What Exactly is a Piano Sonata?
For about two hundred years (approx. 1760-1960), piano sonatas have remained at core of the keyboard repertoire. And no wonder! Many magnificent pieces in other genres have been composed, but as a body of music, the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and about two dozen others by their 19th- and 20th-century successors provide instrumentalists with a repertoire of unsurpassed originality, structural rigor, and an extraordinary richness and range of expression. No other form has allowed the greatest of composers such a panoply of means to manipulate and exploit tensions between conflicting tonalities and themes, while simultaneously offering opportunities to create such variety within a basic unity. So strong a structure is it that even lesser composers can use its template to create a large-scale work that, provided its melodic content is sufficiently interesting, will not collapse under its own weight. So, what is a sonata? This is not a theory essay, but I trust that two
