Mutual Deformity: Ignaz Moscheles's Seventh and William Sterndale Bennett's Fourth Piano Concertos

Abstract

While neither the music of Ignaz Moscheles nor that of William Sterndale Bennett feature in the modern repertoire, the piano concertos of both composers form part of a significant body of works from the early nineteenth century that offer models at variance with conventional accounts of the concerto genre. The opening movements of Moscheles's Concerto No. 7 in C minor (Concerto pathetique, 1835–6) and Bennett's Concerto No. 4 in F minor (1838) are cast in single-exposition concerto form, but each has features that complicate its relationship with the five types of Sonata Form set out in Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory. Both are similarly unusual in that they return to the tonic minor for the second ritornello statement, which by convention signifies the closure of the ‘larger exposition’; and, probably as a consequence of the pre-emptive reappearance of primary material in the tonic here, their recapitulations are drastically abridged, complicating the post-expositional stages of the form. These two works thus provide a rich theoretical and hermeneutical challenge to the historiography of nineteenth-century instrumental form.