Form
The sonata is in three movements and has a conventional structure:
- Allegro - The first movement is in a classical sonata form.
- Adagio - The second movement is a slow movement in the key of B flat major with two halves repeated. In the autograph, the second half is essentially a repeat of its initial presentation with some minor tonal adjustments. In the earliest printed editions, however, it is considerably elaborated.
- Allegro assai - The rapid finale is in sonata form with a 6/8 time. While it starts out with a forte chord and passage work, it concludes with a pianissimo cadence.
Read more about this topic: Piano Sonata No. 12 (Mozart)
Famous quotes containing the word form:
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)
“Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.”
—Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)
“Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)