Review of Janet Schmalfeldt:In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music(Oxford University Press, 2011)

Abstract

This has been a banner season for the "Tempest" sonata.In 2009, Peeters published a widely read volume of essays that explored the unique analytical and performative challenges of Beethoven's op.31, no. 2. (1) In that same year, members of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) had occasion to see several leading lights of the new Formenlehre, William Caplin, James Hepokoski, and Janet Schmalfeldt, go head-to-head with competing interpretations of the sonata's notoriously ambiguous opening movement.(2) Now, the "Tempest" provides the point of departure for Schmalfeldt's much-anticipated essay collection, In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music.[2] Schmalfeldt has written about the opening of the "Tempest" before, of course.Her 1995 essay, "Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the 'Tempest' Sonata," was a landmark text of both Beethoven reception and contemporary formal analysis.In addition to lending its title to the current volume, that study appears here (with key additions) as Chapter Two, where it serves as the centerpiece of the book as a whole.(3) For it is in her "Tempest" analysis that Schmalfeldt most convincingly makes her case for the "processual" conception of form that is at the heart of her project.[3] As Schmalfeldt's readers know, this process-based understanding of the "Tempest's" opening movement is an inheritance from Dahlhaus, who regarded the work as a milestone of Beethoven's development and of nineteenth-century music in general.Spurred by its ostensible lack of a clear-cut primary theme-the mercurial, caesura-riven introduction seems to elide directly into the sonata transition-Dahlhaus came to believe that the work announced a fundamentally new formal impulse, one that "thwart[ed] and negated" the customary schematic-modular conception of sonata form (Dahlhaus 1989, 14).(4) Rather than offering the listener a series of discrete, easily-identifiable functional/thematic regions, this was a music whose "form" was nothing less than the work's own unique "process of coming into being" through the continuous transformation of its materials (1991, 118).

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