Andantino: The Tempo Even Beethoven Questioned

Andantino ought to be the easiest marking in the world to read: it is the diminutive of andante, so it means "a little andante." The trouble is that nobody agrees which way "a little" points. Ask three conductors whether andantino is faster or slower than andante and you can get three answers, and each one has history on its side. It is the single tempo word that has quietly reversed its meaning over the centuries, tripped up publishers, and famously left Beethoven himself unsure. Here is what andantino actually means, why it is so slippery, and how fast to take it.

Is Andantino Faster or Slower Than Andante?

Start with the root. Andante is not a speed at all; it is the present participle of andare, "to walk" or "to go" — music that moves along. The suffix -ino is the ordinary Italian diminutive, "little." So andantino is "a little going," and that is exactly where the ground gives way.

If you feel andante as a slow tempo (the modern habit), then a "diminished" andante is less slow, and andantino comes out faster. But if you feel andante as already brisk, a real walking pace with somewhere to be, then trimming it a little pulls the motion back, and andantino comes out slower. Both readings are airtight. The word by itself cannot tell you which one the composer meant.

Andantino Meaning: How It Flipped Over Time

The reason the ambiguity is historical, not just theoretical, is that the perceived speed of Andante drifted. In the eighteenth century Andante sat toward the quick end of the slow family — a purposeful walk, occasionally even tacked onto other markings to mean "keep it moving." Against that brisk andante, andantino read as a gentle relaxation: a touch slower. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Andante settled into something genuinely unhurried and songful, and once andante means slow, andantino swings the other way and becomes slightly faster.

The first edition of Grove's dictionary caught the changeover in the act. Andantino, it says, once meant "a somewhat slower time than andante," but "some modern composers … forgetting the original meaning of the word, and thinking of andante as equivalent with 'slow,' use andantino for 'rather slow,' i.e. somewhat quicker." You can even find the collision inside a single score: in Mendelssohn's Elijah, movements marked Andante con moto, Andante, and Andantino all carry the identical metronome mark of 72 to the quarter. For the base tempos these words grow out of, our Italian tempo markings chart lays out the full ladder.

Even Beethoven Wasn't Sure

The best evidence that this confused working musicians, not just lexicographers, comes from Beethoven. In an 1813 letter to George Thomson, his Edinburgh publisher — for whom he was arranging Scottish and Irish folk songs — Beethoven asked to be told, in future, whether an andantino was meant to be faster or slower than andante. The term, he wrote, was "of so indefinite a significance that Andantino sometimes approaches an Allegro and sometimes, on the other hand, is played like Adagio."

There is a quiet irony in that request. The folk-song settings he was making for Thomson are dotted with the very marking — Andantino amoroso, Andantino grazioso. The word Beethoven could not confidently interpret was one he kept writing into his own pages.

What the Great Andantinos Tell Us

Look at how the marking behaves in famous scores and a pattern appears. The slow movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271 (the "Jeunehomme") is an andantino in C minor, muted and grieving, one of only a handful of Mozart concerto slow movements in a minor key. Nothing about it is brisk. The andantino of Schubert's late A-major Sonata, D. 959, is the same story: a sparse, sighing barcarolle in F-sharp minor wrapped around a middle section that all but comes apart. For both composers, andantino names a slow, song-like lament, not a speeding-up of andante.

Tchaikovsky pulls in the other direction. The second movement of his Fourth Symphony is marked Andantino in modo di canzona ("in the manner of a song") and opens with that famous, weary oboe melody at a genuinely moderate, flowing gait. The lesson across all three is that andantino carries a character, graceful and song-like, as much as a number. If you want to feel where it lives, set a metronome to andante and nudge it a few clicks either way; the sweet spot is narrow.

So How Fast Is Andantino?

Modern references land on roughly 80 to 108 BPM, "slightly faster than andante, slower than moderato." The catch is that andante's own range (about 76 to 108) overlaps almost completely, so the "faster" is often a difference you can argue about but barely measure. Treat the number as a starting point, then let three things decide the rest: the era (eighteenth-century scores lean slightly slower, later ones slightly faster), the composer's habits, and above all the music's character and note values.

That is the honest answer to "faster or slower": it depends, and the score tells you more than the suffix does. In practice I do the same thing at the stand: set andante, play a bar, and let the note values and the phrase tell me which side of the line the music wants to sit on. Andantino belongs to the same family of qualifiers as the ones covered in our guide to Italian tempo modifiers — words that shade a base tempo rather than fix it. Read it in context and it stops being a riddle.