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Suave, gentle and sweet.
Printed above the staff or a vocal line as a character word, alone or after a tempo word, at the start of a gentle passage; it lasts until the next character word. It describes touch and tone, so dynamics are marked separately.
Soave asks for sweetness and smoothness together: a gentle, rounded tone and suave, connected phrasing. It is close to dolce but puts more weight on smoothness and grace of delivery; in older Italian it can mean simply gentle or delicate. It suits a cantabile line in voice or strings. Avoid pairing it with sharp articulation or accents, which work against the evenness it asks for.
Soave is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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