Largo does not mean “slow”. It means broad, and the difference is the whole instruction: a largo is played as though there were more room in each beat than there is, with long lines and no hurry between them. A slow tempo is the consequence, not the request.
It is the marking behind a surprising number of the most famous slow movements ever written, and it rewards the metronome less than almost any other tempo on this list — held notes, rubato and phrasing that breathes are exactly the things a click cannot help with. Use it to establish the pulse, then take the click away.
One warning about the name. The piece everybody calls “Handel’s Largo” — the aria Ombra mai fù from Serse — is marked Larghetto on the score. The nickname arrived through arrangements, not through Handel, and it is the single most common tempo-marking misattribution in classical music.
Pieces marked largo
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 |
|---|---|
| Dvořák — Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”, 2nd movement | Largo |
| Vivaldi — “Winter”, The Four Seasons, 2nd movement | Largo |
Where largo 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Grave | 20–40 BPM | slow and solemn |
| Largo | 40–60 BPM | broadly |
| Lento | 40–60 BPM | broadly |
| Larghetto | 60–66 BPM | rather broadly |
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. Largo 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.
Largo and Lento cover the same band and are often used interchangeably; where a composer distinguishes them, largo asks for breadth and lento only asks for slowness.
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 largo runs 41–60 BPM. That band sits inside the 40–60 BPM above; it is the same marking, cut so that two names can never claim the same BPM.
Frequently asked questions
How fast is largo?
Largo is 40–60 BPM — broad and slow, a beat every one to one and a half seconds.
What is largo in BPM?
Largo is usually given as 40–60 BPM. At 46 BPM — the middle of that band, and the tempo the metronome on this page opens at — one beat lasts 1304 milliseconds. Largo and Lento cover the same band and are often used interchangeably; where a composer distinguishes them, largo asks for breadth and lento only asks for slowness.
Is largo faster than lento?
Lento is the faster of the two: 40–60 BPM against 40–60 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.