Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 3.djvu/566

554 Mendelssohn's '../Heimkehr aus der Fremde/' (Return from abroad), produced at the Haymarket Theatre, London, July 7, 1851.

The original piece was by Klingemann, and was written and composed in London between Sept. 10 and Oct. 4, 1829, for the silver wedding of Mendelssohn's parents on the following Dec. 26. The parts were cast as follows:—Lisbeth, Rebecka; Kauz, Devrient; Hermann, Mantius; and the Mayor, Hensel, for whom a part was written all on one note, F—which however he could not catch. [ G. ]

SONATA. The history of the Sonata is the history of an attempt to cope with one of the most singular problems ever presented to the mind of man, and its solution is one of the most successful achievements of his artistic instincts. A Sonata is, as its name implies, a sound-piece, and a sound-piece alone: in its purest and most perfect examples, it is unexplained by title or text, and unassisted by voices; it is nothing but an unlimited concatenation of musical notes. Such notes have individually no significance; and even the simplest principles of their relative definition and juxtaposition, such as is necessary to make the most elementary music, had to be drawn from the inner self and the consciousness of things which belong to man's nature only, without the possibility of finding guidance or more than the crudest suggestion from the observation of things external. Yet the structural principles by which such unpromising materials become intelligible have been so ordered and developed by the unaided musical instinct of many successive generations of composers, as to render possible long works which not only penetrate and stir us in detail, but are in their entire mass direct, consistent, and convincing. Such works, in their completest and most severely abstract forms, are Sonatas.

The name seems to have been first adopted purely as the antithesis to Cantata, the musical piece that was sung. It begins to come into notice about the same time as that form of composition, soon after the era of the most marked revolution in music, which began at the end of the sixteenth century; when a band of enthusiasts, led by visionary ideals, unconsciously sowed the seed of true modern music in an attempt to wrest the monopoly of the art in its highest forms from the predominant influence of the church, and to make it serve for the expression of human feelings of more comprehensive range. At this time the possibilities of polyphony in its ecclesiastical forms may well have seemed almost exhausted, and men turned about to find new fields which should give scope for a greater number of workers. The nature of their speculations and the associations of the old order of things alike conspired to direct their attention first to Opera and Cantata, and here they had something to guide them; but for abstract instrumental music of the Sonata kind they had for a long time no clue. The first suggestion was clearly accidental. It appears probable that the excessive elaboration of the Madrigal led to the practice of accompanying the voice parts with viols; and from this the step is but short to leaving the viols by themselves and making a vague kind of chamber music without the voices. This appears to have been the source of the instrumental Canzonas which were written in tolerable numbers till some way into the eighteenth century. It does not appear that any distinct rules for their construction were recognised, but the examination of a large number, written at different periods from Frescobaldi to J. S. Bach, proves the uniform object of the composers to have been a lax kind of fugue, such as might have served in its main outlines for the vocal madrigals. Burney says the earliest examples of 'sonatas' he had been able to discover in his devoted enquiries were by Turini, published at Venice in 1624. His description of those he examined answers perfectly to the character of the canzonas, for, he says, they consist of one movement, in fugue and imitation throughout. Sonatas did not, however, rest long at this point of simplicity, but were destined very early to absorb material from other sources; and though the canzona kind of movement maintained its distinct position through many changes in its environment, and is still found in the Violin Sonatas of J. S. Bach, Handel and Porpora, the madrigal, which was its source, soon ceased to have direct influence upon three parts of the more complete structure. The suggestion for these came from the dance, and the newly-invented opera or dramatic cantata. The former had existed and made the chief staple of instrumental music for generations, but it requires to be well understood that its direct connection with dancing puts it out of the category of abstract music of the kind which was now obscurely germinating. The dances were understood through their relation with one order of dance motions. There would be the order of rhythmic motions which taken together was called a Branle, another that was called a Pavan, another a Gigue; and each dance-tune maintained the distinctive rhythm and style throughout. On the other hand, the radical principle of the Sonata, developed in the course of generations, is the compounding of a limitless variety of rhythms; and though isolated passages may be justly interpreted as representing gestures of an ideal dance kind, like that of the ancients, it is not through this association that the group of movements taken as a whole is understood, but by the disposition of such elements and others in relation to one another. This conception took time to develop, though it is curious how early composers began to perceive the radical difference between the Suite and the Sonata. Occasionally a doubt seems to be implied by confusing the names together or by actually calling a collection of dance-tunes a sonata; but it can hardly be questioned that from almost the earliest times, as is proved by a strong majority of cases, there was a sort of undefined presentiment that their developments lay along totally different paths. In the first attempts to form an aggregate of distinct movements, the composers had to take their forms where they