Sonata - Brief History of The Usage of Sonata - The Baroque Sonata

The Baroque Sonata

In the works of Arcangelo Corelli and his contemporaries, two broad classes of sonata were established, and were first described by Sébastien de Brossard in his Dictionaire de musique (third edition, Amsterdam, ca. 1710): the sonata da chiesa (that is, suitable for use in church), which was the type "rightly known as Sonatas", and the sonata da camera (proper for use at court), which consists of a prelude followed by a succession of dances, all in the same key. Although the four, five, or six movements of the sonata da chiesa are also most often in one key, one or two of the internal movements are sometimes in a contrasting tonality, according to Brossard (Newman 1972a, 23–24).

The sonata da chiesa, generally for one or more violins and bass, consisted normally of a slow introduction, a loosely fugued allegro, a cantabile slow movement, and a lively finale in some binary form suggesting affinity with the dance-tunes of the suite. This scheme, however, was not very clearly defined, until the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, when it became the essential sonata and persisted as a tradition of Italian violin music – even into the early 19th century, in the works of Boccherini.

The sonata da camera consisted almost entirely of idealized dance-tunes, but by the time of Bach and Handel such a composition drew apart from the sonata, and came to be called a suite, a partita, an ordre, or, when it had a prelude in the form of a French opera-overture, an overture. On the other hand, the features of sonata da chiesa and sonata da camera then tended to be freely intermixed. Bach is also cited as being among the first composers to have the keyboard and solo instrument share a melodic line, whereas previously most sonatas for keyboard and instrument had kept the melody exclusively in the solo instrument. Although nearly half of Bach's 1,100 surviving compositions, arrangements, and transcriptions are instrumental works, only about 4% are sonatas (Newman 1972a, 266).

The term sonata is also applied to the series of over 500 works for harpsichord solo, or sometimes for other keyboard instruments, by Domenico Scarlatti, originally published under the name Essercizi per il gravicembalo (Exercises for the Harpsichord). Most of these pieces are in one binary-form movement only, with two parts that are in the same tempo and use the same thematic material, though occasionally there will be changes in tempo within the sections. Many of the sonatas were composed in pairs, one being in the major and the other in the parallel minor. They are frequently virtuosic, and use more distant harmonic transitions and modulations than were common for other works of their time. They are admired for their great variety and invention.

The genre—particularly for solo instruments with just the continuo or ripieno—eventually influenced the solo movements of suites or concerti that occurred between movements with the full orchestra playing, for example in the Brandenburg Concerti of Bach. Both the solo and trio sonatas of Vivaldi show parallels with the concerti he was writing at the same time. Vivaldi composed over 70 sonatas, the great majority of which are of the solo type; most of the rest are trio sonatas, and a very small number are of the multivoice type (Newman 1972a, 169–70).

The sonatas of Domenico Paradies are mild and elongated works of this type, with a graceful and melodious little second movement included. The manuscript on which Longo bases his edition of Scarlatti frequently shows a similar juxtaposition of movements, though without any definite indication of their connection. The style is still traceable in the sonatas of the later classics, whenever a first movement is in a uniform rush of rapid motion, as in Mozart's violin sonata in F (K. 377), and in several of Clementi's best works.