Back and forth from Egmont: Beethoven, Mozart, and the nonresolving recapitulation

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 25, Issue 2-3, 2001, Pages 127-154

  Hepokoski, James ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61449192422     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2001.25.2-3.127     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Elements of Sonata Theory takes up in more detail each aspect of the terminology and style of the hermeneutics that underpin this article. Put another way, my goal here cannot be to derive this system but only, within certain limitations, to demonstrate the methodology in action. Thus I hope to suggest some of the practical results to which it leads and to refer readers to the more elaborate discussions of the basic principles that will soon appear in the Elements of Sonata Theory.
2. I should perhaps mention two additional points. First, while there are points of contact between the present article and the forthcoming book, this article, taking up a central issue and several examples in more detail, is not an extract from the latter. Second, this essay was conceived as one of a complementary pair of articles. Its sibling is "Beyond the Sonata Principle," Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002), 91-154.
3. By a rotational process I mean an ordered arrangement of diverse thematic modules that is subjected to a (usually varied or altered) recycling, or several recyclings, later on in the work. Expositions thus provide an ordered, referential rotation through a set of materials that is recycled, with alterations, in the recapitulatory rotation. In the decades around 1800 developments may also be fully or partially rotational (including the possibility of half-rotations, blocked rotations, and the like), although nonrotational developments are also a possibility. The concept is elaborated further in Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, which also includes a discussion of the utility of the specific term, "rotation." For considerations of rotations a century later, see Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 23-26, 58-84;
4. "The Essence of Sibelius: Creation Myths and Rotational Cycles in Luonnotar," in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 121-46;
5. and "Rotations, Sketches, and [Sibelius's] Sixth Symphony," Sibelius Studies, ed. Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 322-51.
6. See also Darcy, "The Metaphysics of Annihilation: Wagner, Schopenhauer, and the Ending of the Ring," Music Theory Spectrum 16 (1994), 1-40;
7. "Bruckner's Sonata Deformations," in Bruckner Studies, ed. Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 256-77;
8. and "Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler's Sixth Symphony," this journal 25 (2001), 49-74.
9. For the MC and two-part exposition, see Hepokoski and Darcy, "The Medial Caesura and Its Role in the Eighteenth-Century Sonata Exposition," Music Theory Spectrum 19 (1997), 115-54.
10. For considerations of the additional concepts, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, from which figs. la-b are taken.
11. A related situation occurs when the second half of an exposition, grounded essentially in the "proper" key, the dominant in major-mode expositions, contains an interior passage that momentarily tonicizes a contrasting key (not necessarily a mediant) only to return to the more standard key to conclude the passage in question. Normally, toward the end of the movement, the fifth-transposition that governs the shift from the expositional V to the recapitulatory I will also - as a matter of course - control any fleeting interior "escape" to the contrasting key. The first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in D, op. 18, no. 3, for example, arrives at an A major (V) perfect authentic cadence in m. 57, but slips ephemerally into C major (locally, music natural signIII of A) in mm. 68-71 - shortly thereafter returning to A minor (mm. 72-75) and A major (m. 76). In the recapitulation's fifth-transposition the corresponding key that is briefly alluded to, of course, is F major (music natural signIII of D), mm. 199-202. (Here I avoid the term "secondary theme" because this exposition is better interpreted as a provocative instance of the second type of continuous exposition, lacking a proper medial caesura and secondary theme - a structural and expressive issue whose explication would require too much space in the present context. See, however, n. 23 below along with its related passage in the text.)
12. Thus in their incompleteness - or when not followed up with a more precise description of the situation at hand - one might find blunt statements of the type encountered, e.g., in Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 244, to be insufficient: "In the Waldstein Sonata, in C major, the E major mediant of the exposition is balanced by the submediant A major/minor in the recapitulation. In the Sonata for Piano in G Major, op. 31, no. 1, the second group in the mediant B major returns in the submediant E major." Compare n. 6 below.
13. Rosen, "Schubert's Inflections of Classical Form," in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 87. One presumes that Rosen's initial impulse, in this context (a discussion of tonal issues in Schubert's "Grand Duo" in C, D. 812, movt. I), was to refer primarily to major-mode sonata-form examples, since the number of self-evident minor-mode sonata-form contradictions to the claim is vast (as is mentioned in my subsequent paragraph below in the text). And yet, following references to op. 31, no. 1, and op. 53, Rosen sought to include a number of minor-mode "late-style" examples of this, some of which, as it happens, were inaccurate.
14. Additionally, Rosen suggested - with slightly more detail, perhaps, in The Romantic Generation, p. 244, directly following the statements cited in n. 5 above - that "in the E flat-Major Quartet, op. 127 [first movement], the mediant G major is balanced later by submediant C major." The problematic element finessed in this claim (concealed under the general word, "later") is that the presumed balance occurs in fundamentally different parts of the rotational layout. The exposition's secondary theme, in the mediant (m. 41), returns intact in the tonic in the recapitulation (m. 207), a situation unlike that in op. 31, no. 1, movt. I and op. 53, movt. I. The cited C-major element surfaces (and is nonsustainable) only considerably earlier and with reference to another theme altogether, at m. 135, Maestoso (the onset of the third rotation of basic materials). Among the obvious questions to be raised are: how can tonal "balances" occur in radically different parts of a rotational layout?; how can recapitulatory, pre-medial-caesura tonal moves "balance" expositional, post-medial-caesura keys?; why are the specific thematic or textural statements that underpin these "balances" - and their assigned positions within the general layout - utterly irrelevant to these tonal generalizations?
15. Also instructive is the perhaps related procedure found in the first movement of the String Quintet in C, op. 29. Here the exposition (mm. 1-93), non-normatively, moves from an initial I (C major) to the submediant, VI and vi (A major, A minor). (At this point one might recall Rosen's assertion in The Romantic Generation, p. 240: "One should, I suppose, make basic distinctions among these third relationships: major and minor mediant, flatted mediant, submediant, and flatted submediant.... But Beethoven employs all of these in similar fashion.") The recapitulation of op. 29, movt. I, presents the corresponding S-C portion (which, like the exposition, includes a fleetingly local tonal "escape" to a related flat-key shortly into the passage) up a third, in C major-minor-major throughout, albeit with expansions and other rhetorical complications at its end, none of which are directly related to tonal choice. Thus in this recapitulation, as would be the case in Leonore 3, Beethoven provides not the slightest hint of any lower- (or upper-) fifth-based balance or compensation for the unusual S-and-C key in the exposition. One may conclude that within this repertory what we might regard today as compensatory fifth-balances in certain recapitulations were optional features. In other words, when they do appear, they are surely important and worthy of our hermeneutic attention, but they seem not to have responded to what we might imagine to be Beethoven's keen sense "in general" about the acute need to provide such a recapitulatory balance. (Compare also the recapitulatory tonic-treatment of the originally submediant secondary theme in the first movement of the "Archduke" Piano Trio in Bmusic flat sign, op. 97.)
16. See, e.g., Richard L. Cohn, "Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions," Music Analysis 15 (1996), 9-40;
17. Cohn, "As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert," this journal 22 (1999), 213-32;
18. and the entire issue of Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998), devoted to Neo-Riemannian theory. The transformation-labels "L" (Leittonwechsel, or "leading-tone exchange"), "P" (parallel)
19. and "R" (relative), a development of earlier work by David Lewin, were proposed by Brian Hyer, Tonal Intuitions in Tristan und Isolde (Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1989);
20. and presented in a formal publication in Hyer, "Reimag(in)ing Riemann," Journal of Music Theory 39 (1995), 101-38.
21. The suggestion of potential tonal substitutions and tonal representations "by proxy" (p. 228) is most clearly anticipated in Cohn, "As Wonderful as Star Clusters," e.g., p. 231: "My thesis [concerning the first movement of Schubert's Bmusic flat sign Piano Sonata, D. 960] ... is that efficient voice leading, emphasizing semitonal displacement, furnishes a context in which to understand nineteenth-century triadic progressions that are not adequately reconcilable to diatonic tonality.... Diatonic tonality and voice-leading proximity are equivalently systematic ways of interpreting harmonic relations." Compare n. 17 below.
22. Compare the similar remarks in Martha Calhoun, "Music as Subversive Text: Beethoven, Goethe and the Overture to Egmont," Mosaic 20 (1987), 43-56 (esp. pp. 50-51).
23. Calhoun, "Music as Subversive Text," pp. 50-51, lays out the allusive options: "The break [the first fermata, m. 278] could represent Klärchen's death, the quasi-chorale [mm. 279-86, leading to the second fermata on V], the apparition to Egmont of Freedom in the form of Klärchen, and the Symphony of Victory [mm. 287ff.], Egmont bravely mounting the scaffold to die as an example. Or, the [first] break could represent Egmont losing his head; the religious music intones a eulogy or apotheosis, while the coda celebrates the eventual victory of the Netherlands. While the first interpretation seems more in line with Goethe's Egmont, the second agrees more closely with what we know of Beethoven's vision of the play. Still, both play out death, apotheosis and victory. It is perhaps not possible to argue definitively for one interpretation over another. What is most striking is that at this point in the piece the music does generate extra-musical meanings (even if they cannot be proven to represent specific dramatic events) and it is this process which invites further reflection."
24. See, e.g., the influential article, Leonard G. Ratner, "Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form," Journal of the American Musicological Society 2 (1949), 159-68;
25. and cf. The useful discussion of this issue in Mark Evan Bonds, "The Paradox of Musical Form," chap. 1 of Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 13-52.
26. Also relevant, of course, is Heinrich Schenker, Der Freie Satz [1935], trans. Ernst Oster as Free Composition (New York, Longman, 1979), I, 133. The issue is also explored historically in my "Beyond the Sonata Principle" (n. 1 above).
27. Here the standard citation is Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), pp. 76-77. The sonata principle has been recast in a number of differing formulations. See Hepokoski, "Beyond the Sonata Principle."
28. Hepokoski, "Beyond the Sonata Principle."
29. I have discussed the principle and implications of sonata deformations at greater length in Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, and especially in "Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition," chap. 15 of The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 424-59.
30. See also Darcy, "Bruckner's Sonata Deformations" (n. 2 above).
31. Related movements - all three are most profitably considered together, as differing realizations of somewhat similarly posed problems (although not uniformly with nonresolving recapitulations) - include the E-major Adagio of the Piano Sonata in C, op. 2, no. 3 (whose deformational "exposition" also moves to G major) and the E-major Largo of the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, op. 37.
32. Measures 1-9 of op. 1, no. 2, movt. II, were used as a paradigm of a sentence with expanded cadential function by William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 46 [ex. 3.16a], 47: "The extra measure of this nine-measure theme is created by a small expansion of the cadential progression [mm. 8-9 with upbeat]. (Schoenberg speaks of similar situations as a 'written-out ritardando.')"
33. 6. Here the speculative question is whether in the mid-1790s such a shift between what Cohn has recently called "modally matched harmonies [or 'next-adjacencies']... [involving] dual semitonal displacements in contrary motion" (in this case, within what he identified as the "Western" hexatonic cycle, which includes the B and G triads - "As Wonderful as Star Clusters," pp. 217, 216) is to be interpreted as establishing a relatedness between the two sonorities to the point where one may act as an effective "proxy" for the other. As I have suggested above, one may certainly consider such questions to be both germane to the situation at hand and provocative in their implications (e.g., what might the nature and expressive function of such a representation by proxy be?) without abandoning the more central concept of a tonally non-normative exposition, which will eventually result in the nonresolving recapitulation to come.
34. Some readers might initially consider also, however briefly, the merits of a third interpretation, namely whether this movement might be grasped under the paradigm of the sonata-rondo. The relevant model here would be the pattern sometimes described as ABAB'A + coda, although in such manifestly sonata-oriented cases as these it is more accurately laid out as: exposition - recapitulation - return of primary theme (P) - coda. As always, everything depends on the range and clarity of one's deUnitions, but in the present situation the sonata-rondo reading seems the least desirable of the available interpretive options. The sonata-rondo subtype in question represents an intermixture between the rondo principle and the so-called sonatina (or sonata-without-development - which we call the "Type 1 Sonata" in the Elements of Sonata Theory). (In our view, an example of such a mixture is found in the second movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in Emusic flat sign, K. 543.) It is clear, however, that this kind of sonata-rondo mixture is similar to another formal possibility: the sonatina (Type 1 Sonata) with extended, P-based coda. In the Elements of Sonata Theory, these nearly identical formats are distinguished by such factors as: (1) the presence in the sonata-rondo of a clear, separate retransition-link (RT) between the end of the recapitulation and the restatement of the rondo "refrain" that follows (as opposed, for instance, to a simple elision of the one into the other); (2) the seeming rondo-character, or lack of it, of the P-theme; and (3) the degree to which the thematic integrity of the (tonic-grounded) P is maintained in the final statement of it after the recapitulation (more deviations from the original model suggest a coda, not a rondo refrain). Instructive along these lines - and clarifying with regard to the present op. 1, no. 2, movt. II situation - is the Amusic flat sign-major second movement (Adagio molto) of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 10, no. 2, which presents some of the same issues without the "nonresolving" complications of the Trio movement. Lacking an RT between the end of the recapitulation and the onset of P (m. 91 )-and presenting that P in an incomplete, "decaying," and much-varied form (mm. 91-102) - this movement is best considered a Type 1 Sonata (sonatina) with discursive coda (mm. 91-112), not a sonata-rondo. (Within this paradigm, "discursive codas" - or lengthy, multisectional codas, which can appear in conjunction with any sonata type and often begin with P-based material - often also feature a "coda-to-the-coda" effect at the end.) The fuller rationale and argumentation behind these assessments (along with a few more nuances) are provided in Elements of Sonata Theory. In any event, within the second movement of the Trio, op. 1, no. 2, the potential candidate for any supposed final, post-recapitulation rondo-statement, m. 82, is begun off-tonic (A minor), is unprepared by any retransition (it is elided directly with the final chord of the recapitulation), and is subject to extreme decay and variation from the original P-idea. For these reasons it is not helpful to regard mm. 82-107 as participating principally in a broader so-nata-rondo structure. (In other words, there is a simpler explanation of the form to be found other than that resulting from a primary appeal to the sonata-rondo concept - which in any case does not affect the central "nonresolving" argument presented above.)
35. This proposition about tonic presence is elaborated in chap. 11 of the Elements of Sonata Theory.
36. z)-we may note that at least five fast movements proceeded from an initial i to III in their expositions: the two outer movements of the Overture to Betulia liberata, K. 118 (74c); the G-minor second movement (Allegro) of the Quartet in Bmusic flat sign, K. 159; and the two outer movements of the Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, K. 183. At least nine slow movements also moved from i to III, and they are from: the Violin [Flute] and Cello Sonata (also printed as a Violin Sonata) in F, K. 13; the Symphony No. 1 in Emusic flat sign K. 16; the Symphony No. 5 in Bmusic flat sign, K. 22; the Violin Sonata in Emusic flat sign, K. 26; the Cassation in Bmusic flat sign, K. 99 (63a); the Symphony in C, K. 96 (111 b); the Quartet in G, K. 156; the Quartet in C, K. 157; and the Symphony No. 26 in Emusic flat sign K. 184 (166a). The "second-level-default" expositional shift from i to the more "negative" v was less common. It occurs in three slow movements, from: the Piano Concerto in G, K. 41; the Quartet in F, K. 168; and the Quartet in Emusic flat sign K. 171.
37. For this suggestion I am indebted to the more general discussion of eighteenth-century conceptions of melancholy provided by Elaine Sisman in "C. P. E. Bach, Beethoven, and the Labyrinth of Melancholy, " delivered at the American Musicological Society, Toronto, 2 November 2000; an expanded version was presented at Yale University, 29 November 2000. (I am grateful to Professor Sisman for providing me with a copy of this paper.) Sisman related a number of minor-mode works or sections thereof - normally in slow tempo - to the contemporary discourse surrounding melancholia. Frequently associated with this sadness of temperament were such features as a studious frame of mind, extreme mental acuity and memory, a high degree of self-absorption (though occasionally leading to apparent surface disorder), and occasionally a labyrinthine convolution of thought process. Many eighteenth-century writers took pains to distinguish it from the extreme of genuine madness (typically understood as more raving or violent), but from time to time, as Sisman mentions, room was permitted for melancholy to slide into such states as "melancholy madness."
38. I have provided a discussion of op. 20, no. 3, movt. I, in "Beyond the Sonata Principle."
39. (It is also mentioned in Hepokoski and Darcy, "The Medial Caesura and Its Role," p. 119.) I might only mention that two more normative examples may be found in the first movement of Mozart's Quartet in Bmusic flat sign, K. 458 ("Hunt," with multiple "stuttering" cadences - and hence no secondary theme proper - in mm. 54, 60, 66, and 69, along with an effective EEC at m. 77, and a closing theme beginning at m. 78), and Haydn's Symphony No. 88 in G. Compare n. 4 above.
40. Characteristic C-types and their implications are discussed in the Elements of Sonata Theory, chap. 9.
41. The term "crux" is taken from Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 253-61.
42. Compare also the analysis of K. 449, movt. II, in Carl Schachter, "Idiosyncratic Features of Three Mozart Slow Movements: The Piano Concertos K. 449, K. 453, and K. 467," in Mozart's Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 315-33.
43. As before, of course, the issue of one key substituting for another (that has proven "unable" to sustain itself for one reason or another) invites speculation about theoretical matters of chordal and tonal transformation - although in this case the matters are not directly related to the concept of closed groups of hexatonic cycles "based on voice-leading efficiency." Compare nn. 8 and 17 above.
44. The structural and expressive usages of major and minor within sonatas - usages that can be highly variable - are inventoried and discussed in chap. 14 of the Elements of Sonata Theory, which lays out the hermeneutic implications that undergird the present discussion.
45. A convenient inventory of such movements and other minor-mode patterns in Beethoven has been made by Joseph Kerman, "Beethoven's Minority," in Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 217-37.
46. The phrase about "its equivalent" is provided to cover continuous recapitulations, which lack a medial caesura and, consequently, lack a secondary theme proper. See n. 23 above.
47. See n. 22 above.
48. The tonal pattern found in the first movement of Brahms's Third Symphony may also be understood in relation to such major-mode sonata forms with expositional closes in the mediant as Beethoven's Piano Sonatas op. 31, no. 1, movt. I, and op. 53, movt. I. While in this part of his career Beethoven had normally "corrected" the recapitulation's fifth-related submediant (when it occurred) in such a way as to produce the point of essential structural closure (ESC) in the tonic (see n. 5 above along with the related discussion in the text), this does not occur in the Brahms movement. From this perspective, the Brahms piece may be regarded as an instance of an "uncorrected" recapitula-tion - something on the order of the major-mode op. 53, movt. I, pattern additionally informed by the more non-normative, minor-mode Egmont prototype.