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Over the next few weeks I will have a series of “pet peeve” posts. The first in this series is on foreign musical terms. 
My peeve is not with the terms themselves, it is with music students in general not making the effort to understand clear instructions of composers. I would say that virtually every student I have had has come into a lesson without looking up or understanding various terms in various works. Maybe I did this as a young student but by the time of my advanced studies I certainly did not. One teacher in particular, if you did not have the terms all down you could expect death by evil eye in your lesson!
I try to make it easy on students to a point, there is a handy list of French and German musical terms in my original website and also I have it in my syllabus that students are recommended to purchase the Schirmer Pronouncing Pocket Manual of Musical Terms, a very handy book that has almost every common term in it. And also there is a good list at the back of the Arthur LeBar excerpt book. There really is no excuse to not know what allmählich lebhafter means if you are working on taking Till to a high level. Look up the terms, learn them.
UPDATE: And now people use Google Translate for many terms … which has dangers. It can give “unusual” translations that don’t get at the meaning. For example, “keck” is a very important term in Mahler 5 and Google Translate will tell you that means “pert.” But a more traditional and correct translation for our purposes is “bold.”
