The “Mono-Operational” Recapitulation in Movements by Beethoven and Schubert

Abstract

Notions of symmetry, balance, and proportion have appeared prominently in the discourse on sonata form since its origin in the eighteenth century. One clear but insufficiently studied symmetry in sonata forms concerns the relationship of the length of the recapitulation to that of its referential exposition. Many recapitulations make symmetry-altering thematic transformations, but forms that make more than one such alteration tend, overwhelmingly, to make them in opposite “directions,” i.e., they feature both enlargement and abridgement. This article is concerned with a relatively small set of sonata recapitulations that deliberately disavow the drive toward exposition-recapitulation symmetry. The “imbalanced” (Smyth 1990) or “lopsided” (Daverio 1993) forms under consideration satisfy two criteria: first, they feature multiple discrete sets of thematic alterations, all of which adjust the length of the recapitulation vis-à-vis its referential exposition in the same direction via either expansion or contraction; and second, they feature no thematic alterations that perform the opposite “operation.” This article refers to such recapitulations as “mono-operational.” Its primary goals are to outline the mono-operational strategy’s formal properties and to excavate its dramatic implications from the corpus of Schubert’s and Beethoven’s piano works. Detailed analyses are given of the first movements of the “Pastoral” Sonata, Op. 28, and the “Grand Duo,” D. 812.