The Development‐Ending Dominant and the Late Cadence in vi: Changing Norms in the Sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven

Abstract

Scholars disagree about the stylistic norms surrounding the end of the development section in eighteenth‐century sonatas. Although most sonata theories claim that the typical development ends with a prolonged dominant of the home key, other work never mentions this prolongation and focuses instead on a late cadence in vi – a gesture that often occurs near the end of the development, just before a brief retransition that may or may not culminate in a home‐key dominant. I evaluate these divergent views by analysing a corpus containing all first‐movement sonata forms from the string quartets and piano sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven. The results validate both views, provided they are placed in historical context. In the 1780s and 1790s the majority of developments ended with a dominant prolongation. In the 1760s and 1770s, however, only about a third ended this way. At the same time, the late cadence in vi appeared in over three‐quarters of developments from the 1760s and 1770s but in only half of those from the 1780s and 1790s. Thus, the conflicting accounts of development‐ending norms reflect a historical transition from one convention (the late cadence in vi) to another (the dominant prolongation).