History of sonata form

Bach, Handel, and Tartini, who followed older Italian models and employed a type attributable to masters such as Corelli and Vivaldi (Musical Form, Leichtentritt, Hugo, p. 122).

Taking the harmonic and voice-leading techniques that his father had developed, he applied them to the homophonic style – allowing dramatic shifts in key and mood, while maintaining an overall coherence.

This is no small innovation, in that it creates a homophonic analog to the polyphonic fugue – a seed of potential from which the composer could later germinate a range of different effects.

Haydn's variety of dramatic effects and ability to create tension was remarked upon in his own time: his music was increasingly taken as the standard by which other practice might be judged.

Mozart's fluidity with the creation of themes, and the dense network of motives and their parts give his work a surface polish which was remarked upon even by his professional rivals.

By the end of his short life, Mozart had absorbed Haydn's technique and applied it to his own more elongated sense of theme, for example in the Prague Symphony.

He continued to expand the length and weight of the sonata forms used by Haydn and Mozart, as well as frequently using motives and harmonic models drawn from the two older composers.

The 19th century's procedure for writing sonatas diverged from earlier Classical practice, in that it focused more on themes than on the placement of cadences.

The monothematic exposition (a common characteristic of Haydn's sonata-form movements) largely disappeared, and the themes of the first and second groups were expected to contrast in character.

Instead, more distant key regions were established by a variety of other means, including use of increasingly dissonant chords, pedal points, texture, and alteration of the main theme itself.

Because the power of harmonic opposition, both between tonic and dominant and between major and minor, had less force in the Romantic vocabulary, stereotypes of the character of themes became stronger.

By requiring that harmony move with the themes, 19th-century sonata form imposed a kind of discipline on composers and also allowed audiences to comprehend the music by following the appearance of recognizable melodies.

However, the sonata form, as an inherited formal mold, also created a tension for Romantic composers between the desire to combine poetical expression and academic rigor.

Charles Rosen has argued that, properly understood, this was always the case: that real sonata forms (plural) were always present, though this is not universally agreed on.

As the 19th century progressed, the complexity of sonata form grew, as new ways of moving through the harmony of a work were introduced by Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt.

Poetic terms, such as "rhapsody" and "tone poem", entered music, and increasingly musicians felt that they should not take the repeats in symphonies because there was no dramatic or lyrical point to doing so.

The Romantic sonata form was an especially congenial mold for Brahms, who felt a strong affinity with the composers of the Classical era.

They sought to integrate more roving harmonies and unprepared chords into the musical structure in order to attain both formal coherence and a full, expressive range of keys.

The compositional school focused around Liszt and Wagner (the so-called New German School) argued in favor of literary inspiration (see Program music), while another camp, centered on Schumann, Brahms, and Eduard Hanslick argued that pure music should follow the forms laid out by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

This conflict was eventually internalized, and by 1900, though the debate still raged, composers such as Richard Strauss would freely combine programmatic and symphonic structure, such as in the work Ein Heldenleben.

However, even composers of atonal music, such as Roger Sessions and Karl Hartmann, continued to use outlines that clearly pointed back to the practice of Beethoven and Haydn, even if the method and style were quite different.

At the same time, composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich revived the idea of a sonata form by more complex and extended use of tonality.

In more recent times, Minimalism has searched for new ways to develop form, and new outlines which, again, while not being based on the same harmonic plan as the Classical sonata, are clearly related to it.