Sonata form in the Romantic era
In the Romantic era, the formal outline of a sonata was in terms of "themes" or groups of themes, each of which had a function in the progress of the music. By requiring that harmony move with the themes, this formal plan imposed a form of discipline on composers, and also allowed audiences to feel where the music was by following the appearance of recognizable melodies. The important trends in the Romantic sonata were driven by more extended harmonic movement, the desire to combine poetical expression and academic rigour, which were seen as being in tension with each other, and the focus on thematic development becoming central to the conception of a first movement.
As the 19th Century progressed, the complexity of sonata form grew, as new ways of moving through the harmony of a work were introduced by Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt. Instead of focusing exclusively on keys related by the circle of fifths, they used movement along circles based on minor or major triads. Following the trend established by Beethoven, the focus became more and more on the development section. This was in line with the Romantic comparison of music to poetry. Poetic terms, such as "rhapsody" and "recital" and "tone poem" entered music, and increasingly musicians felt that they should not take the repeats in symphonies because there was no point. This changed their interpretation of previous sonata forms.
The final quartets of Beethoven also had an effect on the layout of "sonata" works, in that gradually it became more and more common to have all of the movements of a work be in "sonata-allegro" form. While Charles Rosen has argued that, properly understood, this was always the case, in the 19th and early 20th century, it came to mean specifically the use of the academically layed out first movement form.
The Romantic sonata form was an especially congenial mold for Brahms, who felt a strong affinity with the composers of the Classical era. Brahms adopted and extended Beethoven's practice of modulating to more remote keys in the exposition, and combined it with the use of counterpoint in the inner voices of the music. For example, his piano quintet has the first subject in F minor, but the second subject in C sharp minor, a tritone higher. In the same work, the key scheme of the recapitulation is also altered - the second subject in the recapitulation is in F-sharp minor, rather than the F minor of the first subject.
Another force acting on sonata form was the school of composers centering on Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. They sought to integrate more roving harmonies and unprepared chords into the musical structure, in order to attain both formal coherence and a full expressive range of keys. Increasingly, themes began to have notes which were far from the original key, a procedure later labelled "extended tonality". This trend strongly influenced the next generation of composers, for instance Gustav Mahler. The first movements of several of his symphonies are described as being in sonata form, although they diverge from the above scheme quite dramatically. Some have even argued that the entirety of his first symphony (in which material from the first movement returns in the fourth movement) is meant to a massive sonata-allegro form.
As the result of these innovations, works became more sectional, composers such as Liszt and Anton Bruckner even began to include explicit pauses in works between sections. The length of sonata movements grew starting in the 1830's. The "Prize Symphony" by Lachner, a work seldom played today, had a first movement longer than any symphonic first movement by Beethoven. The length of whole works also increased correspondingly. Another area where the sonata form expanded was in the realm of "tone poems" or "symphonic poems", which would often use the first movement form, and greatly extended their length versus traditional overtures. Berlioz's "Waverly" overture is almost as long as many middle period Haydn symphonies.
One of the debates in the 19th century was over whether it was acceptable to use the layout of a poem or other literary work to structure a work of instrumental music. The compositional school focused around Liszt and Wagner - the so called "New German School" - argued in favor of literary inspiration, while another camp, centered around Schumann, Brahms, and Hanslick argued that "pure" music should follow the forms laid out by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. This conflict was eventually internalized and by 1900, while the debate still raged, composers such as Richard Strauss would freely combine program with symphonic structure, such as in the work "An Heroic Life".
Sonata form in the Modern era
In the Modern period, sonata form became unhooked from its traditional harmonic basis. The works of Schoenberg, Debussy, Sibelius and Richard Strauss emphasized different scales other than the traditional major-minor scale and chords which did not establish a tonality clearly. It could be argued that by the 1930's, "sonata form" was merely a rhetorical term for any movement which stated themes, took them apart, and put them back together again. However, even composers of atonal music, such as Roger Sessions and Hartman continued to use outlines which clearly pointed back to the practice of Beethoven and Haydn, even if the method and style were quite different. At the same time, composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich revived the idea of a sonata form by more complex and extended use of tonality.
In more recent times, Minimalism has searched for new ways to develop form, and new outlines which, again, while not being based on the same harmonic plan as the Classical sonata, are clearly related to it. An example is Aaron Jay Kearnis's Symphony In Waves from the early 1990's.
Sonata form and other musical forms
Sonata form shares characteristics with both binary form and ternary form. It terms of key relationships, it is very like binary form, with a
first half moving from the home key to the dominant and the second half
moving back again (this is why sonata form is sometimes known as compound binary form); in other ways it is very like ternary form, being divided
into three sections, the first (exposition) of a particular character, the
second (development) in contrast to it, the third section (recapitulation)
the same as the first.
Resources
Links:
Books:
Two works by Charles Rosen have helped define the modern conception of sonata form: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (2nd ed. 1997; New York: Norton) and Sonata Forms (1982; New York: Norton).