Assai

What it means

Assai means “very” and strengthens the word to which it is joined. Allegro assai thus calls for a tempo distinctly above an ordinary Allegro, Adagio assai for a pronounced slowness. The word never stands alone but always as an addition.

There is also an older reading: some eighteenth-century composers used assai in the sense of “rather”, which would soften rather than strengthen the marking. Today the word is as a rule understood as a strengthening.

Assai is to be distinguished from molto, which likewise means “very”; whether either of the two is the stronger is handled differently from composer to composer. The counterpart is poco, “a little”. Ma non troppo has a qualifying effect.

In the notation

The word stands in italics after the tempo or character word, above the first system of a movement or section, and becomes part of the movement’s name. It also joins performance markings, for instance in cantabile assai.

Musical use

Strengthening and qualifying additions have belonged to the stock of tempo designation since the Baroque. They allow fine gradations to be expressed with few base words, without introducing new terms. In the Viennese Classicism they are especially frequent; there the same movement type can turn out very differently according to the addition.

Both intensifiers can stand in the same work: in Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, K. 550 (1788), the first movement is headed Molto allegro, the finale Allegro assai. In 1752 Johann Joachim Quantz remarked in his Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen that an allegro assai had formerly been played hardly faster than an allegretto in his own day.

Performance practice

Read the heading in full before you choose the tempo: the addition often alters it more strongly than the base word. Check whether the strengthened tempo still carries at the densest place of the movement. And keep the chosen degree throughout the movement, instead of showing it only at the start.