Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

The virtue of tliis process is that it simplifies the
conditions of structure in the whole movement.
"When a correct system of centralisation is found
by which the subject is restrained within the
limits which strictly illustrate but one single
tonality, the feelings which this suggests to tlie
hearer are such as will be satisfied with equally
simple oixjer in all other parts of the complete
structure. If the creative poweris notsuffioiently
concentrated and disciplined to restrain the
direction of its activity within comprehensible
bounds, the result can only be to make perfect
balance and proportion impossible. Thus if the
first section of a movement is so decentralised
that its connection with any pai'ticular key cannot
possibly be followed by the hearer, one of the
primary conditions of abstract music has been
violated, and the balance of pai'ts rendered undistinguishable.
Yet the subject or section may
range broadly in its course, and touch upon many
alien tonalities without violating these conditions
; but then the horizon is broadened so
as to necessitate an equal relative extension in
every part of the movement. If a poet sets out
with a passage expanded to the full with imagery
and implication, in which almost every word is
suggestive of wide horizons of thought, and
carries inference behind it as complicated as
those which lie in simple external manifestations
of nature, it is useless for liim to go bade afterwards
to a more limited and statuesque mode
of expression. Even a pei'son of little cultivation
would feel at once the violation of artistic
proportion. A relative degree of heat and
intensity must be maintained at the risk of the
work being as a whole unendurable. But if a
more restricted field of imagination be appealed
to at the outset, the work may be the more easily
and perfectly carried out in simpler and narrower
limits. In abstract music, balance, proportion,
equality in the range of emotional and structural
elements, are some of the most important conditions.
Not that there is to be equal intensity
all through, but that the salient and subordinate
parts shall be fairly proportionate ; and this
cannot be tested or stated by formulas of science,
but only by cultivated artistic instinct. In
music the art of expressing an idea within
the limits and after the manner necessary for
abstract music had to be discovered. The process
of selection from experimental types had
brought this to the closest point consistent with
completeness in the latter half of the 18th
century. At that time the disposition of the
musical mind was specially set upon obviously
intelligible order and certainty in the structural
aspect of works. It was a necessary condition
for art to go throigh ; and though not by any
meansthe sole oraupremecondition of excellence,
it is not strange that the satisfaction derived
from the sense of its achievement should cause
people, in social circumstances which were
peculiarly favourable, to put disproportionate
SONATA 519
stress upon it ; and that modern writers who
have not been able to keep pace with the inevitable
march and change in the conditions of
musical utterance should stiU insist on it as if
it were the ultimate aim of art ; whereas in fact
its prominence in that epoch was a passing phase
having considerable dependence upon unique
social conditions, and ' its existence in art at
any time is only one of numberless constituent
elements. The condition of art of that time
enabled the gi-eatest composers to express the
utmost of their ideas, and to satisfy their
audiences, within the limits of a very simple
group of hai-monies. And this simplified the
whole process of building their works to the
utmost. Haydn manipulates the resources which
lie within such limits to admiration. Haidly
any composer so successfully made uniformity
out of compounded diversity on a small scale.
He delights in making the separate limbs of a
subject of diffeiftnt lengths, and yet, out of theii'
total sura, attaining a perfect and convincing
symmetry. The harmonic progression of the
subjects is uniformly obedient to the principles
of a form which is on a preconceived plan, and
without some such device the monotony of wellbalanced
phrases must soon have become wearisome.
With regard to the actual distribution
of the movements, Haydn does not depart from
that already familiar in the works of earlier
composers. Out of forty sonatas, comprising
works for pianoforte alone, for pianoforte with
accompaniment, and some adaptations, ten have
only two movements, twenty-nine have three,
and only one has four, this last comprising the
only Scherzando in the whole collection of one
hundred and eleven movements. Nearly all the
first movements are in binary form with an
occasional rondo ; the last is often a rondo,
more often in binary form, and occasionally a
theme and variations. In the sonatas which
have more than two movements, at least twice
as many retain the old adagio as those which
have the characteristic minuet and trio ; but
as a set-off, several of the sonatas either conclude
with a dance form, or a rondo, or set of variations
in the Tempo '
di Minuetto.'
The actual structure of the movements presents
occasional peculiarities. In a few cases the
pure old binary type, with repeat of first subject
at the beginning of the second half, reappears.
A considerable number are in the composite
form, in which the first subject makes two
distinct reappearances in full in the second half,
as before described. The two halves of the
movement are generally, but not invariably, repeated—the
first half almost invariably ; in fact,
the absence of the double bar in the middle of
the Sonata in D major (No. 32 in Breitkopf &
Hartel's edition) appears to be the only exception.
The distribution of subjects in balancing keys
appears to be absolutely without exception, as
tonic and dominant, or tonic minor and relative