The -etto ending is a diminutive: larghetto is a smaller largo. It is quicker, and it is also lighter — the broad, weighty quality largo asks for is dialled back rather than merely sped up. At 60 BPM a beat is exactly one second, which makes larghetto the easiest tempo on this page to check without any equipment at all.
It is a narrow band, and the pieces in it are famous out of proportion to how often the marking is used. Two of the three below are among the best-known slow movements in the repertoire, and the third is the one people mean when they say “Handel’s Largo”.
Pieces marked larghetto
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 |
|---|---|
| Handel — “Ombra mai fù” from Serse — the aria known as “Handel’s Largo” | Larghetto |
| Beethoven — Symphony No. 2, 2nd movement | Larghetto |
| Chopin — Piano Concerto No. 1, 2nd movement | Romanze: Larghetto |
Where larghetto 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Largo | 40–60 BPM | broadly |
| 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 |
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. Larghetto is a band 6 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.
Larghetto sits between largo and adagio, and different editions disagree about which side it falls on. Some tables place it slower than 60; the six-BPM window here is narrower than the disagreement about where it goes.
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 larghetto runs 61–66 BPM. That band sits inside the 60–66 BPM above; it is the same marking, cut so that two names can never claim the same BPM.
Frequently asked questions
How fast is larghetto?
Larghetto is 60–66 BPM — a little quicker than largo, and about one beat a second.
What is larghetto in BPM?
Larghetto is usually given as 60–66 BPM. At 63 BPM — the middle of that band, and the tempo the metronome on this page opens at — one beat lasts 952 milliseconds. Larghetto sits between largo and adagio, and different editions disagree about which side it falls on. Some tables place it slower than 60; the six-BPM window here is narrower than the disagreement about where it goes.
Is larghetto faster than adagio?
Adagio is the faster of the two: 66–76 BPM against 60–66 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.