Ioannis
Fulias, “Sonata forms and
their theoretical evolution:
20th-century theorists
(I)”, Polyphonia 13, Athens 2008, p. 61-101.
The
sixth part of this extensive survey of the theoretical evolution of sonata
forms from 18th to 20th centuries is utterly devoted to a number of major 20th-century
contributions to sonata forms from a thematic point of view, thus keeping on
the main norms of the 19th-century sonata theory. Hugo Riemann lends
ideological nuances to sonata form, while Hugo Leichtentritt and Percy
Goetschius develop Prout’s “school sonata forms” further. At the same time, a
new tendency is revealed in a few musicological studies by Wilhelm Fischer and
Rudolf von Tobel, in which the investigation of specific works by Haydn, Mozart
and Beethoven results in a more detailed description and interpretation of
sonata features in the classic era. A summary of the basic specifications for
sonata forms, found in numerous handbooks of music analysis and composition from
the mid-20th-century onwards, is then achieved through a juxtaposition of five
representative books by Arnold Schönberg, Wolfgang Stockmeier, Wallace Berry,
Ellis Bonoff Kohs and Clemens Kühn. The present paper contains also a
brief reference to Erwin Ratz, as well as a more extensive one to William Earl
Caplin, whose study Classical Form combines
the prevalent theoretical tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries with some reconstructed
elements from the late-18th-century sonata theory.
© Ioannis
Fulias