andante and a Romantic andante are not the same speed, and neither is wrong.
- A metronome mark on the score always wins. If the music says ♩ = 96, that is the tempo, and the Italian word above it is telling you about character rather than speed. Set the number, ignore the table.
Adagio has drifted slower over two centuries of performance practice. Recordings of the same movement fifty years apart can differ by 20 BPM, and both can be defensible.
One housekeeping note about this site specifically. The metronome’s live readout has to print exactly one marking for any tempo, so it uses a narrower, non-overlapping ladder in which adagio runs 67–75 BPM. That band sits inside the 66–76 BPM above; it is the same marking, cut so that two names can never claim the same BPM.
Frequently asked questions
How fast is adagio?
Adagio is 66–76 BPM — slow and stately, a little under a beat a second.
What is adagio in BPM?
Adagio is usually given as 66–76 BPM. At 72 BPM — the middle of that band, and the tempo the metronome on this page opens at — one beat lasts 833 milliseconds. Adagio has drifted slower over two centuries of performance practice. Recordings of the same movement fifty years apart can differ by 20 BPM, and both can be defensible.
Is adagio faster than andante?
Andante is the faster of the two: 76–108 BPM against 66–76 BPM. The two ranges overlap in most published tables, which is normal — these are descriptions of character that were fitted to numbers afterwards, so neighbouring markings shade into each other rather than meeting at a line.