sonata

Sonata comes from Italian sonata, the past participle of sonare, meaning 'to sound, to play an instrument,' derived from Latin sonāre, from sonus ('sound'). The word's original meaning was simply 'something sounded' — a piece played on instruments, as opposed to a cantata, 'something sung.' In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the distinction between sonata and cantata was straightforward and functional: one was played, one was sung. The sonata was not yet a formal structure but a category of musical work defined by its medium — the instruments that produced sound without a human voice, the music that existed in pure instrumental tone rather than in the marriage of tone and word.

The first named sonatas were published in the late sixteenth century by Italian composers such as Giovanni Bassano and Luzzasco Luzzaschi. These early sonatas were arrangements or original compositions for solo instruments or small ensembles — often a melodic instrument (violin or cornett) with a supporting bass. The term carried no implication of internal structure; a sonata could be in any form. Through the seventeenth century, as instrumental music gained prestige and complexity, the word accumulated associations with particular types of multi-movement structure. The trio sonata — two melodic instruments and a bass — became the dominant chamber music form of the Baroque period, composed in vast quantities by Corelli, Handel, and their contemporaries.

The 'sonata principle' as a structural concept — what we now call sonata form — developed primarily in the Classical period of the mid to late eighteenth century. In the hands of composers like C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, the first movement of a sonata typically followed a three-part structure: an exposition presenting two contrasting themes, a development section elaborating and destabilizing them, and a recapitulation restoring the original key. This form was not named 'sonata form' in its own time — theorists invented the term retrospectively in the nineteenth century. But it became the default structure for the first movement of not just sonatas but symphonies, string quartets, and concertos, making the 'sounded piece' the model for all extended instrumental music.

Beethoven pushed the sonata to its limits, using the form to pursue philosophical arguments that the language of music had never before attempted. His thirty-two piano sonatas — from the compact Opus 2 works of his twenties to the monumental Opus 111 of his fifties — chart the entire trajectory of Romantic ambition, the desire to use instruments to say things that words cannot. The final sonata, Opus 111, ends not with a triumphant coda but with a series of increasingly ethereal variations that seem to leave the physical world behind, the piano sound dispersing upward into silence. A piece named for the act of sounding had arrived at its opposite — a meditation on what lies beyond sound.