Sonata-form No. 7: Role of repetition

Play it again, Wolfgang:
Why sonata-form needs repetition

DAN COREN

Seventh in a series of essays about sonata-form.

When I started this series in August 2007, I chose the Mozart 36th Symphony (the Linz), as my departure point partly because I knew the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia was going to perform it in January. I pictured a troop of loyal Broad Street Review readers attending this concert, enlightened by my contribution to their knowledge. I blush at my naiveté.

Here we are eight months later and I still haven’t gotten beyond the exposition section of a sonata-form movement. And, though I promise to move on after this installment, I’m still not quite ready to leave the subject.

If the First Commandment of sonata-form composition is “Thou shalt modulate to the dominant,” the Second is “Thou shalt repeat the exposition.” In the notated score, expositions are bracketed by a pair of symbols– repeat signs – that mean, “Play everything between these symbols twice.”

Fifty years ago, in large part because of the physical limitations of vinyl records, it became customary not to repeat the exposition. Nowadays, however, the repeat is almost always taken, at least in the first movement. I really don’t know what actual performance practice was in the late 18th Century, but Haydn and, even more so, Mozart and Beethoven lavished a great deal of care on dramatizing their repeats. Some of the most elegant passages in the literature— for example, the end of the exposition in the Linz— involve two-way connecting joints that lead either back to the beginning of the exposition or forward into the development section.

(By the way, it has come to my attention that some readers are not bothering to follow the links to my musical examples. I assure you, BSR’s technical staff is keeping careful track of slackers. If you don’t mend your ways, you can expect a visit soon from BSR’s Aesthetic Enforcement Division, which will present first offenders with an obligatory membership to the Philadelphia Frederic Delius Society. For repeat offenders, a lifetime membership.)

Writing two different endings

Nearly 20 years after the Linz, in a piece that seems light-years away in many respects, Beethoven used the same architecture in the last movement of his Fifth Symphony. Here’s the end of the exposition the first time; here it is the second time around. (It’s a coincidence, I’m sure – I doubt if Beethoven even knew the Linz existed – but the pieces are in the same key and enter their developments with the same chord change.)

In some cases, Mozart or Beethoven – typically in their largest, most serious works-- wrote two separate endings to the exposition, one going back to the beginning, the other forward. In these cases, a performance that omits the repeat actually deprives listeners of several seconds of music. Here’s something that, even today, one rarely gets to hear in concert: the first and second endings of the exposition of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. (The several minutes of music following this second example are, one might argue— especially if one is my BSR colleague Robert Zaller– to the Classical symphony what the French Revolution was to international politics. I’ll come back to it in my next article.)

Try singing The Star-Spangled Banner

Why does the repeated exposition exist? What aesthetic purpose does it serve?

Part of the answer lies in the musical example I used at the beginning of this series: the tune from the second movement of Haydn’s 85th Symphony. To Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, sonata-form (remember, they had no idea what that term meant) was an expansion of that structure; they thought of it as two repeated parts.

If you want to get a sense of what leaving out the first repeat might have sounded like to them, sing the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner but omit the music for “Whose broad stripes…” through “…gallantly streaming.” It’s not just that the familiar text is missing; without that repeated music, the tune (to me, at least) seems incomplete and out of kilter.

Aside from the issues of balance and conventional practice, an obvious benefit of the repeat is that if you’re new at this and trying to orient yourself to the landmarks within sonata-form, hearing the exposition repeated makes it easier to hear where the development begins. Beyond serving as a guidepost, the repeat brings up a deeper issue having to do with tonality.

Convincing the ear

I’ve tried very hard in earlier essays, especially in my last discussion of Mozart’s Linz Symphony, to drill home the idea of how much hard work and skill it takes to convince the ear that, by the end of the exposition, the dominant has really been established as a new key. But maybe it really hasn’t. Listen again to that link at the end of the exposition in the Linz. The music slips back to the beginning so easily, as if nothing had happened: All the hard work of modulation is gone, poof, just like that.

Repeating the exposition serves two dramatic purposes: First, it shows just how ephemeral and fragile that modulation to the dominant really is— how hard it is to escape the pull of the original tonic. Second, it heightens the feeling of finally leaving home, of striking off for new territory, when the music finally does leave the exposition.

Here’s one of my favorite examples: the end of the exposition of the slow movement of Mozart’s 38th Symphony. Here’s the beginning of the movement; the first ending of the exposition; and the second ending, which sails out into the open waters of unstable tonality.

Three men on a quest

In the 20 years or so between 1785 and 1805, all three of the great Classical composers seemed to be searching— within the framework of sonata-form— for ways to escape the gravitational pull of the tonic. As we’ll see in my next essays in this series, this search was in many ways a joint venture. But the composer who achieved musical space travel— who quite literally went where no man had gone before— was, of course, Beethoven.

By about 1805, after several years of arduous experimentation, Beethoven had developed a new turbo-charged version of sonata-form. He had found ways to leave the tonic far behind and to make its return feel like a return to Earth from outside the solar system. The engine room of this musical spaceship, the source of the power that got him into orbit, was what we have come to call the development section. Its evolution will be the subject of my next essays.



To read earlier articles in this series, begin here.