Formal Process, Sonata Theory, and the First Movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata

JAMES A. HEPOKOSKI

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Abstract

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.

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References

2006Elements of Sonata Theory 2006Elements of sonata theory : norms, types, and deformations in the late eighteenth-century sonata 1993Adorno's Aesthetics of Music 1993Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music 2000Beethoven's concertos: history, style, performance 2010Sonata Theory and Dialogic Form 1995Beethoven 2017Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the “Tempest” Sonata

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2012Compositions, Scores, Performances, Meanings 2015The ‘Continuous Exposition’ and the Concept of Subordinate Theme 2013In Search of Romantic Form 2011Review of Janet Schmalfeldt:In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music(Oxford University Press, 2011)

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