The Romantic sonata form in theory and praxis

The development of sonata form during the 19th Century was highly influenced by the theoretical speculation of the Formenlehre. Since few decades after its appearance, sonata form was described in many books of theorists of the late 18th Century (Koch, Galeazzi, Kollmann, ecc.) and later, in the third decade of the new century, by Marx and Reicha.This large theoretical speculation focused on certain features of the 18th Century sonata form, neglecting others. This paper aims to underline how romantic composers absorbed sonata principles through the filters of theoretical treatises, more than thought the direct analysis of the works of classical composers. For example the principle that an exposition would contain two principal melodic ideas in contrast of character (the first and the second theme) and two ancillary sections (the transition and the closing section) became stronger after having been theoretically established by Marx, while, as Hepokoski and Darcy (2006) have demonstrated, this principle was not normative during the classical period and the four different “spaces” of the exposition of a classical sonata form (P, TR, S, C) could have the same melodic importance.Similarly, the gradual disappearance of the “continuous exposition” during the century or the weakening of the rhetorical power of the MC (medial caesura) can be explained by the fact that the Formenlehre didn’t formalize and theorized these concepts, leaving the composers unaware of them.Of course, the romantic sonata cannot be seen as a mere expression of prescriptions of the contemporary treatises, but many strong normative rules of the sonata form in the classical period tended to fade faster in the romantic period because they were not set down in the theories.The paper will take in account the most important differences between the classical and the romantic sonata form, underlining how the Formelehre has affect these transformations in the works of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and others romantic composers.