Allargando

What it means

Allargando comes from allargare, “to broaden”, and calls for letting the music become broader. This includes a slowing but means more than it: to the slowing pulse is added an increase in weight and usually also in loudness. The notes gain more room, the sound becomes fuller.

Herein lies the distinction from rallentando and ritardando. Both denote solely the slowing and say nothing about the dynamics; a ritardando may just as well become softer. Allargando, by contrast, is almost always bound up with a growth and therefore stands at different places: not where something fades, but where something is spread out toward a grand close. From the tempo word largamente, which calls for a broad playing throughout, it differs in that it describes a process and not a state.

In the notation

The word stands in italics above the staff, frequently together with a crescendo hairpin that makes the growth explicit. The effect reaches to a new tempo marking or, as most often, to the close of the section. A continuation line is usual when the broadening extends over several bars.

Musical use

The typical place is the closing intensification: the last bars of a movement, the coda of an orchestral work, the end of a great intensifying passage. There allargando ensures that the close does not come abruptly but towers up. The marking is also found before a fermata or before the entry of an important theme, when the moment is to take on weight.

Performance practice

Combine the two deliberately: slow down and at the same time become fuller in tone — whoever only becomes slower does not achieve the effect. Space out the stretch, so that the last bar still allows an intensification; the most common weakness is being at the maximum too early. For strings and winds, becoming broader also means more bow, or more air, per note. In an ensemble one voice should set the direction, or tempo and loudness drift apart.