Der kadenzielle Prozess in den Durchführungen: Untersuchung der Kopfsätze von Joseph Haydns Streichquartetten (review)

Not too long agowe thought we knew everything we could possibly need to know about sonata form. Not only was it a hallowed subject inmusic scholarship—the focal point for any number of treatments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instrumental music in particular—anda familiar signpost of any education in classical music, but even the objections to its classic textbook definition had become stale. Compounding this was the pressure placed on theory and analysis by the debates of a recent generation about the mission of music scholarship: the central position occupied by ‘form’ was contested both in the narrower terms of its relevance to the perception of music and also in the wider terms of its relevance to music as an encompassing social practice. Even its proponents were for ever distancing themselves from the ‘dusty’ origins of their discipline in nineteenth-century Formenlehre, and so form must have seemed an edifice that was easy to push over.

But even before the revolution had been accomplished, a revival was under way, led by achievements such as William Caplin’s Classical Form (New York and Oxford, 1998), which precisely set out to restore the validity of perspectives deriving from the much-reviled Formenlehre. If Caplin’s focus was not specifically on sonata-form structures, the coyly named Elements of Sonata Theory by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (New York and Oxford, 2006), of magisterial proportions, certainly did set out to tackle just those structures. Even Robert O. Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style (New York and Oxford, 2007), while hostile to the very notion of large-scale forms underpinning the music of the eighteenth century (the core repertory for all these publications), represents an encyclopedic approach to the ways in which musical materials of the time could be organized.

Christhard Zimpel’s contribution to this revival, however, is by no means a theory of everything. Its claims are much more modest, guided by a number of restrictions announced at the outset. Zimpel’s study, based on a dissertation completed at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2004 but only published in 2010, confines itself to the string quartets of Haydn. Within that, attention is devoted solely to sonata-form first movements, an all too familiar choice, but at least partly justified by Zimpel’s wish to concentrate on development sections. It is difficult to deny the author’s premiss that developments have been undertheorized within the inherited apparatus of sonata-form taxonomy. Even the more recent publications referred to above are comparatively light in their treatments of the central section—though given the relative freedom of phrase syntax and harmonic behaviour that seems to characterize so many development sections, such an approach may be logical enough when the focus is theoretical rather than analytical, looking to explicate shared patterns more than any particular movement. However, Zimpel is also able to make his claim so strongly because he writes in apparent innocence of these publications. Very little of the Anglophone literature that he refers to is of recent vintage, and while of the major studies named above, only Caplin’s would have been available to the author by 2004, plenty of smaller-scale publications by the other authors along similar lines were already in existence. The absence of these and indeed many other figures from Zimpel’s reading list means we have to understand his efforts as responding to a particularly Germanophone theoretical culture. The fact that Formenlehre has always reigned supreme there also means that Schenkerian perspectives, for instance, are off the radar for this study.

That said, Zimpel does, in common with some Anglophone writings of the last generation, place considerable emphasis on historical theory, above all in this case the writings of Joseph Riepel and Heinrich Christoph Koch. He is also conscious of a pronounced...