Grave is the one marking whose English cognate is the better translation: it means grave in the sense of solemn, weighty, serious. The speed follows from the character rather than the other way round, which is why the range is so wide and so rarely relevant. Music marked grave is heavy first and slow second.
It appears most often as an introduction rather than a whole movement — the slow, dotted, ceremonial opening of a French overture, or the twenty bars Beethoven puts in front of the Pathétique before the Allegro arrives. A grave introduction is doing a specific job: it makes the fast music that follows sound like an answer to something.
At the bottom of the range a beat is three seconds long, which is longer than most people can hold without counting the subdivisions. If you are practising a grave passage, set the metronome to eighths or sixteenths rather than to the beat itself — a click every three seconds tells you almost nothing about what happened in between.
Pieces marked grave
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. 8 “Pathétique”, 1st movement | Grave – Allegro di molto e con brio |
| J. S. Bach — Sonata No. 2 for solo violin, BWV 1003, 1st movement | Grave |
Where grave 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.
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. Grave is a band 20 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.
Grave is about weight far more than about a number, and a grave introduction is often played with considerable freedom — a metronome is a rehearsal tool here, not a description.
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 grave runs 25–40 BPM. That band sits inside the 20–40 BPM above; it is the same marking, cut so that two names can never claim the same BPM.
Frequently asked questions
How fast is grave?
Grave is 20–40 BPM — the slowest marking in ordinary use, one beat every one and a half to three seconds.
What is grave in BPM?
Grave is usually given as 20–40 BPM. At 40 BPM — the middle of that band, and the tempo the metronome on this page opens at — one beat lasts 1500 milliseconds. Grave is about weight far more than about a number, and a grave introduction is often played with considerable freedom — a metronome is a rehearsal tool here, not a description.
Is grave faster than largo?
Largo is the faster of the two: 40–60 BPM against 20–40 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.