Tunes in sonata-form (Part 5)

Sonata-form, Part 5:
Play a (not so) simple melody

DAN COREN

Fifth in a series of articles about sonata-form.

Remember when I wrote, a few months ago, “It’s clear from the empirical evidence … that Mozart and Haydn carried something like The Official Rule Book of Classical Form in their heads”? Well, do I have great news! This week I discovered a copy of the 1795 edition of the Manual of Classical Style Regulations.

There are, to be sure, some weird things about this Manual. For starters, nobody else seems to have ever heard of it. Equally strange, it’s written in English. Even more striking is how congruent its ideas about sonata-form are with my own.

For example, it’s crucial that you resist the idea that once you’ve heard one sonata-form exposition, you’ve heard them all. The first movement of Mozart’s 36th Symphony (the “Linz”) is just one example of what a composer can do by following the Manual’s guidelines. That’s clear from the Manual’s first two general instructions for writing a sonata-form exposition, which coincidentally were the subject of my last installment:

1. In the exposition, if you use a major key (and the judges prefer major to minor), you must modulate to the dominant.
2. Your modulation will be judged on efficiency and grace. You must convince us that you’ve really changed key. If you can make that happen without our noticing when or how you did it, so much the better.

Ah, but the Manual offers two more guidelines (which also coincide with my own).

3. If you insist on writing in a minor key, you will of course modulate to the relative major. We assume you are aware of the complications you will cause yourself later on in the recapitulation. You will be judged harshly if you don’t deal with them convincingly.

Why avoid minor keys?

Ah, yes— minor keys and the relative major. In order to avoid an overload of theory in these articles, I’ve made a valiant effort until now— an effort I now regret— to avoid dealing with pieces in minor keys, pieces like the Mozart 40th Symphony and the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony … the list of famous masterpieces in minor keys goes on and on. I don’t know what I was thinking. Having come this far, though, I think it would be best to put off a thorough discussion of the behavior of minor keys until we discuss recapitulations and find out why the Manual is so touchy on this subject.

For now, here’s a reminder of what major and minor sound like. First, an example of three-part harmony from my previous article; second, the same passage in the minor mode. (Since both passages have the same tonic, they differ in mode, not in key.) Sonata-form expositions in minor keys behave just like those in major keys in that they start in the tonic and end up in another key— in this case, almost invariably, a key using the major scale, which, in relation to the original tonic, is called the relative major. While modulation to the dominant is subtle, not so easy to hear, and occurs slowly, modulation to the relative major is often much more obvious and overtly dramatic, since it involves both a change of key and a change of mode, and can take place very quickly indeed.

Modulation needs melody

By itself, modulation is a pure abstraction, of course— a sort of Platonic ideal. Modulations become real only through actual music, and actual music means tunes— or, as they’re usually called in discussions of sonata-form, themes. Here’s what the Manual says on that subject:

4. Despite what you may have heard from your friends, there are no rules about themes. If you want to use a memorable new melody to announce your arrival in the new key, that’s OK with us. But if you think you can get by with only one tune, or if you feel you need five or six, that’s fine, too. Moreover, you can use a melody anywhere you see fit. For example, you can use a tune to travel from one key to another. If you can get away without any real tunes at all, more power to you. Just be sure to observe Rule 2.

One of the most unfortunate features of formal textbook descriptions of sonata-form is the idea of a “first theme” in the tonic and a “second theme” in the new key strung together by musical filler. In the last 30 years or so, this grossly oversimplified description has come to seem a bit antiquated, but it still frequently pops up in program notes. In actuality, the Classical masters followed my Manual’s guidelines.

Mozart the exuberant, Haydn the miserly

To be sure, many expositions do in fact have very clearly defined new melodies synchronized with the arrival in the new key, be it dominant or relative major. Here’s one very clear example among many: the tune that coincides with the arrival in the dominant, from the first movement of Beethoven's Second Symphony.

By way of extreme contrast, here’s an example from Mozart’s G Minor String Quintet, K. 516: one long passionate melody that starts in the tonic minor and over its long course seamlessly reaches the relative major.

Or consider the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, which is all rhythm and kinetic energy with hardly anything in its exposition that could be called a singable tune.

Mozart’s use of melodies is as profligate as the luxurious life-style he enjoyed in Vienna. (“Here, have another! No, really, I’ve got a ton of ’em the fridge.”) Haydn, on the other hand, conserves musical material the way some folks who grew up in the Great Depression conserve scraps of aluminum foil. Here’s the beginning of the exposition of Haydn’s Symphony No. 100, followed by its arrival in the dominant, at which point Haydn re-uses the same tune that began the exposition. Only then, after all the hard work of getting to the dominant is over, does Haydn kick back and allow himself (and us) a new tune.

Haydn the practical joker

You may have noticed that this is the first time since the opening essay in this series that I’ve used an example of Haydn’s music. In fact, in the past few months I’ve spent a great deal of time listening to Haydn, and I’ve concluded again and again that his treatment of sonata-form is simply too sophisticated to be used for introductory examples. If Beethoven is the Zeus of the Classical Pantheon and Mozart its Apollo, then Haydn is its Hermes: a perpetual perpetrator of practical jokes and deception.

I’ll close with an example from the last movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 84 in E-flat major, which shows Haydn at his wittiest and trickiest. The movement starts innocently enough, and soon proceeds on its way to the dominant. Here’s the music arriving there. What’s coming next? Almost certainly a nice new melody, right? Something like this, perhaps?

Damn! I almost brought that off! There’s something a bit suspicious about that example, isn’t there? There’s a tiny little glitch just before that new tune. OK, OK— I've been playing a little Haydn-style joke of my own. This is not, in fact, the way the 84th Symphony actually goes; I’ve spliced in a tune from Haydn’s 99th Symphony, which is also in E-flat. And isn't it amazing how well Sir Neville Mariner’s tempo in the 84th matches Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s in the 99th? (The tune from the 99th is taken from a live performance, part of the CD that the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia very generously sent as a holiday gift to its subscribers.)

Here's what Haydn actually does in the 84th— substituting just a few mysterious, magical chords where you had every reason to expect a melody. It is, for me at least, an amazing and quintessentially Haydnesque moment. But it's not as amazing as what Haydn does with this material later on the movement, as we'll see in a future essay.



Before that, though, in the next article I must deal with a question that I know must be taxing you: "Hey, what about those miracles of formal organization and musical drama, the Mozart Piano Concertos?"


Fifth in a series of articles about sonata-form.
To read the series from the beginning, click here.
To read the next article in the series, click here.