It was in 1837, however, that Carl Czerny who, in the
preface to his opus 600 (a work devoted to the explanation of compositional techniques),
implied that he was the first to describe the sonata in any detail. It was only
in 1848, however, that this three-volume treatise on composition appeared in
print. Newman provides a brief summary of Czerny's description of the first
movement of the sonata, which will be discussed here.
Czerny described in detail, in the forty-nine pages of his
sixth chapter, what "must" go into each of the four movements (allegro, adagio
or andante, scherzo or minuet, and finale or rondo). He cautioned that in connection with the
first movement, "we must always proceed in a settled form. For, if this order
were evaded or arbitrarily changed, the composition would no longer be a
regular Sonata."
He still viewed the first movement as being in two parts. Its first part
consists of the "principal subject," its extension and a modulation to "the
nearest related key," a "middle subject" and its extension in the related key,
and a "final melody" that closes in that key at the repeat sign. Its second part divides into two sections, a
modulatory "development" of any of those ideas or a new one, ending back in the
original key; and a recapitulation that restates the first part except for
abridgements and adjustments needed to remain in the original key. Czerny also
discussed the other three movements of the sonata and quoted examples from
piano sonatas regarded by him as successful, including those by Haydn,
Clementi, Mozart, Beethoven, and Dussek.
The most striking feature of this discussion of the
codification of the term "sonata" is that Chopin's second piano sonata was
composed before the concepts "sonata" and "sonata form" (in their modern sense)
had been fully recognised as specific terms in textbooks on music theory. As
Newman puts it, Czerny's work provides "an astonishing illustration of the
degree to which theory can trail practice. Not until as much as sixty years
after some of the masterworks of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Clementi had
appeared...did anyone write an explicit description of what happens in a
