‘Beethoven’s Error? The Modulating Ritornello and the Type-5 Sonata in the Post-Classical Piano Concerto’

Abstract:

In his analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 37, Donald Francis Tovey dismissed Beethoven’s decision to modulate for the second theme in the opening tutti as an ‘error’, which gives the impression of a symphonic exposition rather than a concerto ritornello and thereby undermines the work’s generic identity. For Tovey, Beethoven and practitioners falling under his influence misunderstood a fundamental principle of concerto first-movement form, enshrined in Mozart’s predominant habit of associating structural modulation with the solo exposition. More recent theories of concerto first-movement form, including James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s model of the ‘type-5’ sonata, sustain both Tovey’s view of Op. 37 and the normativity of Mozart’s example.

Drawing on a corpus study of 87 piano concerti by 20 composers written between 1789 and 1848, this paper challenges the centrality of the monotonal ritornello to the theory of the type-5 sonata. It demonstrates the overwhelming generic predominance of modulating ritornelli in this time and discloses a range of practices, which have thus far escaped theoretical attention. I develop a post-canonical theory of concerto first-movement form, which questions the centrality of Mozartian norms on historical and empirical grounds, and advocates for an approach that restricts theory’s purview to the evidence of historically and generically bounded corpora.