Allegro (pronounced uh-ley-groh or uh-leg-roh or ahl-le-graw (Italian)).
(1) In
music, a tempo mark directing that a passage is to be played in a quick, lively
tempo, faster than allegretto but slower than presto.
(2) In
music (more traditionally), an expressive mark indicating that a passage is to
be played in a lively or happy manner, not necessarily quickly.
(3) In
music, a piece or passage to be performed in this manner (an allegro movement).
(4) In
printing & typography, as the font Allegro, a serif typeface released in
1936.
1625–1635:
From the Italian allegro (lively; happy, cheerful (feminine allegra, masculine plural allegri, feminine plural allegre, superlative allegrissimo)), from the French allègre, from the Latin alacer (nominative alacer) (lively, cheerful, brisk) (from which English later picked
up alacrity). The Italian allegretto (diminutive of allegro) in musical composition is the
instruction to be (brisk & sprightly but not so quick as allegro) was
coined in 1740 explicitly for its technical purpose in music.
Use as
a musical term didn’t actually begin until 1721. Prior to that, since the early seventeenth
century, English had used the word in the sense (brisk, sprightly; cheerful)
picked up from Italian and Latin although the original spelling in English was aleger (lively, brisk) from Old French alegre, influenced by the Medieval Latin
alacris. What encouraged the use was the adoption of the
word (in its literal sense) by John Milton who in 1632 published the poem L'Allegro". Apart from the use in musical composition,
there’s also allegro speech, a relatively fast manner of speaking, once often
used as a stage notation by playwrights although it seems now less common,
replaced by terms better known to the young.
As well as the native Italian and the English allegro, composers in many
languages use the term including in French allegro (the post-1990 spelling allégro), the Greek αλέγρος (alégros)
& αλλέγκρο (allégkro), the Norwegian
allegro, the Portuguese allegro (the alternative spelling alegro), the Turkish allegro and the Persian آلگرو. Allegro is an adjective, adverb & noun, the noun
plural being allegros.
Although book burning was associated with the era, much publishing was still done in Germany during the 1930s and the centre of the industry was Frankfurt. In 1936 the city’s Ludwig & Mayer type foundry released the Allegro typeface, in the tradition of the nineteenth century Didone style but influenced also by the art deco designs which had become popular. A serif design which relied for its effect on the alternation of thick and thin strokes, it uses breaks in the letter where thin strokes might be expected, hinting at the style of stencils with a touch of the inclination associated with calligraphy. It was a popular typeface for decorative purposes such as book jackets or headings of musical notation but very much a display font, it works well only above a certain point size and is used almost exclusively for titles.
Aesthetic success & failure: The Alfa-Romeo Alfasud (left) and the Austin Allegro (right).
Often featured (usually with several other products of British Leyland in the 1970s) in lists as among the worst cars ever made, the Austin Allegro was in production between 1973-1982 and actually sold in respectable numbers for most of that time although at only a third the rate of its remarkably popular predecessor (ADO16, the Morris 1100/1300 and its many badge-engineered siblings). One much criticized aspect of the Allegro was the appearance; it was thought a bloated blob in an era of sharp-edged wedges and the critique does illustrate just how narrow can be the margin between success and failure in the execution of a concept. The Alfa Romeo Alfasud (1971-1983 (variants of the original produced until 1989)) adopted essentially the same shape and dimensions yet was praised as an elegant and well-balanced design. Seen in silhouette, the shapes are similar yet in the metal, the detail differences, a mere inch (25 mm) or two here and there or a subtle change in an angle or curve and one emerges lithe and the other ponderous.
The Allegro’s portly appearance wasn’t the original intent.
Tasked with designing a replacement for ADO16, the stylist Harry Mann
(1938-2023) sketched a modernist wedge, designed to accommodate what was at the
time an advanced specification which included all-independent hydraulic
suspension, front wheel drive, disk brakes and crucially, new, compact
engines. Mann however began the project
while employed by Austin’s parent corporation, the British Motor Corporation
(BMC) but by the time substantive work on the Allegro began, BMC had been absorbed into
the Leyland conglomerate, a sprawling entity of disparate and now competing
divisions which, if agonizingly reorganized, might have succeeded but such were
the internal & external obstacles to re-structuring that, coupled with political turmoil and the economic shocks of the 1970s, it staggered to
failure, something the later nationalization could only briefly disguise. Thus Mann’s team learned the clean-lined wedge would have to be fattened-up because not only were the old, tall engines
to be re-used but the new engines to be offered as options were bulkier
still. Installed at an angle, which would have demanding some re-engineering but would have been possible, that might
have been manageable but what was not was the decision to use the corporate heater unit, developed at an apparently extraordinary cost; it could be installed just one way and it was a tall piece of machinery.
Mann
didn’t forget his 1968 sketch and when the opportunity later came to design a
new sports car, his wedge re-appeared as one of the cars which most
represented the design ethos of the 1970s: The Triumph TR7 & TR8
(1975-1982) which would have their own troubled history but which sold quite well
and, as the TR8 (which used the 3.5 litre (215 cubic inch) River V8), represented something in which the potential of the original
was finally realized but it was too late for by then the disaster that was British Leyland had eaten itself.
In one aspect, the Allegro and Alfasud were wholly un-alike, the latter infamous for its propensity to rust, a trait shared with many mass-produced Italian cars of the era, the only consolation for Alfasud owners being the contemporary Lancia Beta suffered even more. The Alfasud's rust-resistance did improve over the years but it remained a problem until the end of production and the industry story has always been that in the barter economy which was sometime conducted between the members of the EEC (European Economic Community, an ancestor organization of the latter-day European Union (EU)) and those of the Warsaw Pact (the alliance between the USSR and its satellite states which essentially duplicated the structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)), Italian manufactured goods were exchanged for Russian steel which was reputedly re-cycled but anyway turned out to be of poor quality and essentially porous. The story certainly is a good fit for the narrative of maladministration and corruption that was Italy in the 1970s but subsequent research has revealed it to be a myth, the sheet metal used in the Neapolitan factory at Pomigliano d’Arco where Alfasuds were made the same stuff that Alfa Romeo used in the facility at Arese in Milan where the Giulia range was produced and their reputation for resisting rust was good. The evidence suggests all the steel used by the company's local operations came from the state owned Taranto steel mills. Intriguingly, the factories south & north all used the same paints and the ovens & paint booths were a decade-odd newer in Naples.
Given all that, the startlingly premature corrosion surprised many within Alfa Romeo and in 1977 a project-team began to investigate the causes and it was afforded some urgency given the reputational damage being suffered by the whole company (ie profits were suffering). Having determined the core components (paint & steel) weren't to blame, the engineers deconstructed the production process including the system of movement (how the partially completed cars proceeded from start to finish). What the team found was that while the electrophoresis baths at Pomigliano were state of the art, the inexperienced (and sometimes indifferently-minded) workforce operated them without adequate supervision and quality control, something exacerbated by the chronically bad labor relations, the factory beset by rolling strikes which meant unpainted bodies were often sitting for days. In the humid climate of the south, condensation gathered, many cars already rusting even before eventually receiving a coat of paint and that the plant was less than 10 miles (16 km) from the coast and the prevailing winds blew from the sea added to the problem, the unpainted Alfasuds often left for days damp with salty moisture.
The team's findings resulted in a change to the production process for the revised Series 2 Alfasuds launched in December 1977. The critical parts of the bodyshell now used "Zincrometal" (steel coated with a primer which was a mix of chromium, zinc and an organic bonding resin, baked at 160°C (320°F) which was as good as anything used in the industry. As a added precaution, a polyurethane foam was injected into the body's boxed sections with a flexible plastic sealant applied at the seams to prevent moisture intrusion. That had the added benefit of reducing noise vibration & harshness (NVH) while adding little extra weight. Unfortunately, the tests the engineers conducted to prove the design was waterproof relied on perfectly applied sealant at the junctions but the poor quality control continued and many seams were poorly sealed which meant the foam acted as a moisture store, making the problem worse. By contrast, whatever its other faults, and there were a few, the Allegro resisted rust like few cars built anywhere during the era, the design sound and that 1970s British Leyland paint thick and durable. In the years that followed, many would criticize the sometimes lurid and even sickly shades but as a protective coating, it did the job.
In another sign of the times, unlike ADO16, one basic vehicle which was badge-engineered to be sold under six brands (Austin, Morris, Riley, Wolseley, MG & Vanden Plas), the only variation of the Allegro was a luxury version by Vanden Plas, laden with leather, cut-pile carpeting and burl walnut trim including the picnic tables on the back of the seats so beloved of English coachbuilders. It didn't use the Allegro name and has always elicited condemnation, even from those who admired the Vanden Plas ADO16, presumably because the traditional upright grill attached to the front suited the earlier car's lines whereas the version which had to be flattened to fit the Allegro's pinched, pudgy nose looked just absurd. Still, there's clearly some appeal because the Vanden Plas cars have the highest survival rate of all the Allegros and now enjoy a niche (one step below the GDR's (the German Democratic Republic; the old East Germany) Trabant) on the bottom rung of the collector car market.
