Beyond the Sonata Principle

Abstract This essay provides a concept-history, a close examination, and a testing of the much invoked “sonata principle” (Edward T Cone, 1967-68), while also introducing a new, contrasting mode of analysis (“Sonata Theory”) for sonata-form compositions from the decades around 1800. Within these compositions it was a common expectation that (nontonic) secondary- and closing-material from the exposition would normally be restated in the tonic in the corresponding place in the recapitulation. In mid- and late-twentieth-century English-language analysis (in response to shifting analytical paradigms), this expectation came to be inflated into differing recastings of a much freer, more encompassing “sonata principle” that, at least initially, was proposed to be the “unifying [and] underlying …… principle for the Classical style.” Some of the attractions of this idea included its claims to midcentury academic sophistication, its protean flexibility, and its ability to provide quick solutions to otherwise “difficult” moments within highly regarded compositions. Anticipated by the caveats of other writers, this article calls attention to the principle9s limitations and the ways in which it has been imprecisely laid out or misapplied in influential writing. In a few comparative analyses I also present aspects of a more hermeneutically productive mode of analytical questioning “beyond the sonata principle.”