Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how Mozart broke the rules. Did Mozart really break the rules? What do I mean by that? It’s a funny thing that we, in retrospect, analyze music from hundreds of years ago, and come up with the forms these great composers composed in.
The quintessential form of all time is the sonata allegro form.
Sonatas are generally three- or four-movement works (sometimes two movements), and the first movement is almost always in the sonata allegro form. Why do they call it the sonata allegro? Because the first movement is usually the fast movement, and allegro means fast. In a nutshell, it’s a three-part form:
A. Exposition
– Theme 1. in the tonic key (the key of the piece)
– Theme 2. in the dominant key (the key starting on the 5th note of the scale of the key of the piece). – The Exposition Repeats-
B. Development: This is a free development of both themes
C. Recapitulation
– Theme 1. in the tonic key (the key of the piece) – Theme 2. in the tonic key (so the movement ends in the key it started in!)
The exposition has two themes. The first theme is in the tonic key, which is the key of the piece. The second theme is in the dominant key, which is five notes higher than the tonic. Then, the whole exposition repeats.
I’m going to outline it here in Mozart’s famous K 545 C Major Sonata, so you can see how he broke the rules.
The first theme is in C major, naturally, which you would expect. It continues to the second subject in G major, and the entire exposition ends in G major. This is a classic sonata allegro form. That’s the end of the exposition. Then you come to the repeat, and the entire exposition repeats.
After the exposition, you come to what’s called the development section. The development comes after the double bar, after the repeat, and it’s a free development of both the first theme and the second theme. After the development section comes the recapitulation. What’s the recapitulation? It’s a repeat of the beginning. You have theme one and theme two. Except theme two this time doesn’t modulate to the dominant. It stays in the tonic. So the piece ends in the same key it started!
But Mozart takes a turn that is unexpected.
Then the first theme comes back in F major, the subdominant. How did this happen? It continues in F major. But the first theme is supposed to come back in the recapitulation in the tonic key, C major, but we’re in F major. Then it goes to the second theme in C major, which is what you would expect. But there is never a restatement of the first theme, the opening theme in C major, which is a textbook of what a sonata is, and he just leaves it out. In fact, that statement of the main theme in the subdominant in F major is simply part of the development section. He never gives you the first theme in the recapitulation in the tonic key as expected. The recapitulation just has a short statement of the first theme in the subdominant, F major, in the development section. Then it goes right into the second theme in C major to the end. So yes, Mozart broke the rules.
All great composers break the rules!
The rules are just observations after the fact. It’s all the deviations from what you expect that make music great. Lesser composers do exactly what you think they’ll do, and it’s boring! Composers like Mozart or Beethoven are so full of surprises, always taking turns you don’t expect. That is the secret of great music! I’m wondering what you think about this. Are there any examples that you can bring to the table? Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
6 thoughts on “How Mozart Broke the Rules”
How can one listen to Bartok’s music with a better appreciation for Modern Music??
Try listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yahbGooZ8cY&ab_channel=TessaLark
Very interesting! What do you think of the suggestion that the first
subject in F does begin the recapitulation after all? The rule
breaking would then be the choice of key for the returned first subject
rather than its omission. I don’t know this piece very well, but
listening to your excerpts, that way of parsing the score somehow sounds
right to my ears.
That could be the case, but there is further development material after the statement of the first theme in F major. So it is really part of the development section after all.
I’ve now listened to the whole movement and I see your point. There’s a kind of mini-development of 4 bars within the (transposed) first subject. However after this short interlude the first subject continues, and it ends in a definite cadence as originally. This is not how Mozart commonly leads into his recapitulations, whereas the lead into what I’m calling the recapitulation does seem more typical. So on balance, I think I still would place the transposed first subject in the recapitulation.
But maybe the real lesson is that there’s no right or wrong and no single answer. The distinction between development and recapitulation doesn’t always need to be sharp. It’s just there to help us listen with understanding, and I think that both ways of hearing it contribute something. (Perhaps there are also elements of what some people call a “false recapitulation” here.)
The bottom line is the music is extremely interesting and uplifting. The great trumpeter, Adolph Herseth, talked about, “Paralysis by Analysis”. He was referring to what can happen when overthinking when playing an instrument. But the same thing happens to many conservatory students who are trained to listen to music in an analytical way. There is the danger of losing the joy of listening to music!