sonata

Sonata form was more congenial to Classical
than Romantic temperaments. In Romantic
styles, the focus on the explicit “contents” of
music, on original themes, on continual
thematic transformation, and on dynamic processes inhibited the full integration of complex structures along Classical lines. The
Romantics believed that a sonata-form exposition was governed more by the contrast between the “first theme” and the “second
theme” than by the tonal polarity between the
keys of the first and second groups. Hence
their sonata form tended to weaken the structural significance of the exposition as a largescale half-cadence moving to the dominant.
They also had a strong bias against literal repetition and formal symmetry. They therefore
were tempted to downplay or reinterpret the
“double return”-the simultaneous return to
the main theme and to the tonic at the beginning of the recapitulation, on which the structure of sonata form depends. And they could
be suspicious of the “sonata principle”-
Edward T. Cone’s term for the necessity of a
recapitulation in the tonic of all material
which first appeared in a foreign key; in
sonata form, this applies chiefly to the second
group of the exposition. The weight of
Romantic sonata form was thus often displaced away from the symmetrical polarity of
the exposition as antecedent and the recapitulation as consequent, onto the development as
climax and the coda as apotheosis. Caught between the restrictive “textbook” model of the
form and powerful pressures to follow the urgings of his muse, the nineteenth-century composer had difficulty writing idiomatic sonata