III. THE HISTORIC IMPORTANCE OF THE SUITE.
In the course of the eighteenth century the suite gradually waned in popularity, and gave place to the more highly organic sonata. Modern suites, notable among which are such delightful works as Bizet's "L'Arlesienne," Grieg's "Peer Gynt," Dvor?'s Suite for small orchestra, opus. 39, Tschaikowsky's "Nut-Cracker Suite," and Brahms's "Serenades" for orchestra, are, after all, exceptional and infrequent, and not the inevitable mould in which the composer casts his ideas.
But the historical importance of the suite was great, and it fell into disuse only after its lessons had been thoroughly learned. Through it musicians developed the dance element which must always be one of the two main strands of all music; through it they learned to substitute for the ancient polyphonic style which is suitable to voices the homophonic style best adapted to the capacities and the limitations of instruments; and through it they became familiar with those simple binary and ternary forms in which such instrumental music is most conveniently and effectively cast.
Thus the suite formed the bridge between, on the one hand, (a) crude folk-songs, (b) primitive dances, and (c) strict polyphonic forms such as the invention and the fugue, and on the other, the sonatas, quartets, concertos, and symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
SUGGESTIONS FOR COLLATERAL READING.
Dickinson: "The Study of the History of Music," Chapters XIII and XIV. Parry: "Evolution of the Art of Music," Chapters VIII and IX; Mason: "Beethoven and His Forerunners," Chapter IV.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Edward Dickinson, "The Study of the History of Music," page 84.
[13] Handel, though he lived in England, was in his music a German.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RONDO.
The study of the suite contained in the last chapter has brought us for the first time into contact with a cyclic form. We have seen that, as instruments developed, as the technique of playing them advanced, and as the themes and their harmonies became more plastic, composers naturally sought some larger plan than that afforded by a single dance form; they thus arrived at the suite. But the suite was inclined to be monotonous. The same key was used for all the separate movements, there was an almost invariable stated length for each, and the rhythms were too insistent to admit of great variety of expression. So composers began to experiment with other forms, chief among which was the sonata.[14]
Through all the rest of this book we shall be dealing directly or indirectly with the musical forms that go to make up the complete sonata. In the present chapter we shall deal with one of its simplest and most primitive types of structure, the rondo.
Sonatas were written as far back as the seventeenth century. Kuhnau's celebrated "Bible Sonatas," crude attempts at program music, are among the notable examples of primitive sonatas. These were indeed "sound-pieces," but their resemblance to a real sonata, as we understand the term, is slight. Bach and Handel each wrote sonatas; and some of Bach's are masterly examples of the then prevailing style. His sonata for violin and piano in F-minor (number V in Peters' edition) may be studied as an example of the form. It contains four movements, the first, second, and fourth of which are purely polyphonic, the third being one of those beautiful meditative pieces of a somewhat rhapsodical style in which Bach seems to have specially delighted. Italian contemporaries of Bach also wrote sonatas, and some of those by D. Scarlatti (1683-1757) and A. Corelli (1653-1713) were of considerable importance in the development of the form. All these early specimens, however, were either vague and indeterminate in form, or were hampered in their expression by the old polyphonic methods. The modern sonata first begins to emerge in the work of Philip Emanuel Bach, son of John Sebastian, and his compositions in this style will be the subject of a later chapter.