Impetuoso

As Printed on a Score

Printed above the staff as a character word, either alone where a passage surges or inside a heading, as in Scriabin’s “Allegro. Impetuoso. Con stravaganza”. It colours the music until a contrasting character or tempo word replaces it; it is not itself a tempo change, though players tend to press forward under it.

How Composers Use It

Impetuoso asks for headlong momentum: strong attacks, forward-leaning phrasing, a sense that the music cannot wait. It is the adjectival twin of con impeto, and sits between agitato (nervous unrest) and con fuoco (heat and brilliance). Because players hear it as licence to rush, pair it with a firm tempo word or a metronome mark if the pulse must hold, and save it for a passage that genuinely surges rather than a whole movement.

Example

Scriabin, Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53, m. 1: “Allegro. Impetuoso. Con stravaganza” heads the sonata after its epigraph from Le Poème de l’extase; the single word “impetuoso” returns at m. 451 beside a cresc.

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