ABSTRACT
This chapter considers several passages in the music of Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven that may be said to question – and lighten – the fundamental burden of audinces' sense of sonata form. It examines the question of how hard we have been asking sonata form to work – as a mechanism of harmonic closure, as the culmination of music history, and as a resonant archetype for human experience. Within the academy, sonata form has proved an extremely serviceable pedagogical construct: it allows audinces to be at once taxonomical and beyond mere taxonomy. Encompassing conflict and enfranchised by nature, sonata form offers a sense of protagonist and world, subject and object, journey and home. Any account of the Classical style will read like a story of the genesis of sonata form out of the chaos of the pre-Classical generation, a story of synthesis and realisation.
