In approaching sonata form, Brahms and Schenker both struck a compromise between a quintessential late-nineteenth-century view of musical form in which continuous linear evolution is valued above elements of sectionalization, and their sensitivity to the realities of a formal type based in part on the dramatic delineation of a parallel thematic design. This essay explores the difficulties Schenker encountered in the derivation of sonata form from a single Ursatz and reveals that he was anachronistically forcing the ideal of organic unity onto the large-scale formal conventions of the classical period. However, these very difficulties evaporate when his method of analysis is applied to a number of Brahms's more unusual sonata forms. Through an overlap of the retransition and the beginning of the recapitulation and a reinterpretation of the sonata principle, Brahms achieved creatively the specific type of organic unity Schenker had difficulty demonstrating in his analyses of late-eighteenth-century music.
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