Sonata
[1]: 17 The term evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms until the Classical era, when it took on increasing importance.
It was applied to most instrumental genres and regarded—alongside the fugue—as one of two fundamental methods of organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music.
This scheme, however, was not very clearly defined, until the works of Arcangelo Corelli when it became the essential sonata and persisted as a tradition of Italian violin music.
Although nearly half of Johann Sebastian Bach's 1,100 surviving compositions, arrangements, and transcriptions are instrumental works, only about 4% are sonatas.
[5] The sonatas of Domenico Paradies are mild and elongated works with a graceful and melodious little second movement included.
In the transition to the Classical period there were several names given to multimovement works, including divertimento, serenade, and partita, many of which are now regarded effectively as sonatas.
It is during this period that the differences between the three- and the four-movement layouts became a subject of commentary, with emphasis on the concerto being laid out in three movements, and the symphony in four.
Research into the practice and meaning of sonata form, style, and structure has been the motivation for important theoretical works by Heinrich Schenker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Charles Rosen among others; and the pedagogy of music continued to rest on an understanding and application of the rules of sonata form as almost two centuries of development in practice and theory had codified it.
The development of the classical style and its norms of composition formed the basis for much of the music theory of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The sonata idea begins before the term had taken on its present importance, along with the evolution of the Classical period's changing norms.
The reasons for these changes, and how they relate to the evolving sense of a new formal order in music, is a matter to which research is devoted.
[9] Crucial to most interpretations of the sonata form is the idea of a tonal center; and, as the Grove Concise Dictionary of Music puts it: "The main form of the group embodying the 'sonata principle', the most important principle of musical structure from the Classical period to the 20th century: that material first stated in a complementary key be restated in the home key".
[11] As a practical matter, Schenker applied his ideas to the editing of the piano sonatas of Beethoven, using original manuscripts and his own theories to "correct" the available sources.
The basic procedure was the use of tonal theory to infer meaning from available sources as part of the critical process, even to the extent of completing works left unfinished by their composers.
