Lamentabile

What it means

Lamentabile means “lamenting, deplorable” and calls for a performance that expresses lament. The word goes back to lamento, the lament; lamentoso is used with the same meaning.

Among the words for sorrow, the difference lies in the manner of utterance. Doloroso designates the pain itself, flebile the tearful tone, mesto the quiet sadness. Lamentabile means the uttered pain — the lament, which addresses someone or becomes audible.

The marking concerns expression, not tempo, but affects it: a lamenting performance is calm and gives the notes time.

In the notation

The word stands in italics above the staff, usually after a tempo word, and applies until a new marking. It is often found together with sighing figures, chromatically descending lines, minor harmony, and suspensions — means with which music has depicted lament since the Baroque.

Musical use

The lament has been its own type of movement since the seventeenth century, often over a descending bass in minor that repeats constantly. In opera it stands at moments of loss and farewell, in instrumental music over slow movements of a lamenting character. The marking lamentabile refers to this tradition and calls for the corresponding tone.

The instruction calls for a lamenting performance with a soft, dark tone, slow movement, and expressive phrasing. It is related to lamentoso and doloroso. The marking is rarer than lamentoso but describes the same character. Sighing figures, falling lines, and suspensions often form the musical material of such passages. Bear in mind that the lament keeps an arc: the individual sighs should...

Performance practice

Bring out the sighing figures: weight on the first note, yielding on the second. Give chromatic steps and suspensions time. Hold the dynamics back and shape with fine gradations. And let the bass, where it descends, be clearly audible — it carries the expression just as much as the melody.