Ioannis Fulias: The minuet tradition and its novel transformations in Anton Reicha’s wind quintets

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Ioannis Fulias, “The minuet tradition and its novel transformations in Anton Reicha’s wind quintets”, in: Ioannis Fulias, Emmanouil Giannopoulos & Dimitris Exarchos (ed.), 14th Musicological Conference: “Histories, traditions, transformations” (Conference proceedings, under the auspices of the Hellenic Musicological Society, Arta, 26-27 November 2022), Hellenic Musicological Society, Thessaloniki 2023, p. 261-278.

Anton Reicha’s 25 wind quintets, composed during the 1810s in Paris, constitute a homogenous set of works with many innovative features. The present study focuses on the “minuet” movements of these quintets, although as a rule both their character and tempo are now referring to scherzos. It is also noticeable that Reicha only partially follows the traditional structural standards that still remained universally valid and were stereotypically applied in his era for every minuet and scherzo, since he often exceeds and replaces them with a multitude of new alternative possibilities concerning both the small and – foremost – the larger structural level: among them, there are structural parts in either ostinato variations or fugal form, truncated or reconstructed and sometimes even combined (hybrid) returns of either sections or larger movement parts, as well as minuet forms that not only include a double trio but also variously expand their overall sectional design, apart from the parallel development of a new rotational form or the utilisation of sonata forms instead of any minuet ones. All these transformations of the minuet tradition are also compared to the multiple versions for the minuet form that Reicha introduces a few years later in the second volume of his great theoretical work Traité de haute composition musicale (1826).