The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner

This article revisits the long‐standing issue of form in the Adagio of Mahler's Tenth Symphony (1910) in light of recent developments in Formenlehre and neo‐Riemannian theory. I consider the movement's sonata properties, as discerned by Kofi Agawu (1986) and Richard Kaplan (2005), by exploring the applicability of William E. Caplin's form‐functional theory (1998) and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Sonata Theory (2006) in a post‐Wagnerian tonal environment, construed in terms of Richard Cohn's hexatonic systems (1999) and Julian Horton's model of orbital tonality (2018b). While the argument posits a hexatonically orientated conception of form based on what I theorise as hexatonic tension, special attention is given to the idea of breakthrough as an analytical and hermeneutic point of reorientation: conceived after Janet Schmalfeldt's concept of becoming (2011), the breakthrough initiates a retrospective reinterpretation of the Adagio's tonal universe and consequently turns its form into a diatonically orientated sonata form. The article thus explicates the formal function of breakthrough based on Adorno's aesthetic formulation, propounding a chromatically inflected model of sonata form in response to Seth Monahan's call for a novel framework for Mahler's late works (2011). Together they constitute a foundation of a theory of fin‐de‐siècle modernist symphonic sonata form.

Section: Towards a Fin‐de‐siècle Turn Of The New Formenlehrementioning

confidence: 99%

“…2525Vande Moortele (2017, Ch. 3) has a similar formulation with regard to sonata form and potpourri procedure in Romantic overtures.…”

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confidence: 99%

Formalising Star Clusters: Sonata Process and Breakthrough Function in the Adagio of Mahler's Tenth Symphony

Lee¹

2021

“…Useful critiques of the Type 2 sonata's Romantic applicability can be found in Wingfield (), p. 160, and Vande Moortele (), pp. 236–40, who argues, via consideration of Marx's Formenlehre , that nineteenth‐century composers had no perception of Type 2 as a distinct precursor.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The call for such a theory has gathered force in recent years, stimulated in no small measure by Schmalfeldt (): see for example Horton () and (), and Vande Moortele (). Fledgling examples of such a theory can be seen in Vande Moortele () and Horton ( and ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Form and Orbital Tonality in the Finale of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony

Horton¹

2018

This article investigates questions of form in the Finale of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, paying special attention to the reversed recapitulation as a problematic category in contemporary Formenlehre. Counterpointing Timothy Jackson's reading of the movement as a ‘tragic’ reversed sonata against James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's critique of the concept of reversal, it seeks ways of accounting for the movement's novel form‐functional characteristics, which integrate concepts of thematic syntax with a model of chromatic tonality, drawing simultaneously on Schenkerian and neo‐Riemannian theories and the notion of the double‐tonic complex first proposed by Robert Bailey. The argument is contextualised in relation to critical debates about Bruckner's forms that originated during the composer's lifetime, especially claims of material discontinuity and harmonic illogicality, which were common in the symphonies’ pro‐Brahmsian reception and which linger in the discourse up to the present. The article's central claim is that a substantial understanding of both the Finale's form and its critical reception is attendant upon a theory of formal function, which takes seriously the difficulties of harmonic analysis that Bruckner's post‐Wagnerian idiom engenders.

“…158–9). Following Wingfield's sentiment, Vande Mortele adds that the Type 2 sonata ‘is never discussed in the nineteenth‐century theoretical literature’; therefore, ‘apparent “Type 2 sonatas” are better understood as being in dialogue with norms derived from contemporaneous practice’ (, pp. 237–8).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Formal Ramifications of Bruckner's Bipartite Sonata Form

Lai¹

2018

As a composer who had received intensive training in music theory, notably through Simon Sechter and Otto Kitzler, Bruckner's understanding of sonata form as a bipartite design as addressed in Formenlehre manuals is no secret to us. By taking as its point of departure an examination of the treatises of Ernst Friedrich Richter and Johann Christian Lobe, which Bruckner had consulted, this paper broadens our understanding of Bruckner's treatment of form and content in the sonata discourse by exploring his compositional approaches within a specific formal area – the music surrounding the onset of the recapitulation – in order to show how the perception of the development plus recapitulation as a unified formal space is reinforced. Analyses of opening movements and finales of his symphonies have revealed three major strategies of projecting the binary construction: ‘false recapitulation’, Type 2 sonata (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006), and what I call ‘enclosure’; the third strategy provides an additional means of evading the boundary between the development and recapitulation. At a time when composers such as Berlioz and Liszt had already discarded sonata form and were experimenting with new formal criteria, tonal‐harmonic options and alternative aesthetics, Bruckner remained faithful to it and expressed his belief in its potential for the symphonic medium.