Towards a theory of Chopin's large-scale forms

Abstract

Chopin’s large-scale compositions occupy a peculiar, uneasy position in nineteenth-century repertoire. On one hand, works such as the Second Piano Sonata (Op. 35), with its famous ‘Funeral March’ movement, have become concert-hall favourites. On the other, ever since the composer’s day, influential critics and scholars (including Robert Schumann, Gerald Abraham and Charles Rosen) have deemed these same works to exhibit significant formal shortcomings. Consequently, there is now a conspicuous discrepancy between the public’s perception of Chopin’s oeuvre and a rather dismissive approach frequently adopted in the literature. Such scholarly rejection seems unwarranted, especially given the significant shortage of comprehensive investigations into the composer’s use of large-scale structure: existing analyses undertaken by scholars including Jim Samson, John Rink and Karol Berger have almost always dealt with a single genre or work. It is with the aim of going some way in redressing this obtrusive lacuna that the current thesis is written, which presents a framework elucidating salient syntactical and formal devices employed across Chopin’s large-scale repertoire.

In accounting for such structural processes, the project engages with a recent discipline-advancing movement towards analysing Romantic works on their own terms—that is, to go beyond a ‘negative’ approach in which nineteenth-century music is viewed merely as a response to (or ‘deformation’ of) its Classical forebears. Specifically, a reading sensitive to both pre-existing tendencies and the music’s originality is proposed, giving rise to a methodology whose transferability extends well beyond the repertoire at hand. In developing an innovative range of analytical techniques that draws upon the new Formenlehre spearheaded by William Caplin and James Hepokoski on one hand, and upon rather neglected issues of syntax and topic on the other, the thesis proposes not only guidelines for subsequent engagement with Chopin’s work, but also a set of criteria with significance for analysis of nineteenth-century instrumental music more generally.