In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music

Abstract

The first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, the “Tempest,” holds center stage in Janet Schmalfeldt's prizewinning book, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music.1 The formal processes found in each section of the movement—and especially in the first twenty-one measures with its alternating gasps of Largo, Allegro, Adagio, Largo, Allegro—launch her book-length inquiry into the perception of musical form from the perspective of the performer, listener, analyst, and philosopher. As Schmalfeldt explains (9), these varied scholarly threads reflect both the chronology of her acquaintance with early nineteenth-century music and the progress of her career: she was first and foremost a performer and was gripped by this repertoire in her youth; she then trained as an analyst and theorist, and her foray into philosophy came later still. Schmalfeldt's book begins at the end of her process of scholarly discovery. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 (“The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the ‘Tempest’ Sonata”) delves into the philosophical backdrop to the concept of the “process of becoming” or “form-as-process,” which she attributes to a Hegelian Zeitgeist, for (as she rightly notes) few musical commentators were directly influenced by Hegel himself. The chief musical commentators in Schmalfeldt's story are E. T. A. Hoffmann (23–24), A. B. Marx (24–28), Arnold Schoenberg (28–29), Theodor W. Adorno (23, 29–33), and Carl Dahlhaus (33–51), all of whom invested their aesthetics, Formenlehren, critical commentaries, and historiographies in the music of Beethoven. (Note the absence of Heinrich Schenker from this list; I return to this below.)