Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms by Andrew Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms by Andrew Davis Jonathan D. Bellman Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. By Andrew Davis. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. [ix, 203 p. ISBN 9780253025333 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9780253028938 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9780253025456 (e-book), $34.99.] Tables, music examples, bibliography, index. This study builds on the work of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in their Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late [End Page 454] Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Davis's book may be seen as an effort to expand sonata theory more solidly into the nineteenth-century repertoire, seeking to explain the continuities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works so designated. The connection with Hepokoski and Darcy is clear from the adoption of their terminology: P and S zones (primary and secondary thematic areas, action zones, rotations, etc.). This flexible model for how the sonata conducts its business is well suited to the ideas Davis seeks to develop, particularly as he sees sonata form beginning to reflect romantic aesthetics: increasing reliance on the fragment (an idea masterfully developed by John Daverio in Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology [New York: Schirmer Books, 1993]) and on the pastoral narrative, a concept adopted from literary criticism that he finds especially relevant for romantic music as a whole. Pastoral narratives "can be either narrowly or broadly defined," the narrower deriving from classical poetry that celebrates bucolic life and evolving through the Enlightenment (with its shepherds and shepherdesses in the unspoiled countryside) into nineteenth-century novels in which the landscape itself plays a central role—Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony is one of Davis's examples of a musical manifestation of this kind of narrative. More broadly, the pastoral narrative refers "to mythological narratives of wish fulfillment" centering on "oppositions between, for example, humans versus nature, urban versus rural, or generally anything conceived as idealized (and unattainable) versus something else understood as less than perfect (human frailties, urban environments, or a present-day, complex world fraught with distress and anxiety)." The broad theme of retreat and return is key: "a retreat from some sort of flawed, present-tense site or state of being into a simpler, more innocent, venerated, and always intentionally fictitious time or place that came to be known by the generic name Arcadia" (p. 21). For Davis, the literary model suits the essentially narrative character of the sonata: "Some musical forms should be understood as narrative forms precisely because they depend for their expressive meaning on an ordered presentation of events in time. … Perhaps the most obvious example of a narrative form in music is sonata form" (p. 38). So the sequence of sonata components—primary theme zone, transition, medial caesura, secondary theme zone, essential expositional closure (perhaps followed by closing material), multipartite development, and the partial or full rotational rehearsal of exposition material found in the recapitulation—amounts to recounting a narrative, a sequence of necessary events that must occur in a fixed and proper order, and the novelistic arcs of the nineteenth century provide an apt model. Moreover, Davis draws a distinction between time and temporality, both of which are relevant to an unfolding form but which do not operate congruently: time is understood as real time, as it unfolds in seconds and minutes; temporality has to do with the timing of perceived events, which in any narrative are not synchronous with anything resembling real time. (James Parakilas has used the felicitous phrase "leaping and lingering" to describe this principle as it appears in epic poetry; signal events are set up, emphasized, and lingered over, while the time between them is telescoped, passing much more quickly [James Parakilas, Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992), 46ff.]. The phrase "leaping and lingering" originated with Francis B. Gummere [The Popular Ballad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 90–91].) [End Page 455] After establishing the framework of the argument, David follows with a detailed discussion of specific issues. In chapter 3, "Music with Text," Davis discusses the slow movements of Johannes Brahms's op. 1...