stretto

The term stretto (plural: 'stretti') comes from the Italian past participle of stringere, and means ‘narrow’, ‘tight’, or 'close’.^[1]

In music the Italian term stretto has two distinct meanings:

(1) In a fugue, stretto (German: Engführung) is the imitation of the subject in close succession, so that the answer enters before the subject is completed.^[2]

Stretto is typically employed near the end of a fugue, where, by increasing the textural intensity of what otherwise is already a texturally intense style of writing (i.e., fugue), the 'piling-up' of two or more temporally off-set statements of the subject (i.e., stretto) signals the arrival of the fugue's conclusion in climactic fashion, as may be seen in the C-major Fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I: Fugue No. 1 (External Shockwave movie). In other instances stretto serves to display contrapuntal prowess, as in the E Major fugue (External Shockwave movie) from WTC Book II, where Bach follows a traditional exposition (subject accompanied by countersubject) with a counterexposition in which the subject accompanies itself, in stretto, followed by the countersubject accompanying itself.

(2) In non-fugal compositions, a stretto (also sometimes spelled stretta) is a passage, often at the end of an aria or movement, in faster tempo.^[2][3] Examples include: the end of the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; measure 227 of Chopin's Third Ballade; measures 16 and 17, of his Prelude No. 4 in E minor; and measure 25 of his Etude Op. 10, No. 12, "The Revolutionary."

See also

• Music theory
• Fugue

References