Sonata


In music, a sonata is a piece that consists of 3 or 4 movements that can be for different musical instruments. The term evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms until the Classical era, when it took on increasing importance. Sonata is a vague term, with varying meanings depending on the context and time period. By the early 19th century it came to represent a principle of composing large-scale works. It was applied to most instrumental genres and regarded—alongside the fugue—as one of two fundamental methods of organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music. Though the musical style of sonatas has changed since the Classical era, most 20th- and 21st-century sonatas maintain the overarching structure.
The term sonatina, pl. sonatine, the diminutive form of sonata, is often used for a short or technically easy sonata.

Instrumentation

In the Baroque period, a sonata was for one or more instruments, almost always with continuo. After the Baroque period most works designated as sonatas specifically are performed by a solo instrument, most often a keyboard instrument, or by a solo instrument accompanied by a keyboard instrument.
Sonatas for a solo instrument other than keyboard have been composed, as have sonatas for other combinations of instruments.
There are some general guidelines a typical sonata might follow, however, it is important to acknowledge the term sonata still hadn’t taken shape yet in the 17th century because of the sinfonia conflating the term. A sinfonia were pieces played by multiple instruments together, upholding the characteristics of the imitative canzona. The sinfonia showed precursors to the introductory movement of sonata form today. As newer types of canzonas and concertos began to form, the sonata was still an ambiguous genre because many characteristics of other forms became entangled with early sonatas.
The sonata finally began to become a separate entity starting in the 17th to 18th centuries when the canzona became less popular and the suite, concerto, and sonata all developed in different directions. In short, a suite is a sequence of movements based on dance movements, whereas sonatas do not possess complete dance like movements. Although it is important to note that sonatas can contain movements assembled from parts of dance movements, but the passages are not formal enough to be called a suite. Sonatas were standardized to either fall into being a sonata da camera, “chamber sonata,” or a sonata da chiesa, “church sonata.” Corelli’s twelve trio sonatas, Op. 2, were foundational to the development of the sonata and an example of 12 chamber trio sonatas, Op. 2, in 1685. Corelli’s prolific work in his trio sonatas inspired Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, and Telemann.
The sonata and the suite were two forms that experienced overlap in France, Germany, and England; however, they remained separate in Italy because the scoring criteria were different. Beste writes that during this time period, the keyboard repertoire evolved with the sonata as Bach was writing his keyboard suites, with BWV 825-30 being called “partitas.” Beste writes on the partita that “By the late seventeenth century, however, had come to denote a multi-movement instrumental cycle, either still as a set of variations or as a succession of dances. Only in its latter connotation does it overlap with the sonata, and only in a specific instrumental and geographical context: its widespread currency is limited to Germany, and to the solo keyboard repertoire. The overlap between sonata and partita are interesting to consider looking at Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas for violin, as Beste writes “they conform to the four-movement ‘church sonata’ pattern established by Corelli, for which no other generic term was available. The partitas, on the other hand, borrow their designation from the keyboard repertoire, as multi-movement dance cycles for solo instrument.”

History

Baroque

In the works of Arcangelo Corelli and his contemporaries, two broad classes of sonata were established, and were first described by Sébastien de Brossard in his Dictionaire de musique : the sonata da chiesa, which was the type "rightly known as Sonatas", and the sonata da camera, which consists of a prelude followed by a succession of dances, all in the same key. Although the four, five, or six movements of the sonata da chiesa are also most often in one key, one or two of the internal movements are sometimes in a contrasting tonality.
The sonata da chiesa, generally for one or two violins and basso continuo, consisted normally of a slow introduction, a loosely fugued allegro, a cantabile slow movement, and a lively finale in some binary form suggesting affinity with the dance-tunes of the suite. This scheme, however, was not very clearly defined, until the works of Arcangelo Corelli when it became the essential sonata and persisted as a tradition of Italian violin music.
The sonata da camera consisted almost entirely of idealized dance-tunes. On the other hand, the features of sonata da chiesa and sonata da camera then tended to be freely intermixed. Although nearly half of Johann Sebastian Bach's 1,100 surviving compositions, arrangements, and transcriptions are instrumental works, only about 4% are sonatas.
The term sonata is also applied to the series of over 500 works for harpsichord solo, or sometimes for other keyboard instruments, by Domenico Scarlatti, originally published under the name Essercizi per il gravicembalo. Most of these pieces are in one binary-form movement only, with two parts that are in the same tempo and use the same thematic material, though occasionally there will be changes in tempo within the sections. They are frequently virtuosic, and use more distant harmonic transitions and modulations than were common for other works of the time. They were admired for their great variety and invention.
Both the solo and trio sonatas of Vivaldi show parallels with the concerti he was writing at the same time. He composed over 70 sonatas, the great majority of which are of the solo type; most of the rest are trio sonatas, and a very small number are of the multivoice type.
The sonatas of Domenico Paradies are mild and elongated works with a graceful and melodious little second movement included.

Classical period

The practice of the Classical period would become decisive for the sonata; the term moved from being one of many terms indicating genres or forms, to designating the fundamental form of organization for large-scale works. This evolution stretched over fifty years. The term came to apply both to the structure of individual movements and to the layout of the movements in a multi-movement work. In the transition to the Classical period there were several names given to multimovement works, including divertimento, serenade, and partita, many of which are now regarded effectively as sonatas. The usage of sonata as the standard term for such works began somewhere in the 1770s. Haydn labels his first piano sonata as such in 1771, after which the term divertimento is used sparingly in his output. The term sonata was increasingly applied to either a work for keyboard alone, or for keyboard and one other instrument, often the violin or cello. It was less and less frequently applied to works with more than two instrumentalists; for example, piano trios were not often labelled sonata for piano, violin, and cello.
Initially the most common layout of movements was:
  1. Allegro, which at the time was understood to mean not only a tempo, but also some degree of "working out", or development, of the theme.
  2. A middle movement, most frequently a slow movement: an Andante, an Adagio or a Largo; or less frequently a Minuet or Theme and Variations form.
  3. A closing movement was generally an Allegro or a Presto, often labeled Finale. The form was often a Rondo or Minuet.
However, two-movement layouts also occur, a practice Haydn uses as late as the 1790s. There was also in the early Classical period the possibility of using four movements, with a dance movement inserted before the slow movement, as in Haydn's piano sonatas No. 6 and No. 8. Mozart's sonatas were also primarily in three movements. Of the works that Haydn labelled piano sonata, divertimento, or partita in Hob XIV, seven are in two movements, thirty-five are in three, and three are in four; and there are several in three or four movements whose authenticity is listed as "doubtful." Composers such as Boccherini would publish sonatas for piano and obbligato instrument with an optional third movement—–in Boccherini's case, 28 cello sonatas.
But increasingly instrumental works were laid out in four, not three movements, a practice seen first in string quartets and symphonies, and reaching the sonata proper in the early sonatas of Beethoven. But two- and three-movement sonatas continued to be written throughout the Classical period: Beethoven's opus 102 pair has a two-movement C major sonata and a three-movement D major sonata. Nevertheless, works with fewer or more than four movements were increasingly felt to be exceptions; they were labelled as having movements "omitted," or as having "extra" movements.
The four-movement layout was by this point standard for the string quartet, and overwhelmingly the most common for the symphony. The usual order of the four movements was:
  1. An allegro, which by this point was in what is called sonata form, complete with exposition, development, and recapitulation.
  2. A slow movement: an andante, an adagio, or a largo.
  3. A dance movement, frequently minuet and trio or—especially later in the classical period—a scherzo and trio.
  4. A finale in faster tempo, often in a sonata–rondo form.
When movements appeared out of this order they would be described as "reversed", such as the scherzo coming before the slow movement in Beethoven's 9th Symphony. This usage would be noted by critics in the early 19th century, and it was codified into teaching soon thereafter.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Beethoven's output of sonatas: 32 piano sonatas, plus sonatas for cello and piano or violin and piano, forming a large body of music that would over time increasingly be thought essential for any serious instrumentalist to master.