Vienna as the home of the sonata; definition of ‘sonata’—Origin and history of the standard sonata cycle; relationship of sonata movements—Evolution of the ‘triplex’ form: Pergolesi’s ‘singing allegro’; the union of aria and binary forms; Padre Martini’s sonatas, Scarlatti’s true sonata in C; Domenico Alberti; the Alberti bass; the transitional period of the sonata—Sonata writers before Haydn and Mozart: J. C. Bach; Muzio Clementi—Schobert and Wagenseil; C. P. E. Bach; F. W. Rust.
Turning our backs upon Bach and looking over the musical marches, we shall observe many roads in the second half of the eighteenth century making their way even from the remotest confines towards Vienna. There they converge towards the end of the century. Thither comes pouring music from England, from France, volumes of music from Italy; music from Prussia, from Saxony, from Russia; from all the provinces, from Poland, from Bohemia and from Croatia. There is a hodge-podge and a pêle-mêle of music, of types and nationalities. There are the pompous oratorios from the west, light operas and tuneful trios and sonatas from the south, dry-as-dust fugues from the north, folk-songs gay and sad from the east. All whirling and churning before Maria Theresa, or her lovable son, or the intelligent courtiers about them. France will grow sick before the Revolution, Italy will become frivolous, Germany cold. Only Vienna loves music better than life. Presently up will come Haydn from Croatia, and Mozart from Salzburg, and Beethoven from Bonn. Then young Schubert will sing a swan-song at the feast from which the honored guests have one by one departed; and waltzes will whirl in to gobble up all save what fat Rossini can grab for himself.
And what is the pianoforte’s share in this profusion of music? Something of all, variations, pot-pourris from the operas, rondos and bagatelles and waltzes; but chiefly sonatas, and again sonatas.
Now sonatas did not grow in Vienna. Vienna laid before her honored guests the great confusion of music which had poured into her for fifty years from foreign lands, and in that confusion were sonatas. They were but babes, frail and starved for lack of many things, little more than skin and bones. But they had bright eyes which caught Haydn’s fatherly glance. He dragged them forth from the rubbish and fed them a good diet of hearty folk-songs, so that they grew. Mozart came from many wanderings and trained them in elegance and dressed them with his lovely fancies. And at last when they were quite full-grown, Beethoven took charge of them and made them mighty. What manner of babe was this that could so grow, and whence came it to Vienna?
The word sonata slips easily over the tongues of most people, great musicians, amateurs, dilettanti and laymen alike; but it is not a word, nor yet a type, easily defined. The form is very properly associated with the composers of the Viennese period. Earlier sonatas, such as those of the seventeenth century composers, like Kuhnau and Pasquini, are sonatas only in name, and not in the generally accepted sense of the word. The rock which bars their entrance into the happy kingdom of sonatas is the internal form of the movements. For a sonata is not only a group of pieces or movements in an arbitrary whole. At least one of the separate movements within the whole must be in the special form dubbed by generations with an unfortunate blindness to ambiguity, the sonata form. Attempts have been made from time to time to rename this form. It has been called the first movement form; because usually the first movements of sonatas, symphonies and other like works, are found to have it. Unhappily it is scarcely less frequently to be found in the last movements. Let us simply cut the Gordian knot, and for no other reason than that it may help in this book to render a difficult subject a little less confusing, call this special form arbitrarily the triplex form.
To trace the development of the pianoforte sonata, then, is a twofold task: to trace the tendency towards a standard group of pieces or movements in one whole; and to trace the development of the triplex form of movement, the presence of which in the group gives us the somewhat despotic right to label that group a sonata.
The first task leads upon something of a wild-goose chase. The number of movements which a sonata might contain never became rigidly fixed. A single movement, however, is not a sonata in the generally accepted meaning of the word. It is true that the separate pieces of D. Scarlatti are still called sonatas; but this is only one of the few cases where the original natural use of the word has persisted beside the arbitrarily restricted one. We are, as a matter of fact, almost forced to this continued free use of the term by the lack of a more specific one to cover the circumstance, or even of a suitable abstract one. As we have seen, the few pieces Scarlatti published himself he called esercizii. Even in his day the word sonata was applied mostly to compositions made up of two or more movements. His pieces were not fugues; neither were they dances. They were too regular and too compact to be called fantasies or toccatas. They were not rondos, and his imagination was sterile in fanciful titles such as Couperin gave to his pieces. Our modern minds reject his own title as utterly unmusical. In abstract terms we have ‘piece,’ which may do for the historian but not for the program. ‘Movement’ has been chained up in the sonata and symphony. ‘Gems’ and ‘jewels’ are too often in music a paste of musk and tears. So we hold to sonata, for the lack of anything better.
Though the word originally signified any music sounded or played on instruments, thus differentiating instrumental music from vocal, its use was limited early in the seventeenth century to music written for groups of strings or wind. At that time, it will be remembered, harpsichord and clavichord music was still essentially organ music, to which the word sonata was rarely applied.
The string sonatas had developed chiefly from the old chanson, the setting of a poem in stanzas to polyphonic vocal music. The composer attempted in this old form to reflect in his music the varied meaning of the stanzas of his poem. Thus the music, taken from its words and given to groups of strings to play, was more or less clearly divided into varied sections, showing, as it were, the shape or skeleton upon which it had originally been moulded. At first the instrumentalists, even the organists, as we have seen, were content merely to play upon their instruments what had been thus written for voices. Such had long been their custom with popular madrigals and with other simpler forms.
Soon the organists broke ground in a wholly different direction. But the other instrumentalists, chiefly the violinists, on the contrary, though they began to compose their own music with an ever-growing regard to the special qualities of their instruments, still retained the well-known form. Hence the many fledgling sonatas in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and even the first quarter of the seventeenth, with their title of canzon a suonare. This title was soon cut down to sonata. The form was enormously expanded by the enthusiasm and rapidly soaring skill of the instrumental composers. The many more or less vague sections, fossil outlines, as it were, of the poem in stanzas, swelled out to broad and clear proportions. The number of them was consequently cut down to four or even three, the selection and sequence of which had been almost unconsciously determined by principles of contrast. Finally the influence of the growing suite combined with the breadth and formal perfection of the several sections to cut them off distinctly, each from the other. The word sonata, then, it will be observed, was applied almost from the beginning to a piece of music divided into several more or less clearly differentiated sections or movements.
The growth of the suite was, as we have seen, of quite a different nature. The sonata developed rapidly from a seed. The suite was a synthesis of various dance pieces, held together by a convention, without any inherited internal relationship. In spite of the number of suites written during the seventeenth century for string band and even other combinations of instruments, it is practically a special development of keyboard music. The lighter character of the music itself, depending largely upon dance rhythms for its vitality, encouraged the free style suitable to the harpsichord. Its influence upon the string sonata is, however, unmistakable.
Thus, though harpsichord music and the suite were more or less neglected in Italy during the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, we find Corelli publishing between 1683 and 1700 his epoch-making works for violin and other instruments in alternate sets of suonate (sometimes called suonate da chiesa), and suites, which he called suonate da camera. In the former the movements had no titles but the Italian words which marked their character, such as grave, allegro, vivace, and other like words. In the latter most of the movements conformed to dance rhythms and were given dance names.
The normal number of movements in both sonatas and suites is four, and normally these four are in the order of slow, fast, slow, fast. The movements of the suite are all normally in the same key; but among the sonatas the middle adagio is often in a different key from the other movements. This variety of key is nearly always present as a distinctive feature of the sonata.
Corelli’s works are, leaving aside his personal genius, indicative of the state of the sonata at the end of the seventeenth century. That the sonatas with suite movements were called chamber sonatas and the others church sonatas gives us some hint of the relative dignity of the two forms in the minds of composers of that day. In 1695 J. Kuhnau published in Leipzig his sonata in B-flat for the harpsichord, with the prefatory remarks that he saw no reason why the harpsichord, with its range of harmony and its possibilities in contrapuntal music, should be restricted to the lighter forms of music (such as the suite). He therefore offered to the public a piece for harpsichord written in the more dignified form of the violin music of the day, which he called the Sonate aus dem B.
Here, as we remarked in chapter I, the word sonata comes into pianoforte music, bringing with it a dignity, if not a charm, which was felt to be lacking in the suite. Kuhnau’s sonata is in four movements, none of which is very clearly articulated. The adagio comes between the second and fourth and is in the key of E-flat major. This sonata was followed by seven more, published the next year under the title of Frische Clavier Früchte. The tone of all is experimental and somewhat bombastic. But at any rate we have at last keyboard sonatas.
During the lifetime of Corelli two other Italian violinists rose to shining prominence, Locatelli[21] and Vivaldi[22]. To them is owing a certain development in the internal structure of a new form of the sonata called the concerto, of which we shall say more later on. Here we have to note, however, the tendency of both these composers to make their concertos and sonatas in three movements: two long rapid movements with a slow movement between. Corelli left sonate da camera and sonate da chiesa of the same description; but the procedure seems to have recommended itself to Sebastian Bach mainly by the works of Vivaldi, of which, as we have seen, he made a most careful study. Hence we have from Bach not only the beautiful sonatas for violin and harpsichord in three movements, but harpsichord concertos,—many of which were transcriptions of Vivaldi’s works, but some, like the exquisite one in D minor cited in the last chapter, all his own,—likewise on the same plan. So, too, were written many of the Brandenburg concertos, notably the one in G major, No. 5. Finally we have the magnificent concerto in the Italian style for cembalo alone, which is more truly a sonata, leaving for all time a splendid example of the symmetry of a well-wrought piece in three movements.
Of this perfect masterpiece we have already spoken. It is well to recall attention to the fact, however, that the first and last movements are of about equal length and significance. Both are in rapid tempo and of careful and more or less close-knit workmanship; and both are in the key of F major. The movement between them is in a different key (D minor) and of slow tempo and wholly contrasting character.
Here, then, as regards the number and grouping of movements in the sonata, we have in the work of the father, the model for the son Emanuel. For so far as Emanuel Bach contributed at all to the external structure of the pianoforte sonata, it was by adhering consistently to this three-movement type which was later adopted by Haydn, Mozart, and, to a great extent, Beethoven.
His consistency in this regard is indeed well worth noticing. For between the years 1740 and 1786, when he composed and published his numerous sets of sonatas, there was much variety of procedure among musicians. Bach, however, rarely varied; and this, together with the models his father left, justifies us in calling the sonata in three movements distinctly the German type of this period.
Meanwhile composers who were more in the current of Italian music fought shy of committing themselves to a fixed grouping of movements. Italian instrumental music was taking a tremendous swing towards melody and lightness. This was especially influential in shaping the triplex form of movement; but was also affecting the general grouping. Padre Martini (1706-84) of Bologna alone adhered to a regular, or nearly regular, number and sequence of movements in harpsichord sonatas. His twelve harpsichord sonatas, published in Amsterdam in 1742, but written some years earlier, seem strangely out of place in their surroundings.
To begin with, even at this late date they are written either for organ or for harpsichord. This alone prepares us for the general contrapuntal style of them all. Then, though named sonatas, they are far more nearly suites. Each is composed of five movements. The first is regularly in sonorous prelude style, suitable to the organ. The second is regularly an allegro in fugal style, the third usually an adagio. The fourth and fifth are in most cases dances,—gavottes, courantes or gigues, with sometimes an aria or a theme and variations. All the movements in one sonata are in the same key. Only one feature resembles those of the growing Italian harpsichord sonata: the generally light dance character of the last or the last two movements. For what is very noticeable in the sonatas of E. Bach is that the last movements, though cheerful in character, are usually of equal musical significance with the first.
Far more in the growing Italian style are the eight sonatas of Domenico Alberti, the amateur thorn in the professional side. Just when they were written is not known. The young man was born in 1717 and died probably in 1740 if not before. None of them has more than two movements. Both are in the same key and the second is usually the livelier of the two, often a minuet.
A group of the Italians preferred the sonata in two movements, Francisco Durante (1684-1755), for example, and later Domenico Paradies (1710-92). Later still, some sonatas of Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Sebastian, who submitted quite to the Italian influence, have but two movements; and the first of Clementi’s sonatas also. Other Italians, like Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85), seem never to have decided upon any definite number, nor any definite order of movements.
What is, however, due particularly to the Italian influence is the persistent intrusion of a dance form in the cycle—usually a minuet. We find it in Alberti, in Christian Bach, and especially in the clavecin works of Jean Schobert, a young Silesian, resident in Paris from about 1750 to 1766, one of the most brilliant clavecinists of his day, one of the most charming, and one who brought a very decided influence upon the development of the young Mozart.
The Italian tendency was invariably to put at the end of the sonata a movement of which the lightness and gaiety of the contents were to bring refreshment or even relief after the more serious divulgences of the earlier movements,—a rondo or even a dance. To this impulse Haydn and Mozart both yielded, retaining from Emanuel Bach only the standard number of three movements.
It must be added here that something is due to Slavic influences in the ultimate general triumph of the objectively gay over the subjectively profound in the last movement or movements of the sonata and the symphony. Not only did Haydn incorporate in the scheme the lively expressive melodies and the crisp rhythms so native to the Slavic peoples among whom he grew to manhood. Earlier than he the Bohemian, Johann Stamitz, had thus enlivened and clarified the symphony, and given it the great impetus to future development which bore so splendidly in Vienna. And Schobert, whom we have but now mentioned, was from a Polish land. What such men brought was essentially of spiritual significance; but in music, as in other arts, the new spirit brings the new form.
As we have already said, the number and sequence of movements in the pianoforte sonata has never been rigidly fixed. But an average combination is clear. The majority of sonatas by Haydn and by Mozart, as well as by lesser men like Clementi, Dussek and Rust, and many of the sonatas by Beethoven, are in three movements. Of these the first and last are invariably in the same key (major and minor). The first movement is normally of a dignified, formal, and more or less involved character, though such a generalization may be quickly stoned to death by numbers of conspicuous and great exceptions. The second movement is normally in a key contrasting with the first movement, usually of slow and lyrical character, usually also simple, at least as regards form. The last movement is, in perhaps the majority of cases, more brilliant, more obvious and more rapid than the others, calculated to amuse and astonish the listener rather than to stir his emotions, to send him away laughing and delighted, rather than sad and thoughtful.
The number three was established by Emanuel Bach. The character of the last movement, however, was determined by Italian and Slavic influences, and is somewhat reminiscent of the suite. If one more sign is necessary of the complex crossing and recrossing of various lines of development before the pianoforte sonata rose up clear on its foundations, we have but to note the curious facts that the suite was neglected in Italy during the seventeenth century in favor of the string sonata; that the suite reached its finest proportions in Germany, chiefly at the hands of Sebastian Bach; that through Sebastian Bach the three-movement sonata group passed from the Italian Vivaldi to Emanuel Bach, who established it as a norm; finally that the Italians, who neglected the suite in the seventeenth century, conceived an enthusiasm for it in the eighteenth and brought their love of it to bear on the German sonata group, introducing the minuet and giving to the last movement the lively care-free form of a dance or a rondo.
Before proceeding to outline the development of the triplex form in which at least one movement of this sonata group was written and which is one of the most distinctive features of the sonata, it is not out of place to stop to consider what relationship, if any, existed between the movements. Was the sonata as a whole an indissoluble unit? Rather decidedly no. The grouping of several movements together came to be as conventional and as arbitrary, if not so regular, as the grouping of the suites. There is about the sonatas of Emanuel Bach a certain seriousness and an emotional genuineness which might prevail upon the pianist today, if ever he should think of playing them in concert, to respect the grouping in which the composer chose to present them to the world. But there is no organic life in the sonatas as a whole. Occasionally in his sonatas and in those of Clementi and Haydn the slow middle movement leads without pause into the rapid finale. In these cases, however, the slow movement is introductory to the last, to which it is attached though not related.
Haydn, Mozart and even Beethoven took movements from one work and incorporated them in another. Moreover, it was the custom even as late as the time that Chopin played in Vienna, to play the first movement of a symphony, a concerto or a sonata early in a program and the last movements considerably later, after other works in other styles had been performed. The sonatas and symphonies of the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries in the main lacked any logical principle of unity. We say in the main, because Emanuel Bach, F. W. Rust, and Beethoven succeeded, in some of their greatest sonatas, in welding the movements inseparably together. Clementi, too, in the course of his long life acquired such a mastery of the form. But these developments are special, and signalize in a way the passing on of the sonata. As a form the sonata proper was doomed by the lack of a unity which composers in the nineteenth century felt to be necessary in any long work of music.
The day will come, if indeed it has not already come, when most sonatas will have been broken up by Time into the various distinct parts of which they were pieced together. Out of the fragments future years will choose what they will to preserve. Already the Bach suites have been so broken. It makes no difference that their separate numbers are for the most part of imperishable stuff. Movements of Haydn and Mozart will endure after their sonatas as wholes are dead. So, too, with many of the Beethoven sonatas. The links which hold their movements together are often but convention; and there is evidently no convention which Time will not corrode.
In looking over the vast number of sonatas written between 1750 and 1800 one is impressed, if one is kindly, not so much by their careless structure and triviality as by their gaiety. In the adagios the composers sometimes doff their hats, somewhat perfunctorily, to the muse of tragedy; but for the most part their sonatas are light-hearted. They had a butterfly existence. They were born one day but to die the next. Yet there was a charm about them. The people of that day loved them. A run and a trill do, it is true, but tickle the ear; but that is, after all, a pleasant tickling. And simple harmonies may shirk often enough the weight of souls in tragic conflict, to bear which many would make the duty of music; yet their lucidity is something akin to sunlight. The frivolities of these countless sonatas are the frivolities of youth. There is no high seriousness in most of them. And our triplex form came sliding into music on a burst of youth. A star danced and it was born.
What gave definite shape to this fundamentally simple form is the Italian love of melody. So far as it may be traced to the influence of one man, it may be traced to Giovanni Pergolesi, whose trio-sonatas first gave to the world as a prototype of the classical triplex form what is now known as the ‘singing allegro.’ Pergolesi was born in 1704 and lived to be only thirty-three years old; but in that brief life, gaily and recklessly squandered as it seems to have been, he exerted an influence upon the growth of music which apparently started it upon a new stage. He was all but worshipped by his countrymen. His opera, La serva padrona (1733), won instant success, not only in Italy, but well over all Europe; and had an influence comparable to that of but few other single works in the history of music. On the ground of instrumental music his trio-sonatas have, as it seems now, accomplished scarcely less.
We must here restrict ourselves to the harpsichord music of the time in Italy, in which the ‘singing allegro’ found place almost at once. Let us first consider what lay at the bottom of the new form.
We may plunge at once to the very foundation, the harmonic groundwork. As we have seen, perhaps the most important accomplishment in music of the seventeenth century was the discovery and establishment of key relationships in that harmonic conception of music which has endured almost to the present day. Instrumental forms developed upon this re-organization of musical material. Subsequently, however polyphonic the texture of a piece of music—a fugue of Bach’s, for instance—might be, its shape was moulded upon a frame of harmony. The piece was in a certain key, clearly affirmed at the beginning and at the end, points in the structure which in a piece of music as in a paragraph are naturally the most emphatic. Within these limits there was the life and variety of a harmonic development, which, departing from the tonic key, must return thence. Long before the year 1700 the regulation of such harmonic procedures had definitely fixed the symmetrical plan of two forms: the so-called aria form and the binary form. Neither was in itself capable of much development; and it was in a sort of fusion of both that the harmonic plan of the triplex form was created.
The aria form was in three sections which we have elsewhere represented by the letters A, B, A. A, the opening section, was all in the tonic key, and was practically complete in itself. B, the second section, was in a contrasting key or was harmonically unstable. A, the third section, was but an exact repetition of the first, to give balance and unity to the whole. The limitations of the form were essentially harmonic. The first section offered little or no chance for modulation. Its tonality must be unmistakably and impressively tonic. Therefore it did not develop into the second section by means of harmonic unrest. The second was simply a block of contrasting harmonies, like a block of porphyry set beside a block of marble. Frequently, however, the second section was incomplete without the third. In such cases a hyphen between the B and the second A in our lettered scheme would represent the relations between the three sections more nearly, thus: A, B-A.
The binary form, in which most of the dance movements of the suite were composed, was usually shorter than the aria form; but though apparently simpler, it was, from the point of view of harmony, more highly organized. It consisted, as we have seen, of two sections, each of which was repeated in turn. The first modulated from the tonic key to the dominant or relative major; the second from that key back to the tonic again. It will be observed that the first section really grew into the second by harmonic impulse; for the first section, ending as it did in a key that was not the key of the piece, was incomplete. The two sections together not only established a perfect balance of form and harmony, but had an organic harmonic life which was lacking in the aria.
However, the tendency of most forms was towards the triple division typified by the aria, with a clearly defined first section, a second section of contrasting and uncertain character, and a third section which, being a restatement of the first, reestablished the tonic key and gave to the piece as a whole a positive order. In the binary forms of Froberger and Chambonnières there is the harmonic embryo of a distinct middle section; namely, the few modulations through which the music passes on its way from dominant back to tonic in the second section. It can be easily understood that composers would make the most of this chance for modulation as they became more and more aware of the beauty of harmony; likewise, that the bolder their harmonic ventures in these measures, the greater was their need to emphasize the final re-establishment of the tonic key. Ultimately a distinct triple division was inevitable, with an opening section modulating from tonic to dominant, a second section of contrasting keys and few modulations; finally a restatement of the first section, as in the aria, but necessarily somewhat changed so that the whole section might be in the tonic key. Such is the harmonic foundation of the triplex form.
Such a form makes its appearance in music very shortly after the beginning of the eighteenth century. It seems akin now to the aria, now to the binary form. One may suspect the latter relationship if the first section is repeated, and the second and third sections (as one) likewise. These repetitions are obviously inherited from the binary form. On the other hand, if these sections are not thus repeated, the piece resembles more nearly the aria.
Take, for example, an adagio from the second sonata in a set of twelve published by Padre Martini in 1742, written probably many years earlier. These sonatas were republished by Madame Farrenc in the third volume of her Trésor des pianistes. The adagio in question is clearly in three sections very like an aria, with the difference that the first section ends in the dominant (in the eighth measure), and the last is consequently changed from the first so that it may end in the tonic. There are no repeats.
Far more remarkable is a sonata in C major by D. Scarlatti. It is the eleventh in the Breitkopf and Härtel collection of twenty to which reference has already been made. Here we find a first section modulating from tonic to dominant. This is repeated. Then follows the second section, full of free modulations, and this section comes to a very obvious half-close. The last section very nearly repeats the first, except for the necessary changes in harmony so that all may be in the tonic key. Scarlatti nowhere else wrote in this form so clearly. Did he merely chance upon it? The wide crossing of the hands marks an early stage in his composing, yet the form is clearly triplex and astonishingly orthodox.
The most striking aspect of this little piece is the obvious, clear divisions of the sections. The first section is marked off from the second by the double bar for the repeat. There is a pause before the third section, or restatement, begins. But clearest of all is the arrangement of musical material. By this we know positively that the triplex form has become firmly fixed, that the old binary form has expanded to a ternary form, submitting to the same influences that had made the perfect aria and the perfect fugue.
It will be remembered that in the old binary form, composers made little effort to differentiate the material proper to the dominant part of the first section from that which had already been given out in the tonic. Such pieces dealt not in clear themes but in one or two running figures which lent themselves to more or less contrapuntal treatment. The opening figure was usually the most definite. The second section began with this figure in the dominant key; but in the final restoration of the tonic key the figure played no part. In other words, the chief figure of the whole piece almost never appeared in the second section in the tonic. It was not until the embryonic middle section, which, as we have seen, consisted of but one or two modulations, had developed to something of the proportions of the contrasting section of the aria, that composers realized that in order fully to re-establish the tonic key at the end, the chief figure should again make its appearance and usher in the final section, which thus became a restatement of the first.
Scarlatti’s treatment of the binary form was always brilliant and clear. He was, as we know, fertile in sparkling figures. His sonatas are always made up of two or more of these, which, unlike the figures in the suites of most of his contemporaries, are distinct from each other. But in most of his pieces, long as the middle section might be, the tonic key was never re-introduced by the return of the opening figure of the first section. It is precisely this that he has done in the sonata in C major now in question. The first section presents two distinct figures or subjects, one in the tonic, the other in the dominant. The first, or opening figure, is in the nature of a trumpet call. The second is conspicuous by the wide crossing of the hands. The second section begins immediately after the double bar in the proper manner of the binary form; that is, with a modification of the first subject in the key of the dominant. Then follow many interesting modulations, leading to the unmistakable half-close, prefatory to the third section. And the third section begins at once with the first figure in the tonic key, and proceeds to the second, now likewise in the tonic. This, more than all else, marks the passing of the binary form into the triplex. The Padre Martini adagio presents the same feature, but less clearly because the second figure is hardly articulate.
These two little pieces, which are but two out of many now known and others yet to be discovered, seem to reveal to us a stage at which the aria form and the binary form merged into the form of movement generally known as the sonata form, which we have chosen arbitrarily to call the triplex. The three distinct sections, the last repeating the first, seem modelled on the aria. The highly organized harmonic life seems inherited from the binary form of the dance movements of the suite. Finally the arrangement and development of two distinct figures or subjects on this plan are proper to the new form alone.
Upon this hybrid foundation Pergolesi built up his ‘singing allegro.’ Where Scarlatti had employed figures, Pergolesi employed melodies. Therefore we find a melody in the tonic key, a melody in the dominant, these two constituting with the measures which accomplish the modulation between them, the first section, which is repeated. Then follows a section of free modulation, in which fragments of either melody, but chiefly of the first, play their parts; and lastly the return of both melodies in the tonic key.
It is the Italian love of melody which gives it its final stamp. To this love Scarlatti hardly felt free to abandon himself in his harpsichord music; partly, probably, because of the ancient polyphonic tradition which still demanded of organ and of harpsichord music the constant movement we find in the preludes of Bach’s English suites; also because as a virtuoso he was interested in making his instrument speak brilliantly, and because he realized that the harpsichord was really unfitted to melody.
But the singing allegro of Pergolesi won the world at a stroke, and almost at once we find it applied to the harpsichord by the young amateur, Domenico Alberti. One should give the devil his due. Poor Alberti, hardly more than a youth, for having supposedly seduced the world of composers to bite the juicy apple of what is called the Alberti bass, has been excoriated by all soberminded critics and treated with unveiled contempt. Let us look into his life and works for a moment.
Little enough is known of him, and that little smacks of faëry. He was probably born in Venice in 1717. He died about 1740, probably in Rome. Only twenty-three, masters, but he tied his bass to the tail of music and there it swings to this day. But more of the bass anon. He was an amateur, according to Laborde,[23] a pupil of Biffi and Lotti. He was a beautiful singer. At least we read that he went to Madrid in the train of the Venetian ambassador, and astonished Farinelli, one of the greatest and most idolized singers of the day, who was then living in high favor at the Spanish court. Later he came back to Rome, where he recommended himself to the patronage of a certain Marquis Molinari. About 1737 he set two of Metastasio’s libretti, Endymion and Galatea, to music, which was, according to Laborde, highly esteemed. All his teachers recalled him with great enthusiasm. He could so play on the harpsichord, so improvise, that he charmed large assemblies during whole nights. And sometimes he would go abroad at night through the streets of Rome with his lute, singing, followed by a crowd of delighted amateurs. He died young and much regretted. Laborde closes his article by saying that Alberti wrote thirty-six sonatas which are said to be superb, and of a new kind (d’un genre neuf). Laborde’s article, though pleasing, is a bit highly colored. From it we have a right only to infer that Alberti was lovable, a good singer and a good player. That he speaks of the sonatas as being of a new sort, however, should not be forgotten.
Dr. Burney mentions Alberti twice in his ‘Present State of Music in Germany,’ both times in connection with his stay in Vienna in the autumn of 1772, more than thirty years after Alberti’s death. Once it is to give his name among the seven men who were at that time considered to be the greatest composers for harpsichord and for organ. Other names were Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach (either Emanuel or Christian: the father was not then generally appreciated). High company for poor Alberti, from which he since has fallen most low. But that he should have been reckoned with such men thirty years after his death, speaks irrefutably for the influence his works must have had, for a time, at any rate, upon the development of pianoforte music.
Reference was made in the second chapter to the other mention of Alberti in Dr. Burney’s book. It occurred in connection with Dr. L’Augier’s reminiscences of D. Scarlatti. Scarlatti had told the eminent physician that he had always borne in mind, while writing his pieces for the harpsichord, the special qualities of that instrument, whereas other ‘modern’ composers, like Alberti, were now writing in a style that would be more fitting to other instruments. In the case of Alberti, Scarlatti must have had the voice in mind, for Alberti’s harpsichord sonatas are hardly more than strings of melodies.
Considering then that Alberti was held in such high esteem as late as 1772, and that D. Scarlatti complained of him that he wrote in a manner less fitting to the harpsichord than to some other instrument, it seems likely that to him in part is due the appearance of the singing allegro in harpsichord music, which was to be characteristic of Christian Bach, of Mozart, of Haydn, of Clementi and in some part of Beethoven.
The sonatas themselves bear this out. The eight which we have been able to study, are light stuff, indisputably. But the triplex form is clear in most of the movements. He uses two separate distinct melodies as themes. The first appears at once in the tonic, the second later in the dominant. The first section, which is nothing more than the exposition of these two themes, is repeated. After the double bar follows a section of varying length, usually dominated by reminiscences of the first theme, the modulations of which are free but by no means unusual. Then the third section repeats both melodies in the tonic key. The first movement of a sonata in G major is conspicuous for the length of its second section, in which there is not only a good bit of interesting modulation, but also actually new material.
The bass which bears his name is no more than the familiar breaking of a chord in the following manner:
It is hardly more true that he invented it than that such a formula is intrinsically as contemptible as many musicians, mostly theoreticians, would make it out to be. If a musician is, in a given composition, concerned with melody, he may be justified in following the procedure which makes that melody reign undisputed over his music. This inevitably will reduce the accompaniment to the simplest function possible; namely, outlining or supplying the harmony upon which all melodies, since the Middle Ages at least, have been felt to rest.
In the first sophisticated experiments with melody—the opera early in the seventeenth century—the accompaniment to a song was frequently no more than a few occasional chords upon the harpsichord. These chords were not even written out for the accompanist, but were indicated to him by figures placed over the notes of a single bass part. As composers acquired skill in combining several instruments in accompaniments to their operas, the figured bass lost its importance; but it was still employed as a sort of harmonic groundwork almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It was a prop to the harmonies woven more or less contrapuntally by other instruments, which, unlike the harpsichord, had power to sustain tone.