CHAPTER III

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SONATA FORM

Vienna as the home of the sonata; definition of ‘sonata’--Origin and history of the standard sonata cycle; relationship of sonata movements--Evolution of the ‘triplex’ form: Pergolesi’s ‘singing allegro’; the union of aria and binary forms; Padre Martini’s sonatas, Scarlatti’s true sonata in C; Domenico Alberti; the Alberti bass; the transitional period of the sonata--Sonata writers before Haydn and Mozart: J. C. Bach; Muzio Clementi--Schobert and Wagenseil; C. P. E. Bach; F. W. Rust.

Turning our backs upon Bach and looking over the musical marches, we shall observe many roads in the second half of the eighteenth century making their way even from the remotest confines towards Vienna. There they converge towards the end of the century. Thither comes pouring music from England, from France, volumes of music from Italy; music from Prussia, from Saxony, from Russia; from all the provinces, from Poland, from Bohemia and from Croatia. There is a hodge-podge and a _pêle-mêle_ of music, of types and nationalities. There are the pompous oratorios from the west, light operas and tuneful trios and sonatas from the south, dry-as-dust fugues from the north, folk-songs gay and sad from the east. All whirling and churning before Maria Theresa, or her lovable son, or the intelligent courtiers about them. France will grow sick before the Revolution, Italy will become frivolous, Germany cold. Only Vienna loves music better than life. Presently up will come Haydn from Croatia, and Mozart from Salzburg, and Beethoven from Bonn. Then young Schubert will sing a swan-song at the feast from which the honored guests have one by one departed; and waltzes will whirl in to gobble up all save what fat Rossini can grab for himself.

And what is the pianoforte’s share in this profusion of music? Something of all, variations, pot-pourris from the operas, rondos and bagatelles and waltzes; but chiefly sonatas, and again sonatas.

Now sonatas did not grow in Vienna. Vienna laid before her honored guests the great confusion of music which had poured into her for fifty years from foreign lands, and in that confusion were sonatas. They were but babes, frail and starved for lack of many things, little more than skin and bones. But they had bright eyes which caught Haydn’s fatherly glance. He dragged them forth from the rubbish and fed them a good diet of hearty folk-songs, so that they grew. Mozart came from many wanderings and trained them in elegance and dressed them with his lovely fancies. And at last when they were quite full-grown, Beethoven took charge of them and made them mighty. What manner of babe was this that could so grow, and whence came it to Vienna?

The word sonata slips easily over the tongues of most people, great musicians, amateurs, dilettanti and laymen alike; but it is not a word, nor yet a type, easily defined. The form is very properly associated with the composers of the Viennese period. Earlier sonatas, such as those of the seventeenth century composers, like Kuhnau and Pasquini, are sonatas only in name, and not in the generally accepted sense of the word. The rock which bars their entrance into the happy kingdom of sonatas is the internal form of the movements. For a sonata is not only a group of pieces or movements in an arbitrary whole. At least _one_ of the separate movements within the whole must be in the special form dubbed by generations with an unfortunate blindness to ambiguity, the _sonata form_. Attempts have been made from time to time to rename this form. It has been called the _first movement_ form; because usually the first movements of sonatas, symphonies and other like works, are found to have it. Unhappily it is scarcely less frequently to be found in the last movements. Let us simply cut the Gordian knot, and for no other reason than that it may help in this book to render a difficult subject a little less confusing, call this special form arbitrarily the _triplex_ form.

I

To trace the development of the pianoforte sonata, then, is a twofold task: to trace the tendency towards a standard group of pieces or movements in one whole; and to trace the development of the triplex form of movement, the presence of which in the group gives us the somewhat despotic right to label that group a sonata.

The first task leads upon something of a wild-goose chase. The number of movements which a sonata might contain never became rigidly fixed. A single movement, however, is not a sonata in the generally accepted meaning of the word. It is true that the separate pieces of D. Scarlatti are still called sonatas; but this is only one of the few cases where the original natural use of the word has persisted beside the arbitrarily restricted one. We are, as a matter of fact, almost forced to this continued free use of the term by the lack of a more specific one to cover the circumstance, or even of a suitable abstract one. As we have seen, the few pieces Scarlatti published himself he called _esercizii_. Even in his day the word sonata was applied mostly to compositions made up of two or more movements. His pieces were not fugues; neither were they dances. They were too regular and too compact to be called fantasies or toccatas. They were not rondos, and his imagination was sterile in fanciful titles such as Couperin gave to his pieces. Our modern minds reject his own title as utterly unmusical. In abstract terms we have ‘piece,’ which may do for the historian but not for the program. ‘Movement’ has been chained up in the sonata and symphony. ‘Gems’ and ‘jewels’ are too often in music a paste of musk and tears. So we hold to sonata, for the lack of anything better.

Though the word originally signified any music sounded or played on instruments, thus differentiating instrumental music from vocal, its use was limited early in the seventeenth century to music written for groups of strings or wind. At that time, it will be remembered, harpsichord and clavichord music was still essentially organ music, to which the word sonata was rarely applied.

The string sonatas had developed chiefly from the old _chanson_, the setting of a poem in stanzas to polyphonic vocal music. The composer attempted in this old form to reflect in his music the varied meaning of the stanzas of his poem. Thus the music, taken from its words and given to groups of strings to play, was more or less clearly divided into varied sections, showing, as it were, the shape or skeleton upon which it had originally been moulded. At first the instrumentalists, even the organists, as we have seen, were content merely to play upon their instruments what had been thus written for voices. Such had long been their custom with popular madrigals and with other simpler forms.

Soon the organists broke ground in a wholly different direction. But the other instrumentalists, chiefly the violinists, on the contrary, though they began to compose their own music with an ever-growing regard to the special qualities of their instruments, still retained the well-known form. Hence the many fledgling sonatas in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and even the first quarter of the seventeenth, with their title of _canzon a suonare_. This title was soon cut down to sonata. The form was enormously expanded by the enthusiasm and rapidly soaring skill of the instrumental composers. The many more or less vague sections, fossil outlines, as it were, of the poem in stanzas, swelled out to broad and clear proportions. The number of them was consequently cut down to four or even three, the selection and sequence of which had been almost unconsciously determined by principles of contrast. Finally the influence of the growing suite combined with the breadth and formal perfection of the several sections to cut them off distinctly, each from the other. The word sonata, then, it will be observed, was applied almost from the beginning to a piece of music divided into several more or less clearly differentiated sections or movements.

The growth of the suite was, as we have seen, of quite a different nature. The sonata developed rapidly from a seed. The suite was a synthesis of various dance pieces, held together by a convention, without any inherited internal relationship. In spite of the number of suites written during the seventeenth century for string band and even other combinations of instruments, it is practically a special development of keyboard music. The lighter character of the music itself, depending largely upon dance rhythms for its vitality, encouraged the free style suitable to the harpsichord. Its influence upon the string sonata is, however, unmistakable.

Thus, though harpsichord music and the suite were more or less neglected in Italy during the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, we find Corelli publishing between 1683 and 1700 his epoch-making works for violin and other instruments in alternate sets of _suonate_ (sometimes called _suonate da chiesa_), and suites, which he called _suonate da camera_. In the former the movements had no titles but the Italian words which marked their character, such as _grave_, _allegro_, _vivace_, and other like words. In the latter most of the movements conformed to dance rhythms and were given dance names.

The normal number of movements in both sonatas and suites is four, and normally these four are in the order of slow, fast, slow, fast. The movements of the suite are all normally in the same key; but among the sonatas the middle adagio is often in a different key from the other movements. This variety of key is nearly always present as a distinctive feature of the sonata.

Corelli’s works are, leaving aside his personal genius, indicative of the state of the sonata at the end of the seventeenth century. That the sonatas with suite movements were called chamber sonatas and the others church sonatas gives us some hint of the relative dignity of the two forms in the minds of composers of that day. In 1695 J. Kuhnau published in Leipzig his sonata in B-flat for the harpsichord, with the prefatory remarks that he saw no reason why the harpsichord, with its range of harmony and its possibilities in contrapuntal music, should be restricted to the lighter forms of music (such as the suite). He therefore offered to the public a piece for harpsichord written in the more dignified form of the violin music of the day, which he called the _Sonate aus dem B_.

Here, as we remarked in