Mostly Mozart

In Search of Romantic Form

“…As the subtitle of their treatise proclaims, their ambition is to be more comprehensive in scope and to cover the ‘late eighteenth‐century sonata’ in its entirety. But even though they refer to a much larger number of composers than Caplin, their actual examples are also for the most part drawn from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (see Drabkin and Wingfield ). And while the concept of deformation allows the analyst to move more easily beyond this repertoire, there are limits to its applicability: one can reasonably argue that late Beethoven is working against an established Classical norm, but it is much harder to claim the same about, for instance, early Haydn (see Neuwirth ).…”

The ‘Continuous Exposition’ and the Concept of Subordinate Theme

“…This essay examines one of Hepokoski and Darcy's key concepts: the fundamental distinction that they draw between two‐part and continuous sonata expositions . Considering this distinction is useful not only to probe its general efficacy for formal analysis, but also because it permits us to evaluate a number of other key ideas associated with their theory, especially the medial caesura – their theoretical ‘trademark’, as William Drabkin (, p. 90) has characterised it – and their notion of secondary‐theme zone . For they ground the distinction between exposition types largely in terms of these two concepts: a two‐part exposition contains both a medial caesura and a secondary‐theme zone, whereas a continuous exposition contains neither.…”

“…See Hurwitz‐Keefe (), Drabkin (), Hunt (), Spitzer (), Christiaens (), Hinrichsen (), Riley (), Wingfield (), Hust (), Whittall (2009), Richards (), Neuwirth () and Galand ().…”

Joseph Haydn’s “witty” play on Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory. James Hepokoski/Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata, New York: Oxford University Press 2006.

“…8 Caplin 1998, 3. 9 Anton Webern also deserves a mention here, since he contributed significantly to the dissemination of the form-functional approach through a series of lectures given in Vienna in the 1930s, see Webern 2002. 10 Some parts of their theory had been published in separate studies prior to the Elements (cf., among others, Hepokoski &Darcy 1997 andHepokoski 2002). Reviews and articles that deal with the Elements include Spitzer 2007, Drabkin 2007, Hunt 2007, Wingfield 2008 The current revival of Formenlehre is closely connected to a renewed interest in sonata form. To be sure, no other form has received such a high degree of attention since the sonata form's extensive theorization began in the early nineteenth century with Antonin Reicha,Heinrich Birnbach,Carl Czerny,A.B.…”

“…21 The notion of "formal wit," in particular, implies that the norms with which a certain composer is playing have already been firmly established beforehand. 22 However, it can be argued that this is not invariably the case with all the strategies put forth in the Elements: there are some supposedly "witty" ambiguities H. & D. identify in conjunction with Haydn that only come about through application of an anachronistic and 20 Previous reviews have tended to focus on specific repertoire: Spitzer (2007) prevailingly on Beethoven, Drabkin (2007) on Mozart and Beethoven, Wingfield (2008) on Clementi and the sonata-form practice of the nineteenth century. My approach, by contrast, deals with sonata form from the perspective of an earlier mid-eighteenth-century tradition, since this is the repertoire that provides the context for an adequate historical understanding of the so-called "Classical" period.…”