Formal Process, Sonata Theory, and the First Movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata

Recording and Score of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata (Malcolm Bilson, piano)[1] In recent decades much analytical attention has been paid to the first movement of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31 no. 2. Under scrutiny from contrasting perspectives, that movement, and especially the opening portion of its exposition, has emerged not only as a test case for assessing the merits of differing analytical systems, but also-in the wake of Carl Dahlhaus's (1991) remarks about its opening bars-as a supposedly revelatory touchstone of the maturing Beethoven's larger aesthetic purposes. As all commentators have noted, the composer built startling instabilities into both its primary thematic zone (P, measures 1-21) and the onset and continuation of its transition (which, elided with the cadential close of P, starts in measure 21). While one should not downplay such features, it has been tempting to overread them, even to the point of making claims about the emergence in such music of a new, largely nonschematic concept of form as "the process of coming into existence" or, surely taking a conceptual cue from Adorno, a "processual character of musical form."(1) By the late 1980s the strong form of this assertion regarding the Tempest was associated above all with Dahlhaus. Returning repeatedly to these opening bars in his own writings, he sought again and again to demonstrate this point, although many of his brief analytical readings of music from this period seem grounded in an all-too-apparent eagerness to uncover at least the originary manifestations of what he wished to regard as the conceptual and historical path to the developing-variation aspect of Schoenberg more than a century later.[2] Janet Schmalfeldt (1995) explored this matter further in a Beethoven Forum essay that advanced the dialectical, Hegelian/Adornian argument in more analytically sophisticated and certainly welcome ways. My concern in this essay, though (as was Schmalfeldt's), is with Dahlhaus's original formulation of the "process" argument, upon which I shall comment from a different perspective, though I think a complementary one: that of Sonata Theory and its grounding principle of dialogic form.(2) There is much to say about every aspect of this opening movement-about its calculated minor and major mode interplays, about its ideological deployment of entrenched storm topoi for perhaps broader connotative purposes, about the expressive role of its continuous exposition and avoidance of a clearly demarcated secondary theme, and so on. Given the space limitations here, however, I shall confine myself to only a remark or two about those controversial opening two-dozen bars.(3)[3] The initial measures of Op. 31 no. 2 served more than once as Dahlhaus's touchstone of a process that he wished to construe as an indication of Beethoven's reported decision, perhaps after completing his Op. 28, to "set out on a new [compositional] path."(4) For Dahlhaus this new path was blazing the trail of nothing less than a dialectical process, a "functional context ... that thwarts and negates the received categories of sonata form" (Dahlhaus 1989, 14). "Thwarts and negates": a large claim indeed. In place of the older, schematic concept of sonata form (with its pre-designated slots for generic themes and transitions), here, he insisted, Beethoven problematized those thematic zones, thereby introducing to the sonata tradition nothing less than the facilitation of "the discovery of transformational processes in the musical consciousness," grounded in an ongoing psychological or phenomenological understanding of the generative churning of motives within the work's deep structure (Dahlhaus 1991, 116). For Dahlhaus this would come to be a crucial feature of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sonata form, leading eventually to similar procedures sanctioned, especially, in Liszt, Brahms, and Schoenberg.(5) Observing the unusual character of the Tempest's measures 1-21-and probably following the lead of a mid-nineteenth-century analytical remark by A. …