Mid-Section Cadences in Haydn’s Sonata-Form Movements

Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music, 2017

In Classical Form, William Caplin discusses the deceptive cadence as a courtesy to the theoretical community, since the term has a centuries-long pedigree. However, Caplin disqualifies such closing gestures as being true cadences, in the form-articulating sense of the term. In this article, I propose a similar exclusion of the imperfect authentic cadence (IAC) as a cadence type in Classical music: rather, like the deceptive cadence, the IAC is often best understood as a category of cadential evasion. As such, it can mark an intermediate stage of a theme by punctuating an initiating gesture, or by emphasizing harmonically (though not cadentially) the endpoint of a prolongational segment. I will illustrate the advantages of downplaying the IAC when dealing with anomalous thematic designs of the mid-18th century, through analysis of main themes in certain early keyboard works by Haydn (including his sonatas XVI: 18, 19 and 46). Following Galant practices, such works often employ Prinner schemata in their opening phrases (scale degree 6-5-4-3 soprano, 4-3-2-[5]-1 bass), as per Robert Gjerdingen’s terminology, which are fundamentally prolongational; or display an apparent IAC-HC (half cadence) design (James Webster’s “antiperiod”). By declassifying the IAC as a cadence type, such themes can be analyzed as hybrid thematic structures, or as the presentation phrase of an expanded sentence that encompasses both main theme and transition; thus often simplifying the discernment of a sonata exposition’s formal boundaries, particularly in these challenging works from Haydn’s early maturity.

Music Analysis, 2011

Haydn's play on expectations and conventions (delaying tactics, excessive repetition, metrical ambiguity, harmonic puns, incongruous juxtapositions) and his deliberate grammatical mistakes (beginning in the wrong key or with a cadential gesture) are well-known. However, one notable syntactic irregularity found in his music has been overlooked: the use of a sentential theme which lacks the first half of the continuation phrase. This type of theme moves straight from its presentation phrase to its cadential progression, and its dimensions are irregular: its second part is only half the length of its first. Cases of the missing middle tend to occur in the main themes of sonata allegros, and -as one might expect with Haydn -the middle is supplied later in the movement, usually in the subordinate theme. The way in which this takes place varies from the relatively straightforward to the exceedingly subtle and may have ramifications for the shaping of a whole movement. Haydn's strategies in this regard are of interest in part for the sheer intellectual delight they yield when brought to our attention; they also suggest new perspectives on the processes of variation which pervade so much of his music.

Journal of Schenkerian Studies 5 , 2011

Eighteenth Century Music, 2012

ABSTRACTThe slow movement of Symphony No. 64 in A major, ‘Tempora mutantur’, has long intrigued Haydn scholars on account of its absent cadences and enigmatic form. The Latin title of the symphony is thought to be derived from the epigram by John Owen, a near-contemporary of Shakespeare, and it was used by Elaine Sisman to support her hypothesis that the slow movement formed part of Haydn's incidental music for Shakespeare's Hamlet. The enigma can be explained through an analysis informed by concepts native to eighteenth-century music theory. The absent cadences create instances of ellipsis, a rhetorical figure described by Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and the form plays with a familiar template codified by Heinrich Christoph Koch. This analysis leads to a different interpretation. Rather than suggesting the protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedy, the movement stages a fictive composer in an act of musical comedy not dissimilar to that in Symphony No. ...