The "false recapitulation" and the conventions of sonata form

Abstract

Modern accounts of sonata form typically discuss the design in terms of the creation and resolution of tension. The first part of the form (the exposition) creates tension by moving away from the home key and (in many cases) introducing new melodic material. The next section (the development) heightens this tension by changing keys rapidly and varying the themes. The final section (the recapitulation) then resolves the accumulated tension by returning to the tonic key and the opening melodic material. The importance attached to this moment of resolution can hardly be overestimated: the arrival of the recapitulation is commonly regarded as the “central aesthetic event” of the entire movement. This dissertation examines musical passages now known as “false recapitulations,” in which composers supposedly deceive their listeners by returning to the opening theme in the tonic key while still in the development section. Such returns, which seem to signal the recapitulation, are now considered as witty manipulations of the conventions of sonata form. The device is most often associated with the music of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Writings from the eighteenth century, however, relate such passages to an older formal procedure involving neither the recapitulation nor the system of tensions outlined above: this older convention—which was extraordinarily common in Baroque binary designs and sonata-form movements of the early Classical period—entailed a return to the home key soon after the end of the exposition, either before or amidst the characteristic activity of the development section. These references to the tonic (called “medial returns” in this dissertation) often invoke the primary thematic material. Twentieth-century commentators have attempted to make a sharp distinction between this purely conventional practice and the supposedly deceptive “false recapitulations” but contemporaneous accounts disallow this modern differentiation. Because the medial return remained conventional well into the nineteenth century, there is a need to revise current concepts of sonata form; prevailing misapprehensions concerning the “false recapitulation” imply that the nature of the recapitulation has also been misunderstood.

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