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 chapter I, the word sonata comes into pianoforte music, bringing with it a dignity, if not a charm, which was felt to be lacking in the suite. Kuhnau’s sonata is in four movements, none of which is very clearly articulated. The adagio comes between the second and fourth and is in the key of E-flat major. This sonata was followed by seven more, published the next year under the title of Frische Clavier Früchte. The tone of all is experimental and somewhat bombastic. But at any rate we have at last keyboard sonatas.
During the lifetime of Corelli two other Italian violinists rose to shining prominence, Locatelli[21] and Vivaldi[22]. To them is owing a certain development in the internal structure of a new form of the sonata called the concerto, of which we shall say more later on. Here we have to note, however, the tendency of both these composers to make their concertos and sonatas in three movements: two long rapid movements with a slow movement between. Corelli left sonate da camera and sonate da chiesa of the same description; but the procedure seems to have recommended itself to Sebastian Bach mainly by the works of Vivaldi, of which, as we have seen, he made a most careful study. Hence we have from Bach not only the beautiful sonatas for violin and harpsichord in three movements, but harpsichord concertos,—many of which were transcriptions of Vivaldi’s works, but some, like the exquisite one in D minor cited in the last chapter, all his own,—likewise on the same plan. So, too, were written many of the Brandenburg concertos, notably the one in G major, No. 5. Finally we have the magnificent concerto in the Italian style for cembalo alone, which is more truly a sonata, leaving for all time a splendid example of the symmetry of a well-wrought piece in three movements.
Of this perfect masterpiece we have already spoken. It is well to recall attention to the fact, however, that the first and last movements are of about equal length and significance. Both are in rapid tempo and of careful and more or less close-knit workmanship; and both are in the key of F major. The movement between them is in a different key (D minor) and of slow tempo and wholly contrasting character.
Here, then, as regards the number and grouping of movements in the sonata, we have in the work of the father, the model for the son Emanuel. For so far as Emanuel Bach contributed at all to the external structure of the pianoforte sonata, it was by adhering consistently to this three-movement type which was later adopted by Haydn, Mozart, and, to a great extent, Beethoven.
His consistency in this regard is indeed well worth noticing. For between the years 1740 and 1786, when he composed and published his numerous sets of sonatas, there was much variety of procedure among musicians. Bach, however, rarely varied; and this, together with the models his father left, justifies us in calling the sonata in three movements distinctly the German type of this period.
Meanwhile composers who were more in the current of Italian music fought shy of committing themselves to a fixed grouping of movements. Italian instrumental music was taking a tremendous swing towards melody and lightness. This was especially influential in shaping the triplex form of movement; but was also affecting the general grouping. Padre Martini (1706-84) of Bologna alone adhered to a regular, or nearly regular, number and sequence of movements in harpsichord sonatas. His twelve harpsichord sonatas, published in Amsterdam in 1742, but written some years earlier, seem strangely out of place in their surroundings.
To begin with, even at this late date they are written either for organ or for harpsichord. This alone prepares us for the general contrapuntal style of them all. Then, though named sonatas, they are far more nearly suites. Each is composed of five movements. The first is regularly in sonorous prelude style, suitable to the organ. The second is regularly an allegro in fugal style, the third usually an adagio. The fourth and fifth are in most cases dances,—gavottes, courantes or gigues, with sometimes an aria or a theme and variations. All the movements in one sonata are in the same key. Only one feature resembles those of the growing Italian harpsichord sonata: the generally light dance character of the last or the last two movements. For what is very noticeable in the sonatas of E. Bach is that the last movements, though cheerful in character, are usually of equal musical significance with the first.
Far more in the growing Italian style are the eight sonatas of Domenico Alberti, the amateur thorn in the professional side. Just when they were written is not known. The young man was born in 1717 and died probably in 1740 if not before. None of them has more than two movements. Both are in the same key and the second is usually the livelier of the two, often a minuet.
A group of the Italians preferred the sonata in two movements, Francisco Durante (1684-1755), for example, and later Domenico Paradies (1710-92). Later still, some sonatas of Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Sebastian, who submitted quite to the Italian influence, have but two movements; and the first of Clementi’s sonatas also. Other Italians, like Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85), seem never to have decided upon any definite number, nor any definite order of movements.
What is, however, due particularly to the Italian influence is the persistent intrusion of a dance form in the cycle—usually a minuet. We find it in Alberti, in Christian Bach, and especially in the clavecin works of Jean Schobert, a young Silesian, resident in Paris from about 1750 to 1766, one of the most brilliant clavecinists of his day, one of the most charming, and one who brought a very decided influence upon the development of the young Mozart.
The Italian tendency was invariably to put at the end of the sonata a movement of which the lightness and gaiety of the contents were to bring refreshment or even relief after the more serious divulgences of the earlier movements,—a rondo or even a dance. To this impulse Haydn and Mozart both yielded, retaining from Emanuel Bach only the standard number of three movements.
It must be added here that something is due to Slavic influences in the ultimate general triumph of the objectively gay over the subjectively profound in the last movement or movements of the sonata and the symphony. Not only did Haydn incorporate in the scheme the lively expressive melodies and the crisp rhythms so native to the Slavic peoples among whom he grew to manhood. Earlier than he the Bohemian, Johann Stamitz, had thus enlivened and clarified the symphony, and given it the great impetus to future development which bore so splendidly in Vienna. And Schobert, whom we have but now mentioned, was from a Polish land. What such men brought was essentially of spiritual significance; but in music, as in other arts, the new spirit brings the new form.
As we have already said, the number and sequence of movements in the pianoforte sonata has never been rigidly fixed. But an average combination is clear. The majority of sonatas by Haydn and by Mozart, as well as by lesser men like Clementi, Dussek and Rust, and many of the sonatas by Beethoven, are in three movements. Of these the first and last are invariably in the same key (major and minor). The first movement is normally of a dignified, formal, and more or less involved character, though such a generalization may be quickly stoned to death by numbers of conspicuous and great exceptions. The second movement is normally in a key contrasting with the first movement, usually of slow and lyrical character, usually also simple, at least as regards form. The last movement is, in perhaps the majority of cases, more brilliant, more obvious and more rapid than the others, calculated to amuse and astonish the listener rather than to stir his emotions, to send him away laughing and delighted, rather than sad and thoughtful.
The number three was established by Emanuel Bach. The character of the last movement, however, was determined by Italian and Slavic influences, and is somewhat reminiscent of the suite. If one more sign is necessary of the complex crossing and recrossing of various lines of development before the pianoforte sonata rose up clear on its foundations, we have but to note the curious facts that the suite was neglected in Italy during the seventeenth century in favor of the string sonata; that the suite reached its finest proportions in Germany, chiefly at the hands of Sebastian Bach; that through Sebastian Bach the three-movement sonata group passed from the Italian Vivaldi to Emanuel Bach, who established it as a norm; finally that the Italians, who neglected the suite in the seventeenth century, conceived an enthusiasm for it in the eighteenth and brought their love of it to bear on the German sonata group, introducing the minuet and giving to the last movement the lively care-free form of a dance or a rondo.
Before proceeding to outline the development of the triplex form in which at least one movement of this sonata group was written and which is one of the most distinctive features of the sonata, it is not out of place to stop to consider what relationship, if any, existed between the movements. Was the sonata as a whole an indissoluble unit? Rather decidedly no. The grouping of several movements together came to be as conventional and as arbitrary, if not so regular, as the grouping of the suites. There is about the sonatas of Emanuel Bach a certain seriousness and an emotional genuineness which might prevail upon the pianist today, if ever he should think of playing them in concert, to respect the grouping in which the composer chose to present them to the world. But there is no organic life in the sonatas as a whole. Occasionally in his sonatas and in those of Clementi and Haydn the slow middle movement leads without pause into the rapid finale. In these cases, however, the slow movement is introductory to the last, to which it is attached though not related.
Haydn, Mozart and even Beethoven took movements from one work and incorporated them in another. Moreover, it was the custom even as late as the time that Chopin played in Vienna, to play the first movement of a symphony, a concerto or a sonata early in a program and the last movements considerably later, after other works in other styles had been performed. The sonatas and symphonies of the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries in the main lacked any logical principle of unity. We say in the main, because Emanuel Bach, F. W. Rust, and Beethoven succeeded, in some of their greatest sonatas, in welding the movements inseparably together. Clementi, too, in the course of his long life acquired such a mastery of the form. But these developments are special, and signalize in a way the passing on of the sonata. As a form the sonata proper was doomed by the lack of a unity which composers in the nineteenth century felt to be necessary in any long work of music.
The day will come, if indeed it has not already come, when most sonatas will have been broken up by Time into the various distinct parts of which they were pieced together. Out of the fragments future years will choose what they will to preserve. Already the Bach suites have been so broken. It makes no difference that their separate numbers are for the most part of imperishable stuff. Movements of Haydn and Mozart will endure after their sonatas as wholes are dead. So, too, with many of the Beethoven sonatas. The links which hold their movements together are often but convention; and there is evidently no convention which Time will not corrode.