Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II: preliminary discussion of Matiegka's use of Haydn's themes.
For those who are already familiar with Matiegka's Grand Sonata II you may know that the finale is a bravura set of variations on Haydn's setting of "Liebes Madchen, hor mir zu" (pardon the lack of proper modifiers to the German alphabet there). This is a particularly cheeky lied in which the singer is a man who has headed out to a convent to serenade a maiden he regards as too beautiful to be confined to a convent, serenading her on his zither and requesting the more or less stereotypical reward for his efforts.
The Haydn lied ... with help from IMSLP.
Download 1
Matiegka unsurprisingly transposed the theme from F major to A major. He also split the lied in half with internal repetitions for the two halves as the basis for the presentation of the theme and all subsequent variations.
This is worth mentioning because while in the finale Matiegka's tribute to Haydn is explicit and mentions which Haydn lied he composed variations on, the first movement features a less obvious and far less obviously cited artistic homage to Haydn. It may be easier to present the Haydn material first so that as we go through the Matiegka sonata we can have fewer digressions.
You'll be able to see the additional score examples after the break.
Haydn wrote a lot of trios for violin, piano and cello. One of them, Trio XVI, features the following secondary theme:
Now for a guitarist who wants to pay homage to Haydn while making the ideas more suitable for the guitar someone with the technique of Matiegka did something more like ...
Halve the rhythmic values and modify the melodic lines while simultaneously retaining the basic harmonic movement of the phrases and we've got Matiegka's second theme in the recapitulation of the first movement from his Grand Sonata II. It's not the same, obviously, but the similarities also seem too obvious to go unmentioned.
We're going to get another case where there's a truncated recapitulation. Matiegka's going to bring back just a small part of his Theme 1 materials and I'm mentioning the Haydn theme this early in discussing Grand Sonata II because I believe a case can be made that the Haydn theme is the key to understanding how Theme 1 and Theme 2 are related. One of the shortcomings of a sonata theory such as the one proposed by Hepokoski & Darcy is their diffidence toward a concept that has been pretty well accepted in music theory circles, the idea of a monothematic sonata. They prefer to say that it's possible to have a P-derived S or C section. Now that makes sense if you're trying to prescribe interpretive possibilities for analyzing large-scale sonata forms but the shortcoming in that approach, speaking as a composer, is that it doesn't readily account for the possibility that there could be an S derived P. I'm going to make a case that Matiegka's Theme 1 makes sense as a derivation of a pre-existing theme drawn from the works of Haydn and that the second theme came first and provided a foundation for the material that appears in Theme 1.
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Wenzel Matiegka, Grand Sonata II, 1: incomplete recapitulation featuring the second quarter of Theme 1 and skipping to the transition
and a theme Matiegka included in his Grand Sonata I, movement 1.
That theme ...
was the recapitulation form of the theme. It's also observably derivable from a secondary theme in a sonata form in a Haydn Piano Trio, quoted in the last post.
Take a look at the linear movement in measure 2 in the example above. E F# G# A F# E. One of the things composers can do is invent a new theme based on a drastic rhythmic or metric alteration of a melodic line while retaining the essential linear pattern.
Now (after the break), let's take a look at page 1 of the first movement. As usual, you might want to collapse all the menu stuff on the side for easier reading.
But first ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGoOgAWN7wI
since you might not have a recorded performance of the sonata at the ready.
Let's compare the melodic movement from measure 2 above to the opening motto of this sonata.
Ah, there we see E, F#, G#, A ... and after a flourish in secondary dominant territory we get back down to E. It's even easier to spot if we look at the transition, labeled in green. We've looked at the recapitulation form of Theme 2 from this sonata movement so as to make it easier to demonstrate how you could derive Theme 1 from Theme 2. The opening phrase can be taken as inverting the approach of arrival at the dominant scale degree, from beneath by way of a secondary dominant function rather than from above by the sixth.
After the first half of the theme bursts forth, Matiegka gives us a secondary phrase (Phrase 2a/b) and this ends the first part of Theme 1. Part 2 of Theme 1 is a call and response between the treble and bass strings drawn from the sixteenth note figure in the opening motto.
The modulating transition (which is massive in comparison to Themes 1 or 2) begins as though repeating the twenty-four measure Theme 1.
Download 1
Having affirmed the key of E major as the key in which the new theme will appear, Matiegka writes a florid transitional passage ...
Download 2
We get to Theme 2 at the bottom of page 2. Even in E major it should still be pretty easy to observe the similarity between Matiegka's theme and Haydn's Piano Trio theme. The sixteenth note riff in the opening motto is even observably derivable from the eight-note turn in the original Haydn theme. At the risk of overstating things a bit, the gestural elements of Theme 1 can all be observably traced back to melodic, harmonic and rhetorical elements in Theme 2, whose debt to Haydn we're going to take as a given for the sake of this set of posts. If Matiegka could build the entire finale of Grand Sonata II on a set of variations of a Haydn lied it's hardly a bigger step, given a working knowledge of Haydn's chamber music, to propose that Haydn's influence is all over this sonata.
I agree with Hepokoski & Darcy being reticent about the term "monothematic sonata" in the sense that a Haydn or a Clementi may not really restrict themselves to one theme. That one theme very frequently contains three to four cells that can be broken apart, developed separately, or recombined to form what sound like new thematic ideas whose debt to existing material might only be observed by experienced composers. A Charles Rosen could easily spot how an accompaniment figure in a Haydn string quartet for a first theme could become the basis for the second theme inside a sonata form. Matiegka's work may provide us with a possible case study of working out that process in reverse, settling on what works as a secondary theme that's inspired by a secondary theme in a Haydn trio. If we keep in mind that even something that seems as strict as "monothematic sonata" can be a highly flexible thought process it's possible, as I think we can propose Matiegka did in his Grand Sonata II, to have a functionally monothematic sonata form that would sound to an untrained ear as though it's chock full of various ideas. That organic unity between Theme 1 and Theme 2 could, perhaps, explain how Matiegka approached his truncated recapitulation.
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Having proposed that Matiegka derived his Theme 1 from his Theme 2, and that his Theme 2 is indebted to Haydn, we can get to the development (which will include the coda from the exposition).
It's very important to note that Matiegka calls for a repeating exposition. Remember what we discussed earlier in this series about how an incomplete recapitulation may be informed by things like high intra-expositional development, and that when this happens in the context of a repeating exposition we may find "redundant" content sliced out? That's going to be borne out in this sonata form, too.
The exposition ends robustly in the key of E major and the development starts with a C dominant seventh that takes us into F major for the start of the development process. The Theme 1 derived material is quickly followed by a development of the Theme 2 material. This is followed by a call-and-response passage in D minor drawn from the Part 2 material of Theme 1. Next Matiegka uses the florid sextuplet transitional passage as the basis for continuing the development. You'll be able to see all this after the break.
Download 3
Download 4
Now we'll get to a point in the development where, like he did in his Grand Sonata I, Matiegka introduces a part of his Theme 1 material in a way that causes thematic recapitulation to happen before the opening motto recapitulation occurs. We get an F sharp minor variant of Theme 2 that leads to a tonic pedal passage. Matiegka brings back only Phrase 2a/b at this tonic pedal passage. He doesn't develop that Phrase 2 from Theme 1 until this point and he really expands it to build momentum toward the return of the opening motto. Matiegka has gotten us to the right key for a recapitulation to happen but he's gotten there sooner than his most recognizable Theme 1 motto. Not unlike Haydn (if, arguably, with less skill) Matiegka plays a game of divergent expectations. We're given a tonal resolution in the appropriate key but too soon and there's a little suspense as to when, exactly, that opening motto will return.
When the opening motto returns at measure 144 we finally get what we would expect from a recapitulation, that opening motto comes back loud and clear. But it shows up in its transitional form. It's as though Matiegka treated Phrase 2a from Theme 1 and the motto from Phrase 1 in the transition as a synecdoche for the entire Theme 1. He proceeds with a transition that, with a few modifications, is basically the material from the exposition recalibrated into A major. We move along to Theme 2 .. but first ... let's look at the music we've been talking about.
Download 5
Download 6
At this point we've seen that there are so many gestural links between Theme 1 and Theme 2 that it helps to explain why Matiegka seemed to feel so little obligation to give us a "real" recapitulation. He was developing the same set of ideas from Theme 2 so steadily throughout the sonata (and, we may guess, was so confident that people would hear that he was riffing on Haydn's work and in a way that showed off how a single thematic group could inspire the entire first movement) he didn't feel a need to do more than signal that the ideas "came back" in the recapitulation in a shorthand form. While that could be construed as weak sonata writing by the standards of theorists from the Romantic era, it's not necessarily "bad" composing. If anything, given Matiegka's obvious debt to Haydn, that level of playfulness and joking around would be what we could expect. Matiegka's sonta forms might not be as profound as Sor's in emotional content but I would propose he was Sor's equal in terms of a capacity for thematic development, even if he may not have matched Sor's penchant for original themes.
This is just the first sonata form in Grand Sonata II. Matiegka's second movement is a slow sonata form. We'll get to that movement presently.