Formal Process, Sonata Theory, and the First Movement of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata

Bibliographic Data

ID4390564
AuthorsJames Hepokoski (Yale University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume16
Issue2
Publication date2010-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMusic Theory Online (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1067-3040 • E-ISSN: 1067-3040
PublisherSociety for Music Theory (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.30535/mto.16.2.7
OpenAlexW1481231563
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited6

Recording and Score of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata (Malcolm Bilson, piano) [1] In recent decades much analytical attention has been paid to the first movement of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31 no. 2. Under scrutiny from contrasting perspectives, that movement, and especially the opening portion of its exposition, has emerged not only as a test case for assessing the merits of differing analytical systems, but also-in the wake of Carl Dahlhaus's (1991) remarks about its opening bars-as a supposedly revelatory touchstone of the maturing Beethoven's larger aesthetic purposes. As all commentators have noted, the composer built startling instabilities into both its primary thematic zone (P, measures 1-21) and the onset and continuation of its transition (which, elided with the cadential close of P, starts in measure 21). While one should not downplay such features, it has been tempting to overread them, even to the point of making claims about the emergence in such music of a new, largely nonschematic concept of form as "the process of coming into existence" or, surely taking a conceptual cue from Adorno, a "processual character of musical form." (1) By the late 1980s the strong form of this assertion regarding the Tempest was associated above all with Dahlhaus. Returning repeatedly to these opening bars in his own writings, he sought again and again to demonstrate this point, although many of his brief analytical readings of music from this period seem grounded in an all-too-apparent eagerness to uncover at least the originary manifestations of what he wished to regard as the conceptual and historical path to the developing-variation aspect of Schoenberg more than a century later

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Musical · Opera · Piano · Piano sonata · Scrutiny · Sonata cycle · Sonata form · Symphony · Tempest · Diverse Music Education Insights · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Philosophy

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