JOHN FIELD AND THE ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF ...

Music & Letters,Vol. 92 No. 1, � The Author (2011). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.doi:10.1093/ml/gcq104, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

JOHN FIELDAND THE ALTERNATIVE HISTORYOF CONCERTO FIRST-MOVEMENT FORM

BY JULIAN HORTON*

RECEPTION AND CONTEXT

The analyst approaching John Field’s piano concerti confronts a network of theoretical,historical, and critical problems. Ostensibly isolated trends in musicology, theory, andreception history have together created circumstances that are not analytically congen-ial. Close engagement is discouraged both by the music’s historical marginality, a con-dition exacerbated by casual association with the much-maligned virtuoso concerto,and by a chronic paucity of scholarly editions.1Historical and textual obstacles further-more engender theoretical problems, particularly where matters of form are concerned:formal theory’s heavy dependence on mainstream repertory invariably bodes ill forthe analysis of marginal works.This state of affairs reflects a profound reversal of critical fortune. In his lifetime and

for most of the nineteenth century, Field’s concerti occupied a central position in therepertory, commensurate with his pre-eminence as a performer. When, in 1837, theMusicalWorld eulogized the composer as ‘alone and unrivalled’ in his command of thepiano, it appraised a reputation that was crucially indebted to the concerti’s dissemin-ation.2 As Patrick Piggott reports:

It is evident that by 1830 Field had become a legend . . .his superiority among pianists was sogenerally recognised that Elsner, Wieck, Kalkbrenner and Chopin all regarded him as aleader of his profession. . . .The publication of his concertos and nocturnes by Breitkopf andHa« rtel, which began about 1815, supported his already brilliant reputation as a pianist: theseworks quickly became an essential part of the repertoire.3

*University College Dublin. Email: [email protected]. This study was facilitated by an Irish Research Councilfor the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fellowship and the University College Dublin Seed-fundingScheme. I would like to thank Paul Wingfield, Nicole Grimes, and Benedict Taylor for their invaluable help inbringing this research to fruition, Harry White and Nicole Grimes for their careful reading of the text, and PeterHorton and the staff of the Royal College of Music Library for making crucial documents from the Langley Bequestavailable.

1 Four concerti are available in modern editions: concerti nos. 1^3 were published in Musica Britannica, 17 (1961),edited by Frank Merrick; Concerto no. 4 was published by Boccaccini and Spada Editori (1992), edited by PietroSpada. All other concerti survive in 19th-c. editions as piano reductions sometimes supplied with separate orchestralparts. For a survey of editions, see Cecil Hopkinson, A Bibliographical Thematic Catalogue of theWorks of John Field 1782^1837 (London, 1961). On the problems of editing Field’s music, see Robin Langley, ‘John Field and the Genesis of aStyle’, Musical Times, 123 (1982), 93^9, and id. ‘John Field: The Hidden Manuscripts and Other Sources in the BritishLibrary’, British Library Journal, 21 (1995), 232^9. Langley was working on a complete edition of the concerti at thetime of his death; the materials he collected for this project are held (uncatalogued) in the Library of the RoyalCollege of Music.

2 Quoted in Robin Langley, ‘John Field and the Genesis of a Style’, 93.3 See Patrick Piggott,The Life and Music of John Field, 1782^1837: Creator of the Nocturne (London, 1973), 101.

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Such estimations contrast sharply with modern opinion, which remembers Field chieflyas inventor of the nocturne and as a precursor of Chopin.4 Beyond the efforts of asmall number of specialist performers and scholars, the prestige Piggott describes hasall but evaporated.Field’s concerti have concomitantly fostered a degree of music-historical confusion,

manifest in uncertainty over their genealogy and particularly their relationship toMozart and Beethoven. Hans Engel, for example, groups them with works by Eberl,Clementi, Steibelt, Tomasek, Cramer, Dussek, and others as examples of ‘the brillantconcerto after Mozart’.5 Christopher Headington contrastingly regards them asvariants of the post-Beethovenian virtuoso concerto, associating Field with Chopin,Dussek, Moscheles, and Kalkbrenner as practitioners who circumnavigated Beethovenby emphasizing ‘elegance rather than emotional and physical force’.6 Engel andHeadington locate Field in incompatible historical categories: for Engel, he occupiesan interim ‘early Romantic’ practice between Mozart and Beethoven; for Headington,he is part of a post-Beethovenian progression. Leon Botstein endorses Headington’sview, determining that ‘practically all subsequent forays into the concerto genre harkback to Beethoven’s innovations’ and identifying Field as a seminal example.7 StephanLindeman treads a middle path, establishing Mozart’s concerti as major precursorsand placing Beethoven within a general milieu of concerted composition from Dussekto Liszt, but then further distinguishing between Beethoven as a direct recipient ofMozart’s legacy and Field as representative of an early post-classical lineage, alongwith Dussek, Moscheles, Ries, and Spohr. Lindeman then considers Weber, Mendels-sohn, Cramer, Alkan, ClaraWieck, Schumann, and Liszt separately as ‘experimental’composers in the aftermath of the fin de sie' cle repertory.8

Historical assessments are invariably reinforced by the well-worn tactic of justifyingmarginalization through formal critique. In Field’s case, this is almost alwaysgrounded in the claim that he is properly regarded as a miniaturist, whose materialwas strong, but whose grasp of larger forms, and particularly sonata form, was weak.9

Piggott makes the point bluntly: for him, Concerto no. 2, ‘like all Field’s longer works,suffers from his imperfect grasp of form’, while in the first movement of Concerto no.7, ‘the structural principles of sonata form are in fact largely abandoned . . . , the usual

4 Biographies from the early 20th c. onwards stress Field’s association with the nocturne. William H. GrattonFlood’s John Field: Inventor of the Nocturne (Dublin, 1920) is a representative, but notoriously unreliable, example.More recently, Field’s brief entry in Maurice Hinson’s Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire is typical. Hinson remarks that‘the nocturnes . . . established Field as a composer . . .and make a fine introduction to the Chopin nocturnes’. His listof representative works cites nocturnes on an individual basis, but omits the concerti completely. See Hinson, Guideto the Pianist’s Repertoire (3rd edn., Bloomington, Ind., 2000), 302^3. For a critique of Field biography, see NicholasTemperley, ‘John Field’s Life and Music’, Musical Times, 115 (1974), 386^8.

5 See Hans Engel, Das Instrumentalkonzert: Ein musikgeschichtliche Darstellung, ii:Von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden,1974), 1^9.

6 See Christopher Headington, ‘The Virtuoso Concerto after Beethoven’, in Robert Layton (ed.), A Guide to theConcerto (London, 1988), 131^51 at 144^6.

7 See Leon Botstein, ‘The 19th Century’, in Arthur Hutchings, Michael Talbot, Cliff Eisen, Leon Botstein, andPaul Griffiths, ‘Concerto’, in New Grove II, vi. 240^60 at 251, and see also 252. The post-Beethovenian conception ofthe virtuoso concerto is also stressed by Richard Taruskin: seeThe Oxford History of Western Music, iii:Music in the Nine-teenth Century (NewYork and Oxford, 2004), 273.

8 See Stephan D. Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition in the Early Romantic Piano Concerto (Hillsdale, NY,1999).9 This critique is anticipated by Franc� ois-Joseph Fe¤ tis’s remark, after Concerto no. 7’s Paris premiere in 1832, that

the work was ‘diffuse, but full of happy ideas’; see David Branson, John Field and Chopin (London, 1972), 130, and alsoClaudia Macdonald, Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto (NewYork and London, 2005),100.The charge of formal in-eptitude is strikingly similar to that levelled at Chopin’s larger forms. For an overview of such tendencies in Chopin re-ception, see John Rink, ‘Chopin’s Ballades and the Dialectic: Analysis in Historical Perspective’, Music Analysis, 13(1994), 99^115.

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development section being replaced by two independent episodes . . .which arecomplete in themselves’.10 Piggott’s view is prefigured by Geneva Handy Southall, forwhom Field replaced the taut thematic constructions of Mozart and Beethoven with‘rambling-type development . . . [having] only a subtle relationship, if any, with expos-ition material’.11 David Branson has similarly noted problems of ‘shaping’ and ‘struc-tural indetermination’ in the concerti, offering Field’s ‘visible difficulties in thisrespect’ as one possible reason for their comparative neglect and ultimately reinforcinga perceived dichotomy of form and content: ‘it is [Field’s] misfortune that a series ofhappy ideas . . . cannot alone make a convincing larger work’.12 The same sentimentis formulated more tactfully by Robin Langley, for whom Field’s ‘unconventionaland often discursive form . . .adapted the rigours of strict sonata structure to accommo-date one or more sections of contrasting atmospheric style and tempo’, the resultbeing ‘a weakening of control over the large span of the opening sonata and closingrondo movements which Field did not always surmount successfully’.13

Theory, History, and Canon Formation

The present study pursues this critical thread of reception, with the twofold aim ofreassessing Field’s formsçand particularly his first-movement formsçby bringingthem into dialogue with recent Formenlehre, and conversely of evaluating modernFormenlehre by testing its capacity to deal with Field’s forms. In practice, however,formal and historical judgements are hard to separate, founded as they are on sharedbut often concealed criteria, which themselves have a discernible history. The critiqueof form is habitually grounded more or less overtly in normative models: perceptionsof structural inadequacy invoke the authority of an ideal type, which is validatedthrough reference to a benchmark repertory. In other words, Field’s formal shortcom-ings obviate the purview of theoretical norms as much as they reveal apparent tech-nical deficiencies. Such judgements are historical, in that works from which norms arederived are usually considered historically paramount, orientating opinions in linewith processes of canon formation and their attendant critical and geographical distinc-tions between margins and centre.14

As a perceived acme of compositional achievement, sonata forms have proved espe-cially prone to such constructions. At least from Carl Czerny’s and A. B. Marx’s workonwards, the theory of sonata form has consistently extracted general principles fromselective and culturally restricted evidential samples, to the primary end of establishingwhatWilliamWeber has called the ‘pedagogical canon’ centred on the Viennese classic-al triumvirate, a standard beside which Field’s cultural mobilityças an Irishman whocompleted his apprenticeship under Clementi in London between 1793 and 1802and lived thereafter in St Petersburg and Moscowçseems markedly evasive.15 Bysome estimations, the post-classical condition of nineteenth-century sonata forms itself

10 See Piggott,The Life and Music of John Field, 178 and 157.11 See Geneva Handy Southall, ‘John Field’s Piano Concertos: An Analytical and Historical Study’ (Ph.D. diss.,

University of Iowa, 1966), 151.12 See Branson, John Field and Chopin, 62, 79, 101, and 144.13 See Robin Langley, ‘Field, John’, in New Grove II, viii. 777^83 at 780 and 781.14 The study of canon formation has gathered momentum over the last twenty years; see e.g. Katherine Bergeron

and Philip V. Bohlman (eds.), Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago, 1992); Marcia Citron, Gender andthe Musical Canon (Cambridge, 1993); and WilliamWeber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, in Nicholas Cook andMark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (NewYork and Oxford, 1999), 336^55.

15 SeeWeber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, 339. Field’s apprenticeship and move to Russia are traced in Piggott,The Life and Music of John Field, 10^26.

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guarantees a kind of marginality. Charles Rosen, for example, construes this repertoryas a historically moribund alter ego of the Romantic fragment, the latter embodied inthe forms of the piano miniature and the cycle.16 For Rosen, nineteenth-century com-posers excelled in literary, dramatic, and characteristic genres, while prolonging thelife of classical forms for their prestige rather than their efficacy or stylistic relevance.This process is captured more generously by James Hepokoski’s notion of ‘deform-ation’, formulated for the nineteenth century as the technique ‘of overriding selecteddefaults of normative pre- and post-Formenlehre practice to produce shapes that can nolonger profitably be categorized as mere ‘‘sonatas’’’.17 In these terms, nineteenth-centurysonata forms are distinctive for their conversion of a classical genre (the ‘genre sonataform’) into a reified concept (the ‘standard-textbook’ sonata).18

For the first-movement forms of the piano concerto, the theoretical core repertoryfrom the mid-nineteenth century to the present has been predominantly Mozartian,with a secondary outreach towards Beethoven. The Viennese concerto acquired aninfluential centrality for Czerny and Marx,19 which is maintained by commentatorsfrom Donald Tovey to Hepokoski andWarren Darcy, notwithstanding a fundamentalshift of canonical type and function, through which the compositional-pedagogicalcanon of the nineteenth century transformed into the musicological and music-theoretical canons of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.20 Such constructionshave drawn for additional support on the critique of virtuosity expounded most influ-entially by Robert Schumann, which denigrated self-serving display and elevatedmaterial integration.21 This manoeuvre is blatant in Tovey’s writing, in which the ‘trueconcerto’ and the Mozartian concerto are effectively synonymous: ‘the number ofgreat works in true concerto form [italics mine] is surprisingly small. . . . And of thissmall collection a good two-thirds has been contributed by Mozart.’22 The ‘false’concerto, by contrast, is discovered primarily in the works of ‘every virtuoso whose im-agination is fired by the splendid spectacular effect of a full orchestra as a background

16 On the Romantic fragment see Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (London, 1999), esp. 41^115, counter-pointed against Mendelssohn’s sonata forms ibid. 586^7. See also the more general perspective on 19th-c. sonataforms in id.,The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (rev. edn., NewYork, 1997), 451^60, and Sonata Forms (rev.edn., NewYork, 1988), 292^329.

17 See James Hepokoski, ‘Elgar’, in D. Kern Holoman (ed.),The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (NewYork, 1997), 327^44 at 328. The seminal formulation of the deformation idea is Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony no. 5 (Cambridge, 1993),esp. 5^9, and see alsoWarren Darcy, ‘Bruckner’s Sonata Deformations’, in Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy L. Jackson(eds.), Bruckner Studies (Cambridge, 1997), 256^77.

18 Hepokoski and Darcy theorize classical sonata form as a genre in Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types andDeformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (NewYork and Oxford, 2006), 605^10, and its subsequent reification,e.g. p. 190.

19 Marx’s description of concerto first-movement form is found in Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, iv(Leipzig, 1847); Czerny’s appears in School of Practical Composition, i, trans. John Bishop (London, 1848).

20 On the changing relationship between analysis, theory, and pedagogy in the 19th and 20th cc., see JonathanDunsby and Arnold Whittall, Music Analysis in Theory and Practice (London, 1988), 62, and also Ian Bent, MusicAnalysis in the Nineteenth Century, i: Fugue, Form and Style (Cambridge, 1994), pp. xiv^xv, although these authors disagreeon where the origin of this disjunction should be located.

21 See e.g. Robert Schumann, ‘Piano Concertos (1839)’, in Schumann on Music: A Selection from theWritings, trans. anded. Henry Pleasants (New York, 1965), 146^7. On Schumann’s engagement with the virtuoso repertory see LeonPlantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven 1967), 196^218 and esp. 203^7, and Macdonald, Robert Schumann and thePiano Concerto. On the critique of virtuosity, see e.g. Dana Gooley,The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, 2004), 12^14, and‘The Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Christopher H. Gibbs and DanaGooley (eds.), Franz Liszt and his World (Princeton, 2006), 75^111; Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J.Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1988), 134^42; and Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The TranscendentalStudies of Liszt (Cambridge, 2003).

22 Donald Francis Tovey, ‘The Classical Concerto’, in Essays in Musical Analysis, iii: Concertos (London, 1936, repr.1966), 3^27 at 3.

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for a display of instrumental technique’, which ‘express little else than that effect’,23 butwhich gained credibility thanks to the persistence of theories that misunderstand theclassical essence of the concerted idea.24 It transpires, however, that this essenceresides in ‘the typical artistic idea that is to be found in the concertos of the greatestcomposers’, by which Tovey means the Viennese classicists and above all Mozart,whose K. 503 supplies Tovey’s analytical paradigm.25 The argument courts self-justification: the authentic principles of concerto first-movement form are bothexemplified by and derived from Mozart’s concerti, a stratagem no work outside theViennese classical sphere can hope to penetrate. The net result is that the repertoryto which Field contributed is outflanked by a conjunction of theoretical and criticaltraditions that symbiotically reinforces Austrocentric notions of formal sophistication.

Field and the Performing Canon

One way to test the theoretical credibility of Tovey’s ‘true concerto’as a basis for assess-ing Field is to ground it empirically: if, for instance, it could be shown that Field’sconcerti and their cognate repertory were composed against the background of a per-forming canon to which Mozart’s concerti were central, then their formal disparitiescould be explained generously as misprisions or critically as incompetence. Yet recon-structions of the concert repertory to which Field was formatively indebtedçwhich wasabove all that of London in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the earlydecades of the nineteenth centuryçindicate that Viennese examples had scant canonic-al purchase before 1820. To critique Field’s concerti from a Mozartian perspective isthus to apply a paradigm that had a minimal impact on the circumstances of their pro-duction, but which has been elevated ex post facto to the status of a universal principle.26

Table 1 collates evidence from two sources, Thomas Milligan’s and Therese Ells-worth’s surveys of London’s concert life from 1790 to 1800 and 1801 to 1850 respectively,sampling Field’s concerti and those of the ten most frequently performed composers.27

Before 1800, only two performances of Mozart are noted, both by visiting central

TABLE 1. Performances of piano concerti in London, 1790^1850

Date Mozart Dussek Cramer Steibelt Beethoven Field Hummel Weber Moscheles Mendelssohn Bennett

1790^1800 2 34 12 8 ç 5 ç ç ç ç ç1801^9 2 2 15 12 1 4 ç ç ç ç ç1810^19 4 11 17 1 ç ç ç ç ç ç ç1820^29 13 3 12 4 7 1 14 3 21 ç ç1830^39 12 ç 6 ç 16 4 31 18 22 15 151840^50 12 ç ç 1 34 ç 23 44 9 45 19TOTAL: 45 50 44 26 58 14 68 65 52 60 34

23 Ibid.24 Tovey refers particularly to the view of concerto first-movement form expounded in Ebenezer Prout, Applied

Forms (London, 1895), 203^8. Prout regarded concerto first-movement form as a modified sonata form comprising adouble exposition (pp. 203^4). His point of orientation is nevertheless ‘Mozart, Beethoven and their contemporariesand immediate successors’ (p. 203), and his longer examples are drawn exclusively from Mozart’s piano concerti(nos. 9, 17, 24, and 25).

25 Tovey, ‘The Classical Concerto’, 4 and 16^25.26 On the early British reception of Mozart’s music in general, see Nicholas Temperley, ‘Mozart’s Influence on Eng-

lish Music’, Music & Letters, 24 (1961), 307^18.27 See Thomas B. Milligan,The Concerto and London’s Musical Culture in the Late Eighteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1983),

Appendix B, pp. 297^364, and Therese Ellsworth, ‘The Piano Concerto in London Concert Life between 1801 and1850’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1991), Appendix 2, pp. 279^312.

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Europeans (Hummel in 1791and Haessler in 1792) and both of K. 466.28 Mozart is sub-stantially eclipsed by Dussek in this decade, of whose concerti Milligan identifiesthirty-four performances, and also by Cramer and Steibelt, who amassed twelve andeight performances respectively. As Ellsworth shows, this situation changed after 1819,when the performance of concerti by Mozart and Beethoven was sanctioned by theLondon Philharmonic Society.29 Ellsworth’s evidence, however, rewards carefulscrutiny. Of the 673 performances she records between 1801 and 1850, forty-three areof Mozart, this total excluding seven hybrid concerti performed by Cramer, whichmixed movements of his own with those of Mozart, usually K. 491. Yet thirty-seven ofthese took place after 1820: Ellsworth’s and Milligan’s surveys combined thus yieldonly eight performances to this date. Moreover, more than half of the post-1820concerti were shared between only three pianists: fifteen by Cipriani Potter, seven byCramer, and four by Sterndale Bennett. To speak of the influence of Mozart inLondon in this time is, as far as the composition of the performing canon is concerned,to trace the activities of a small group of advocates.The appraisal shown in Table 2 of the distribution of works for the six most popular

composers after 1801 further qualifies Mozart’s position. Of the concerti Ellsworthidentifies, K. 466 and K. 491 received six performances each, K. 467, K. 482, and K.503 all appear twice, and all other concerti appear only once. Thus, only K. 466 andK. 491 have any presence before 1820, and (allowing for unidentified concerti) onlythirteen are in the repertory before 1850, eight on the strength of one performance.Compare this with Weber, whose three concerted works for piano enjoyed sixty-fiveperformances between 1820 and 1850, an astonishing fifty of which were of theKonzertstu« ck in F minor; it alone accounts for a greater proportion of the repertorythan of all of Mozart’s concerti together. Mozart is also outnumbered by Hummel(68 performances from 1822), Mendelssohn (60 performances of the two concerti from1832), and even Moscheles (52 performances between 1822 and 1849). Before 1820,Mozart is also obscured by Cramer (32 performances between 1801 and 1819) andDussek (13 performances between 1804 and 1820). The situation is in some respectscomparable for Beethoven. Ellsworth records fifty-eight performances up to 1850, butonly one of these took place before 1820 (the 1805 London premiere of Concerto no.3) and more than half (34) occurred after 1840. Beethoven’s centrality as a concertedcomposer is, in these terms, primarily a mid-century phenomenon.Viennese orientation is similarly insufficient in other contexts. Claudia Macdonald,

for instance, observes that up to mid-1831, Schumann ‘heard no live performancesof concertos [by Mozart and Beethoven], may not have known any from score, andultimately showed no interest in them as models for his own compositions in thegenre’.30 Mozart and Beethoven constituted ‘more a distant, emblematic ideal than animmediate, specific influence’, contrasting with ‘the powerful presence of the virtuoso

28 See Milligan,The Concerto and London’s Musical Culture, 54^5 and 56. He notes that ‘Concertos by Mozart wereheard very seldom in London at this time’ (p. 54).

29 The Philharmonic Society’s founding objective was to promote ‘the best and most approved instrumental music’,an agenda that explicitly excluded ‘worthless virtuosi concerti’, as Louis Spohr put it. See ‘Second Prospectus’,Programs of the Philharmonic Society, 1 (1813), quoted in Ellsworth, ‘The Piano Concerto in London Concert Life’, 26;Spohr’s description is cited ibid. 28. The end of the prohibition was signalled by a concert of 26 Apr. 1819, at which aMr Beale performed an unspecified concerto by Mozart. The concerti of Mozart and Beethoven were admitted onthe grounds that they were regarded as symphonic rather than concerted music; see ibid. 31^5.

30 See Macdonald, Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto, 73. She argues elsewhere that ‘in 1831 the full extent ofSchumann’s exposure to the genre did not reach much beyond [concerti by Ries, Moscheles, Hummel, Pixis, Field,Bo« hner, Herz, and Kalkbrenner]çall composed between 1808 and 1829, and all reflecting the latest fashion’. See

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TABL

E2.

Quantitiesofperformancesby

workforthesixmostfrequentlyperformed

composersinLondon,1801^50

Moz

art

Work:

K.449

K.450

K.451

K.453

K.456

K.459

K.466

K.467

K.482

K.488

K.491

K.503

K.537

unkn

own

total

Performan

ces:

11

11

11

62

21

62

117

43

Bee

thov

enWork:

Op.15

Op.19

Op.37

Op.58

Op.73

unkn

own

çç

çç

çç

çç

total

Performan

ces:

62

149

243

çç

çç

çç

çç

58

Web

erWork:

Op.11

Op.32

Op.79

unkn

own

çç

çç

çç

çç

çç

total

Performan

ces:

111

503

çç

çç

çç

çç

çç

65

Hum

mel

Work:

Op.89

Op.85

Op.110

Op.113

Op.

posth.

unkn

own

çç

çç

çç

çç

total

Performan

ces:

1221

59

516

çç

çç

çç

çç

68

Mos

cheles

Work:

Op.45

Op.56

Op.58

Op.64

Op.87

Op.90

Op.93

Op.96

unkn

own

çç

çç

çtotal

Performan

ces:

16

1010

34

22

14ç

çç

çç

52

Men

delssoh

nWork:

Op.25

Op.40

unkn

own

çç

çç

çç

çç

çç

çtotal

Performan

ces:

3520

5ç

çç

çç

çç

çç

çç

60

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concerto’, which ‘overshadowed Beethoven’s concertos and set standards for the radicalrecomposing of Mozart’s concertos’.31 Macdonald draws on Alfred Do« rffel’s history ofthe Gewandhaus concerts between 1781 and 1881, which reports that, in the decade1820^30, Leipzig hosted only two performances of Mozart’s concerti and five of Beet-hoven’s, compared with ten concerti by Hummel, seven by Moscheles, six by Ries,and six by Kalkbrenner.32 Similar circumstances prevailed in Berlin, where in 1830one reviewer lamented that Mozart was ‘still completely alien to our modern virtu-osos’,33 and in Paris, where, according to Jeffrey Cooper, Mozart’s concerti onlybecame established repertory after 1840, although a seminal performance of K. 503was given by Kalkbrenner as early as 1828.34

This evidence admittedly needs to be understood in conjunction with other modesof dissemination, most obviously the circulation of editions and manuscript copies.Editions of Mozart’s concerti emerged piecemeal before 1820: ten concerti were pub-lished by Johann Anton Andre¤ from 1792 and twenty by Breitkopf and Ha« rtel between1800 and 1804.35 After 1820, new editions were prepared by Hummel, Kalkbrenner,Cramer, and Potter, in which the solo parts were systematically recomposed to reflectcontemporary pianistic taste.They evince less the acknowledgement of a compositionalprecedent and more the reformulation of Mozart in the image of the virtuoso concerto.In all, the history of the editions in this time does not reflect a pre-existing centrality,but rather a process of reception, the outcome of which was a mid-century canonicalsecurity.The impact of manuscript transmission is nebulous at best; if Mozart’s practiceswere disseminated in London by these means before 1820, they left their mark neitheron the performing canon nor (as we shall see) on prevailing formal habits.Field’s reported attitude towards Mozart and Beethoven hardly corroborates an

underlying Viennese influence. Piggott, for example, asserts that ‘there is no recordthat [Field] ever played any of Beethoven’s piano concertos in public’, and that accord-ing to Alexander Dubuk, Field referred to Beethoven’s piano music contemptuously as‘German dishcloth’ (‘le torchon Allemand’).36 Field was similarly ambivalent aboutMozart’s keyboard music, neglecting it in his teaching in favour of music by prominentcontemporaries, especially Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, and Cramer.37 Fieldwas, in contrast, much engaged with the virtuoso repertory stemming from theLondon School, and especially Dussek and Steibelt, with whose concerti he becamefamiliar during his apprenticeship in the 1790s.38

‘‘‘Mit einer eigener au�erordentlichen Composition’’: The Genesis of Schumann’s Phantasie in A minor’, Journal of Mu-sicology, 12 (1995), 240^59 at 243.

31 See Macdonald, Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto, 74.32 See Alfred Do« rffel, Geschichte der Gewandhausconcerte vom 25 November 1781 bis 25 November 1881 (repr. Wiesbaden,

1972). Macdonald tabulates Do« rffel’s information for the period 1821^40 in Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto, 78^9.33 See Claudia Macdonald, ‘Mozart’s Piano Concertos and the Romantic Generation’ in Stephen A. Crist and

Roberta Montemorra Marvin (eds.), Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations (Rochester, NY, 2004), 302^29 and esp. 304^5. Macdonald lists performances in Berlin in the 1830s byWenceslas Hauck, Wilhelm Taubert, andMendelssohn, and in Vienna in the same decade by Ignaz Tedesco and Carl Maria von Bocklet.

34 See Jeffrey Cooper,The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris, 1828^71 (Ann Arbor, 1983), 127 andMacdonald, ‘Mozart’s Piano Concertos and the Romantic Generation’, 303^4, which also cites a Parisian perform-ance of an unspecified Mozart concerto in C major given by Ferdinand Hiller in Dec. 1833.

35 See Macdonald, ‘Mozart’s Piano Concertos and the Romantic Generation’, 303.36 See Piggott,The Life and Music of John Field, 53.37 Ibid. 114.38 Dussek’s influence on Field is considered in Piggott,The Life and Music of John Field,146 and 150. Milligan records

two performances of Dussek’s concerti by Field in London, on 23 May 1794 and 3 May 1798 respectively; see TheConcerto and London’s Musical Culture in the Late Eighteenth Century, 308.

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Consequently, although Lindeman’s assertion that ‘all serious British composerswere very familiar with [the] design [of Mozart’s concerti] after 1825’ is probably ac-curate,39 the major problem for any analyst approaching Field’s concerto first-movement forms from the perspective of mainstream Formenlehre is that both theseworks and the models on which they draw largely pre-date this reception. The geo-graphically variable delay between the composition of Viennese examples and theiradmission to the repertory problematizes their adoption as a general archetype. If wewish to do justice to Field, and indeed to the corpus of piano concerti from Dussekto Schumann, then we need to theorize concerted forms in a much more historicallyand empirically sensitive manner.

THEORIES OF CONCERTO FIRST-MOVEMENT FORM

A comprehensive response to this problem requires a detailed survey of the per-forming canon for this period (insofar as it can be reconstructed) for the majorEuropean centres of concerted composition, the distribution of formal practices itexhibits, and the formal theories we habitually employ to explain them. For thepresent purposes, we might more realistically explore how the theory of concertofirst-movement form can be reformulated to accommodate Field’s concerti and relatedrepertory, and scrutinize marked divergences between this practice and Vienneseparadigms.The changing priorities of the theory of concerto first-movement form from the

eighteenth century onwards were seminally appraised by Jane R. Stevens.40 Assessingconceptions from Scheibe and Quantz, through Koch, Vogler, Czerny, A. B. Marx,and Tovey to Edwin R. Simon, Stevens identifies several pivotal changes of perspec-tive. The transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century perceptions, embodied inthe work of Vogler and Koch, is for her marked by the emergence of harmonicallyorientated thinking and the tendency to associate the form with other instrumentaldesigns, chiefly sonata form.41 Marx’s work in turn indicates the point at which ‘theconcerto at last lost its formal independence’ and became subsumed as a sonata-typegenre.42 The contrary idea that concerto first-movement form properly stands apartfrom symphonic forms was influentially championed by Tovey, who cautioned againstaccording the first ritornello excessive ‘symphonic weight’ and rejected its expositionalstatus.43 Stevens ultimately noted the emerging historicism of her own time, especiallyin the work of Simon, who dissociated concerted and symphonic forms on the groundsof their independent development out of Baroque precedents.44

39 See Stephan Lindeman, ‘Continental Composers and their English Influence, as Manifest in the PianoConcertos of William Sterndale Bennett’, Ad Parnassum, 5/10 (2007), 103^41 at 105.

40 See Jane R. Stevens, ‘Theme, Harmony and Texture in Classic-Romantic Descriptions of ConcertoFirst-Movement Form’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 27 (1974), 25^60.

41 As Stevens remarks: ‘It is especially noteworthy . . . that every writer, beginning with Vogler in 1779, who hadattempted to describe sonata or symphonic form and who dealt with concerto form at all, saw parallels betweensymphonic and concerto first-movement form.’ See ‘Theme, Harmony and Texture’, 40. Koch’s landmark descrip-tions are found in Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, iii (Rudolstadt, 1793) and Musikalisches Lexicon (Frankfurt,1802). Vogler’s description is found in Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschuler, ii (1779), 36^9.

42 ‘Theme, Harmony and Texture’, 50.43 See Tovey, ‘The Classical Concerto’ and also ‘Beethoven: Pianoforte Concerto in C major, Op. 15’, ‘Beethoven:

Pianoforte Concerto in C minor, Op. 37’, and ‘Beethoven: Pianoforte Concerto in G major, Op. 58’ in Essays inMusical Analysis, iii. 64^9, 69^75, and 75^84 respectively.

44 See Edwin R. Simon, ‘The Double Exposition in the Classic Concerto’, Journal of the American Musicological Society,10 (1957), 111^18.

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Subsequently, scholars of both historicist and presentist persuasions havereformulated these debates with specific reference to Mozart.45 The extent to whichthe field remains contested is illustrated through comparison of two recent, contrastedapproaches. Echoing Simon, William E. Caplin considers the Marxian view of theform as a sonata variant to be fundamentally problematic:

[C]oncerto form has often been seen as a derivative [of sonata form] and has thus beendescribed as containing three partsçexposition, development, recapitulationçin which thefirst part is preceded by an orchestral introduction. . . .This view of the concerto cum sonatahas its attractions but is misleading in a number of respects. In particular, it ignores the histor-ical development of the classical concerto out of sources distinct from the sonata. Moreover,it fails to take into account a number of compositional procedures that clearly are vestiges ofthe older ritornello form.46

Instead, Caplin theorizes a normative six-part design, comprising three solo sectionsconveying sonata-type functions, framed and punctuated by three ritornelli, whichbetray the form’s Baroque genealogy. The difficulty here is, of course, that the first rit-ornello often has expositional characteristics. Caplin, however, maintains that itcommonly differs in two crucial aspects, which weaken the sonata analogy: it projectsno structural modulation; and the subordinate theme is frequently more ‘tight-knit’than a real expositional second theme, which is to say that it is often singular,self-contained, and cadentially closed.47 This reduced expositional function is com-pounded by the second ritornello, which is ‘allowed to participate in the tonal conflictlying at the heart of the form’ only by reverting to first-ritornello material in thenon-tonic key confirmed by the solo exposition.48 Altogether, Caplin associates classical(and specifically Mozartian) concerto first-movement form with its sister genres pri-marily through its origins in a commonViennese syntax, rather than through member-ship of a broader class of sonata forms.In contrast, the form’s sonata inclination is privileged by James Hepokoski and

Warren Darcy to the extent that they classify it as one of five basic classical sonatatypes and one of two exhibiting a hybrid character (the other being the rondo, or‘type-4’ sonata). For the concerted, or ‘type-5’, sonata, this hybridization arises fromthe conflation of ritornello form and the type-3, or ‘standard ‘‘textbook’’’, sonata,producing six common ‘subtypes’, of which Hepokoski and Darcy identify two as typic-ally Mozartian.49 These in turn reduce to a seven-part normative model, summarizedin Table 3.

45 Important contributions after Stevens include Daniel N. Leeson and Robert D. Levin, ‘On the Authenticity of K.Ahn. C. 14.01 (297b), a Symphonia Concertante for FourWinds and Orchestra’, in Mozart-Jahrbuch 1976/77 (Kasel, 1978),70^96; Charles Rosen,The Classical Style, 185^263 and Sonata Forms, 71^97; James Webster, ‘Are Mozart’s Concertos‘‘Dramatic’’? Concerto Ritornellos versus Aria Introductions in the 1780s’, in Neal Zaslaw (ed.), Mozart’s PianoConcertos:Text, Context, Interpretation (Ann Arbor, 1996), 107^37; David Rosen, ‘‘‘Unexpectedness’’ and ‘‘Inevitability’’ inMozart’s Piano Concertos’, ibid. 261^84; Joel Galand, ‘The Large-Scale Formal Role of the Solo Entry Theme inthe Eighteenth-Century Concerto’, Journal of Music Theory, 44 (2000), 381^450; Simon P. Keefe, Mozart’s PianoConcertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment (Woodbridge, 2001); and John Irving, Mozart’s Piano Concertos(Aldershot, 2003). Both Irving and Keefe orientate themselves initially around Koch’s descriptions.

46 SeeWilliam E. Caplin, Classical Form: ATheory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart andBeethoven (NewYork and Oxford, 1998), 243.

47 Ibid. 244^5.48 Ibid. 248.49 On the ‘type-5’ sonata, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 496^602. The six 18th-c. subtypes,

adapted from Galand, ‘The Large-Scale Formal Role’, are laid out on pp. 437^8. The two seven-part Mozartianvariants identified as basic to concerti (A and B in their tabulation) are found on p. 436.

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There are two obvious discrepancies between the type-5 model and Caplin’s per-spective. Most obviously, Caplin does not recognize a fully-fledged retransitional or re-capitulatory ritornello (R3). Secondly, although Hepokoski and Darcy reiterate R1’smonotonal character, the central role played by the concept of rotation in their theory(the idea that expositions establish a referential thematic order, which the other partsof the form ‘rotate’) restores to it at least a ‘proto-expositional’ status.50 For them,R1 has three essential functions: an introductory/anticipatory function’, through whichit prefigures the solo exposition in ‘embryonic’ form; an ‘expositional-rhetoricfunction’, arising from the fact that R1 is ‘rhetorically structured as a non-modulatingexposition’; and a ‘referential-layout function’, supplying a rotational thematicordering on which the soloist builds.51 Hepokoski and Darcy capture the detail of thisstructure by melding terminology designed to explain the ritornello^solo alternationwith their type-3 vocabulary, producing a quasi-algebraic symbology. Since R1 and S1resemble a double exposition, they invoke the normative defaults of the type-3sonataçthe primary theme (P), subordinate theme (S), transition (TR), closingsection (C), and the significant structural cadences, particularly the medial caesura(MC), essential expositional closure (EEC), and its tonic recapitulatory transpositionas the essential structural closure (ESC)çwith which they are consequently fused.52

Thus, a first theme introduced into R1 and maintained in S1 emerges as R1:\P, whileS1:\P indicates a fresh solo primary theme. S1 may depart further from R1 throughthe adoption of a distinctive initial gesture (the ‘S1 preface’), freely varied transitionalmaterial (the S1:\TR ‘sujet libre’), fresh S material, which either coexists with, or elseusurps, R1’s second theme, and the addition of a display episode (‘DE’) as closingsection (‘S1:\DE’). Because both S1:\DE and R2 will respectively iterate and reiteratean EEC, we have to distinguish S1:\EEC and R2:\EEC. And because the structuralcadences on which S1 and R2 culminate are prefigured, albeit in the tonic, in R1, thetrajectory of the exposition is in a sense duplicated and therefore rendered morecomplex than its type-3 relative.The problems of applying these models to early nineteenth-century concerti become

clear when we compare them with the formal archetype for the virtuoso con-certo advanced by John Rink, drawing on the work of Isabella Amster, appraised inTable 4.53 This model is not comprehensive. Its description of the whole of the first rit-ornello (or T1 in Rink’s terms) and solo section as far as the first Spielepisode as prolong-ing the tonic glosses over the frequent use of a modulating first ritornello. Moreover,the solo first theme very often segments into a bravura preface and a more or lessself-contained cantabile episode, combining nocturne-like accompaniments with elab-orate bel canto figuration, which precede the transition and are frequently unrelatedto the orchestra’s first theme. The exclusion of the third ritornello (Rink’s T3) fromthe sonata design also seems hasty, given that in many cases (Dussek’s Op. 70, Field’s

50 Hepokoski and Darcy define rotation thus: ‘Rotational structures are those that extend through musical space byrecycling one or more times . . . a referential thematic pattern established as an ordered succession at the piece’soutset.’ See Elements of Sonata Theory, 611.

51 See ibid. 449^51.52 On the medial caesura, the essential expositional closure, and the essential structural closure, see ibid. 23^50,

120^4, and 232^3 respectively.53 See Rink, Chopin:The Piano Concertos (Cambridge,1997), 4^5, and Isabella Amster, Das Virtuosenkonzert in der ersten

Ha« lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbu« ttel and Berlin, 1931). Macdonald gives a less schematic appraisal of thefirst-movement forms of the virtuoso concerto in Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto, 19^35, restricting her commen-tary to twelve concertiçby Field, Ries, Hummel, Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Herz, and Pixisçthat Schumann certain-ly knew. This form is also briefly appraised in Jim Samson,The Music of Chopin (Oxford, 1985), 50^1.

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TABL

E3.

Sum

maryofHepokoskiandDarcy’s‘type-5’sonata

2 1

:snoitatoR R

/Ssu

cces

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R )noitisopxe( 1S

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\PR

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RR

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+pre

face

) (P

-cod

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‘eve

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:\T

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S1:\

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traj

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CS

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TABL

E4.

Rink/Amstermodelofearlynineteenth-centuryconcertofirst-movem

entform,from

Rink,Cho

pin:The

Piano

Con

certos,4

Son

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T1

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2S 2

T3

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4

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˜

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(e.g

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, V)

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concerti nos. 4 and 7, and Chopin’s Op. 11, for instance), it plainly initiates therecapitulation.Comparison with Caplin and Hepokoski and Darcy is nonetheless instructive. Rink’s

exclusion of the first and third ritornelli from the sonata design accords with Caplin,whose formal functions and types also remain relevant, even if their concatenationis sometimes eccentric by Viennese-classical standards. On the other hand, the result-ing subordination of the ritornelli to the sonata action reinforces Hepokoski andDarcy’s observation, following Lindeman, of the tendency up to 1850 to reduce thesonata-ritornello hybrid to a unitary sonata.54 Some of sonata theory’s labels arealso plainly transferable, for example its designations for ritornelli and solo sections(R1, S1, and so forth) and its terms specifying solo divergences from R1, especially thesolo ‘preface’ and the ‘display episode’, the latter corresponding to Rink’s secondSpielepisode.The medial caesura and the cadential landmarks of the ‘essential sonata tra-jectory’ likewise persist, although their distribution and articulation are sometimesclouded by strategies of elision and deferral. Other features have no sonata-theoreticalor formal-functional parallel. The display episodes are notably more numerous,comprising TR as well as C in S1 and TR in the recapitulation (Rink’s ‘finale’ andthe virtuoso section of the development often have much in common with theSpielepisoden). More strikingly, R4 (Rink’s T4) contains no punctuating cadenza.Such questions of compatibility complement the disparity of modern theoretical and

contemporary performing canons identified above. They are consequently not simplytheoretical differences of opinion, but map onto and reflect shifts of historical perspec-tive and compositional priority, which cannot be explained away as deformations ofan authentic Viennese scheme; to regard early nineteenth-century practices as such isnevertheless to maintain a theoretical norm that may in this case be of dubious historic-al provenance.

FIELD AND CONCERTO FIRST-MOVEMENT FORM: THREE STUDIES

Enlarging on Lindeman’s brief survey of Field’s formal habits,55 I isolate three practiceshere that graphically illustrate Field’s distance from Mozart: the modulating first ritor-nello; thematic relationships between the first ritornello and the solo exposition; and re-capitulatory truncation. For the most part, the objective is not to reject theoreticalmodels wholesale, but rather to identify the limits of their applicability and introduceconcomitant modifications. The analyses employ a variant of Caplin’s terminology,the syntactic focus of which is advantageous because it permits description apart fromany implied hierarchy of sonata-specific norms. Sonata-theoretical terms are retainedwhere useful, but without their associated apparatus of generic defaults. Four functionallevels are described: two categories of large-scale function (ritornello^solo succession,or R1, S1, and so forth; exposition^development^recapitulation^coda), inter-thematicfunction (A, TR, B, RT, C/DE) and intra-thematic function/type (periods, sentences,hybrids, model-sequence structures, and suchlike).56 New material under a common

54 This more developed sonata analogy presages the convergence of concerto and symphony in the first movementof Schumann’s Piano Concerto of 1845, where the ritornello remains only as a structural marker between expositionand development. See Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition, 25^6, and Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of SonataTheory, 435.

55 See Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition, 29^30. Lindeman notes three ways in which Field’s first movementsdiverge from Mozart: the modulating R1, distinct ritornello and solo first- and sometimes second-group material,and extensive chromatic digressions in the closing sections.

56 The distinction between inter- and intra-thematic functions is elaborated in Caplin, Classical Form, 17.

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inter-thematic functionçfor example differing R1 and S1 A themesçis designatedwith an integer suffix (A1, A2), and repetitions with a superscript integer suffix (A1).Sonata theory’s label for the second group (S) is rejected because it risks tautology(S1 A1 is more elegant than S1 S1). Tonal plots and the distribution of structuralcadences are traced at the bottom of each table. Filled arrows at this level indicateprocesses of modulation; open arrowheads signify cadential elision.

The Modulating R1

The modulating first ritornello has had a mixed reception. Tovey traced its origins tothe non-tonic R1 B themes in Beethoven’s first three concerti and identified it as an‘error’,57 which inappropriately imported a symphonic strategy into a concerted form,leaving ‘nothing essential for the pianoforte to add when its time comes’.58 For Tovey,this mistake was perpetuated through the adoption of the Concerto no. 3 as a modelby subsequent composers, assisted perhaps by Czerny’s paradigmatic use of it in theSchool of Practical Composition, even though Beethoven had reverted to the monotonalscheme favoured by Mozart by the time of the ‘Emperor’ Concerto.59

Lindeman addresses Beethoven’s ‘error’ as one instance of post-Mozartian ‘harmonicdigression’, rightly observing that ‘the key of the secondary theme [in R1] is anythingbut certain in the concertos of Mozart’s successors in the late eighteenth and early tomid-nineteenth centuries’.60 He classifies the modulating R1 as one of three commondigressive strategies, the others occurring in the S1 transition and the aftermath of thesecond theme’s presentation.61 Milligan considers this issue with specific reference toDussek, effectively turning Tovey’s argument on its head:

Since the cantabile [subordinate] theme is in the dominant in the first solo section, there is asense of resolution when it appears in the tonic in the recapitulation. To present the theme inthe tonic in the opening tutti before it is heard in the dominant in the first solo tends tonegate the tension inherent in presenting material in a non-tonic tonality. If the theme is inthe dominant in the first tutti section, there is no premature tonicization to detract from theresolution in the recapitulation.62

Milligan’s London orientation itself problematizes Tovey’s view, because it makes clearthat the modulating ritornello does not originate with Beethoven: it can be traced atleast to Dussek’s Op. 15 of 1787; examples coeval with Beethoven’s early concertiinclude the first three of Cramer, composed between 1795 and 1801, and of DanielSteibelt, written between 1796 and 1799.63 Rather, Beethoven adopted a practicethat gained currency in London in the 1790s and was sustained throughout the nine-teenth century in concerti from Hummel to Brahms. Milligan’s comments, moreover,

57 Tovey, ‘Beethoven: Pianoforte Concerto in G major, Op. 58’, 78.58 Tovey, ‘Beethoven: Pianoforte Concerto in C minor, Op. 37’, 71. Tovey’s analysis is reappraised in William

Drabkin, ‘Towards the ‘‘Symphonic Concerto’’of the Middle Period: Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Piano Concertos’,in Giuseppe Pugliese (ed.), Ludwig van Beethoven: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Verona, 1988), 93^103.

59 See School of Practical Composition, 1, esp. 164. Mozart composed only two decisive non-tonic R1 B-theme presenta-tions: K. 413/i, which corrects to the tonic midway through; K. 449/i, which remains in the dominant into the Csection. On these examples, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 488^90.

60 See Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition, 24.61 Ibid. 25^3.62 See Milligan,The Concerto and London’s Musical Culture, 73.63 Cramer, Concerti Opp. 10 in Ebmajor (1795),16 in D minor (1797), 26 in D major (1801); Steibelt, Concerti nos. 1

in C major (1796), 2 in E minor (1796), and Op. 33 in E Major (1799, L’orage). Tabular analyses of these movementsare provided in Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition, 207^9 and 308^10.

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obviate Beethoven’s ‘error’ as a question of where redundancy should be located, not ofwhether R1 courts redundancy or not: a modulating R1 anticipates S1; a non-modulating R1 anticipates the recapitulation. Mozart’s solution reduces R1’s expos-itional analogy by adumbrating the recapitulation; those of Dussek and others juxta-pose an R1modulation that is cancelled and an S1modulation that is not.Field composed a modulating R1 for five of his seven concerti, nos. 1 (1799), 2 (1810), 3

(published 1816; date of completion uncertain), 4 (1812^15), and 7 (1832, although thefirst movement was completed in 1822). He adopts two basic variants: either A isreprised in the tonic before the soloist enters; or the non-tonic end of B is linked to thetonic solo entry via a modulating retransition. These two strategies have differentformal consequences. The first sets up a distinctly un-Mozartian functional ambiguity:because the first theme frames R1, a tension arises between the implication of atonally open sonata exposition and a closed ternary design, in which the second groupfunctions as a contrasting middle section.64 The second variant places an additionalburden on the solo entry that is also absent in Mozart’s concerti: since the rhetoric ofclosure in R1 favours a non-tonic key, the soloist must reassert the tonic before retracingand sustaining a tonal trajectory from which R1 has retreated.The ternary model is applied most straightforwardly in Concerto no. 1/i, the R1 of

which is summarized in Table 5. Theme A comprises a sentential period, yielding to atransition culminating with a standing on V/V. Theme B is also periodic and tonallyclosed by a dominant perfect cadence, but the expected C section is replaced by afour-bar retransition and R1 ends with a condensed return of A in the tonic.Concerti nos. 2 and 4 apply a more elaborate variant of the same scheme, in which a

retransition and tonic A1 follow a complete non-tonic B theme and C section.In Concerto no. 2’s R1 (appraised in Table 6), the distinction between C and RT is

TABLE 5. Field, Concerto no. 1/i, Eb, Ritornello 1

Bars: 1–161 86–554–0594–536–341 1 68–71Large-scalefunction:

R1(Exposition1)

Inter-thematicfunction:

A TR B RT A1 andcadence

C

Intra-thematicfunction:

sententialperiod

1.16–25presentation–continuation–cadence

2.26–301

standing onV

3.30–4fill

period standingonV

sentence– extendedcadential

post-cadential

Tonal plot: I ˜ V/V V ˜ IStructuralcadence:

⇒PAC ⇒HC MC ⇒PAC ⇒PAC

64 Milligan notes the ternary implication of this design in The Concerto and London’s Musical Culture, 73; Macdonaldaddresses it in Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto, 18. Acknowledgement of the modulating R1 can be traced backto Koch, who describes it as one of three common R1 types: ‘Der erste Ritornell wird aber auch . . .dergestaltgeformt, da� zwar die Modulation fo« rmlich in die Tonart der Quinte geleitet, und nach dem Quintabsatze derselbenein melodische Haupttheil in dieser Tonart vorgetragen wird. Unmittelbar hernach aber wird, ohne in dieserTonart fo« rmlich zu schlie�en, die Modulation wieder in den Hauptton zuru« ckgefu« hrt und das Ritornell derselbengeschlossen.’ Koch tellingly observes that ‘Diese lezte Form ist in den neuern Concerten die gewo« hnlichste’. SeeVersuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 3, 335.

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blurred, because C occurs over a standing on V, and the post-cadential progressionabove it, which is a variant of Robert Gjerdingen’s ‘quiescenza’ schema, is consistentlyshaded with tonic and b6 inflections.65 The framing return of A is in turn left caden-tially incomplete and is thereby elided with the solo entry. Field’s most expansiveternary R1, summarized in Table 7, appears in Concerto no. 4. Here, the dominant Btheme is succeeded by a fourteen-bar post-cadential C section. An eleven-bar RTthen ushers in a tonic reprise of A, with which it is however elided, because A entersbefore RT’s bass motion has been completed. This design is varied in Concerto no. 7;as Table 8 explains, C-section rhetoric here informs a multi-part RT (bb. 75^94) thatprepares A’s tonic return. There is, however, a complication, illustrated by the bassdiagram in Ex.1. Field plays both common B-theme minor-mode sonata-form tonalitiesoff against each other, preparing and evading v in TR before establishing III, andonly resolving V/v at the start of the G major nocturne commencing the development.


1 16–28 29–441 44–581 58–673 674–831

Large-scale function:

R1 (Exposition 1)

Inter-thematic function:

Bars: 1–16

A TR B C RT A1 and cadence

Intra-thematic function:

period– extended cadential

1.16–241

statement-response

2.24–8standing on V/V

sentential period

sequence– cadence

standing on V

period–extendedcadential

Tonal plot: I ˜ V/V V ˜ I Structuralcadence:

⇒PAC ⇒HC MC ⇒PAC ⇒PAC ⇒PAC

TABLE 6. Field, Concerto no. 2/i, Ab, Ritornello 1

Bars: 1–231 76–8474–32 1 67–731 732–76 77–84 Large-scale function:

R1 (Exposition 1)


A TR B C RT A1


period–extended cadential

1.23–32 presentation– continuation

2.33–8sequence– half-cadential

3. 39–47 standing on V– fill

period–extended cadential

post-cadential

standing on V

modified consequent

Tonalplot:

I V V/V V ˜ I

Structuralcadence:


65 See Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (NewYork and Oxford, 2007), 181^95.

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Concerto no. 3’s R1 adopts the second strategy identified above. There is no fullreprise of A; instead, as Table 9 shows, R1 closes with a brief four-bar C section,followed by an eight-bar A-based RT preparing the tonic solo entry.Even when Field favours a non-modulating R1, as in concerti nos. 5 and 6, some dis-

tinctive procedures emerge. In Concerto no. 6, R1 TR effects a modulation to iii andan apparent B theme begins in bar 52, which, however, corrects to the tonic via V forthe B theme proper at bar 61, the resulting double caesura resembling sonata theory’s

TABLE 8. Field, Concerto no. 7/i, c, Ritornello 1

Bars: 1–4 5–211 21–55 Large-scale function: R1 (Exposition1) Inter-thematic function:

A TR


introduction period 1.21–371

presentation–continuation

2.37–431

sequence– half-cadential

3.43–521

sequence–cadence

4.523–55fill

Tonal plot: i ˜ V/v V/III Structural cadence: ⇒PAC ⇒HC ⇒HC MC

//

Bars: 56–751 311–5949–57 1 113–26

Large-scale function:

R1 (cont.)


ATRB 1 C


1.56–642

statement– cadence

2.643–751

period(consequent cadence expanded)

1.75–86post-cadential–half-cadential

2.87–94standing on V

period post-cadential

Tonal plot: III ˜ V/i iStructuralcadence:

⇒PAC ⇒HC ⇒PAC

EX. 1. Field, Concerto no. 7/i, bass diagram showing i^III and i^V progressions in R1, S1,and R2

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‘trimodular block’, or segmentation of the exposition by two medial caesurae.66 Moresurprisingly, the soloist then interjects at bar 84 between B’s concluding perfectcadence and C, pre-empting the real solo entry, which commences twenty-seven barslater. A weaker feint towards iii occurs in Concerto no. 5: here, R1 TR ends at bar 58with a mediant half-close caesura, but the modulation is eliminated in the first phraseof theme B, which ultimately cadences in the tonic. The fact that concerti nos. 5 and 6share a tonic suggests an affiliation between key choice and R1 design.

R1/S1 Relationships

A further aspect of Field’s first movements that is both consistent and distinct fromMozart is his preference for shared B-theme and variant A-theme material betweenR1 and S1. In fourteen of Mozart’s piano-concerto first movements, the soloist intro-duces one or more B themes not presented in R1.67 According to Hepokoski andDarcy, Mozart’s most common technique for expanding S1 B ‘is to make use of thetrimodular-block procedure’, through which an additional medial caesura prefacesfresh subordinate ideas, often before R1’s B theme appears.68 New S1 B themes can,however, also simply replace their R1 counterparts, as in the first movement of K.503, where S1 comprises a transitional sujet libre and a new B theme, whereas the recap-itulation follows S1 B1with R1B, now elaborated by the soloist. Mozart’s most substan-tial S1 divergence perhaps occurs in K. 491, where R1 B is displaced in S1 by twonovel B themes. The recapitulation then deploys all of R1’s and S1’s B themes inreverse order: the expositional R1 B^S1 B1^S1 B2 succession is reprised in S3 as S1B2^S1 B1^R1 B.Field, in contrast, never deploys a double medial caesura to articulate S1’s B-group

material and R1 B is always S1 B. At the same time, only Concerto no. 2 betrays anyA-theme correspondence between R1 and S1. The S1 preface is a heavily embellishedvariant of R1A: Field fuses prefatory rhetoric with the function of an S1A-theme pres-entation. Otherwise, his overwhelming preference in S1 A is for a distinct preface,


1 06–3424–12 1 60–71 Large-scale function:

R1 (Exposition 1)


Bars: 1–21

A TR B RT


period– extended cadential

1.21–321

A-based continuation–half-cadential

2.32–6standing on V

3. 36–42 extended fill

expanded hybrid?

1.60–3post-cadential– modulation

2.64–71 A-based cadential

Tonal plot: I ˜ V/V V ˜ V/I Structuralcadence:


66 The trimodular block is theorized in Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 170^7.67 They are nos. 2, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, and 26. No. 27/i contains new material inserted between A

and B1, but this really serves as an expansion of TR, after which the thematic order of R1 is preserved.68 See Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 537. They cite the first movement of K. 453 as typical.

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which leads on to a new cantabile episode.69 This is embryonic in Concerto no. 1/i,shown in Ex. 2. Here, a nine-bar preface (A1, bb. 72^80) precedes a ten-bar cantabileepisode (A2, bb. 81^90) characterized by a notturno accompaniment and increasinglydecorated new material, after which TR follows immediately, delineated by a perfectcadence and a turn to brillant figuration. Concerto no. 3’s solo entry shuns bravuradisplay, but nevertheless departs from R1material; concerti nos. 4, 5, and 7 all employa bravura S1 preface having no material link to R1. Concerto no. 6 varies this patternin two ways: the soloist enters prematurely in R1 B, as noted above; and S1 begins notwith the archetypal bravura preface, but with a piano extension of R1’s closingmaterial in bare octaves. This, however, turns out to be a delaying tactic: the rhetoricof the bravura preface is reserved for bars 136^45, where the preceding solo material isinterrupted by an extrovert gesture having no R1 correspondence.Concerti nos. 2 and 3 share a further distinctive practice: both introduce a caesura

within S1’s A group, or between it and TR, which is more emphatic than thatpreceding B. In Concerto no. 2, the tonic full-close caesura delineating A and TR inbars 108^9 rounds off a post-cadential extension of the perfect cadence attained inbars 103^4. The half-bar general pause that follows leaves S1 A rhetorically isolated;TR begins in bar 110 with a further variant of A. The caesura articulating the start ofB is, in contrast, prolonged by an elaborate seven-bar solo caesura fill, which evolvesout of the display episode rhetoric of TR.

Recapitulatory Truncation

All of Field’s seven concerti tend towards recapitulatory truncation: that is, they reduceexpositional models in the recapitulation to an extent far exceeding Mozartian or Beet-hovenian precedent. Mozart’s recapitulations often conflate elements of R1 and S1;their basic formal-functional succession tends, however, to be left intact, for whichreason it is more appropriate to write of compression in situations where shorteningoccurs. Beethoven’s recapitulations are sometimes more concise, especially in theearlier concerti: in Concerto no. 1, the recapitulation of A and TR together comprisesonly twenty-four bars, as opposed to forty-eight bars in S1; in Concerto no. 2, theequivalent passage occupies twenty-seven bars, contrasting thirty-eight bars in S1; inConcerto no. 3, A and TR occupy fifty-three bars in S1 and thirty-one bars in the re-capitulation. In each case, however, all inter-thematic functions are preserved.Table 10 compares expositional and recapitulatory A-group and TR lengths in

Field’s seven concerti. Concerto no. 1 contains the most extreme truncation: theA-theme reprise is simply omitted and RT proceeds directly to the tonic return of B,which means that S2 spans both development and recapitulation.70 Concerti nos. 3, 4,and 5 exhibit reduced conflations of R1 and S1. In Concerto no. 3, R1A is immediatelysucceeded by S1 A1, which now functions additionally as a brief transition, so that A1and TR shrink from eighty-eight bars in S1 to eighteen in S3. Concerto no. 4’s recapitu-lation begins with R1 TR, after which S1’s preface and cantabile episode lead directlyinto B, without any reference to the S1 TR. Concerto no. 5’s recapitulation similarlystarts with R1TR and this again leads to a return of the S1 preface, which is conflated

69 As Milligan identifies, Field’s S1preface references an initial gesture that became conventional in concerti of thistime. See The Concerto and London’s Musical Culture, 78^82. On Mozart’s solo-entry rhetoric, see Galand, ‘TheLarge-Scale Formal Role’.

70 In Hepokoski and Darcy’s terms, this would constitute a hybrid of the type-5 and type-2 sonatas. On the type-2sonata, see Elements of Sonata Theory, 353^87.

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EX. 2. Field, Concerto no. 1/i, S1 A and TR

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EX. 2. Continued

(continued)

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EX. 2. Continued

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with a brief TR preparing B in a span of just twenty-four bars. Concerto no. 6 is moreradical, omitting B completely and moving from the reprise of S1 A1 and TR to C1 intwenty-nine bars (compare this with the leisurely 112 bars required to get to B in S1).Concerti nos. 2 and 7 display comparable A-theme truncation strategies. Ex. 3 shows

the A-group recapitulation in Concerto no. 2 and explains its derivation from R1and S1. Field splices together the modified antecedent of R1 A and the consequentof S1 A, and then halts the cantabile episode prematurely on V. The entire transition(32 bars) is then jettisoned and B commences obliquely in E major (enharmonic bVI).The truncation in Concerto no. 7 is more abrupt, even if the tonal relation of A and Bis more conventional. R1 A is recapitulated as R3 from bar 470, after which S1’sentire A group and TR (71 bars) are replaced by a four-bar TR leading straight intoB, now transposed into the tonic major at bar 489.

CONTEXT AND INFLUENCE: TWO STUDIES

The extent to which these practices are typical becomes clear when we survey firstmovements from Dussek to Schumann. In lieu of more detailed consideration, I tracesuggestive parallels in two areas: a contextualization of Field’s R1 designs within ageneral overview of the repertory; a study of one tangible instance of intertextualityin Field’s Concerto no. 7 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto Op. 54.

The Modulating R1 in Context

As might be expected for works composed against the background of an apprenticeshipin London in the 1790s, Field’s R1 designs owe much to those of his London-schoolcontemporaries. Table 11 summarizes R1 in the first movement of Dussek’s Op. 14,completed in 1791. Correspondences with Field’s practice are manifold. Dussek alsowrites a modulating R1, employing the ternary design favoured in Field’s concerti nos.1, 2, 4, and 7. Like that of Field’s Concerto no. 1, Dussek’s A theme comprises a senten-tial period, followed by a transition segmenting into a sequential modulation anda standing on V rounded off with a half-close dominant medial caesura in V. Like

TABLE 10. Comparison of S1 and recapitulation A-group and TR length in the seven Field concerti

Work Length ofR1A andTR in bars

Length ofS1 A andTR in bars

Length of recapitulationA and TR in bars

Concerto no. 1/i 34 32 0 (A omitted: RT leads into B)Concerto no. 2/i 47 57 17Concerto no. 3/i 42 88 18Concerto no. 4/i 28 43 27Concerto no. 5/i 66 63 44 (A omitted; recapitulation

begins with R1TR; solo A andTR occupy 24 bars)

Concerto no. 6/i 60 112 29 (recapitulation of B omitted)Concerto no. 7/i 55 71 20

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EX. 3. Field, Concerto no. 2/i, recapitulation of A,TR, and B

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EX. 3. Continued

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Field’s Concerto no. 4, Dussek’s R1 separates B and A1by means of a fully worked out Cand an RT returning to the tonic.The modulating R1 remains widespread in the first half of the nineteenth century

and persists in later repertory (Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 2 supplies a well-knowninstance). Dussek retained it for his final Concerto, Op. 70 of 1810, the R1 of whichcontains a sentential presentation of B in V (bb. 59^69), an eight-bar dominant C, anda four-bar RT, after which A is restated in I at bar 82 and a tonic C section ensuesfrom bar 93. The practice was adopted by Moscheles, who applied it with particularconcision in his Concerto no. 1 of 1818. He composes a twelve-bar R1 A, consisting ofa statement, response, and reiterated cadence. A four-bar TR follows, concluding inbars 15^16 with a rapidly engineered perfect cadence in V, preparing a sentential B,which is cadentially closed in bars 27^8. The A theme is then reprised verbatim frombar 33 via a five-bar retransitional standing on V/I and R1 concludes with a C sectiondesigned as an eleven-bar post-cadential extension of A’s perfect cadence.Modulating ternary R1s are also common in minor-key movements. A variant of the

design adopted in Field’s Concerto no. 7 is found in the first movement of DanielSteibelt’s Concerto no. 7 in E minor, published in 1816 and summarized in Table 12.71

Steibelt, like Field, distinguishes his abbreviated A1 from the following C by anemphatic perfect cadence.The subsumption of the non-tonic C into RT also anticipatesField: B has no C of its own; rather, RT begins life as a potential B-theme continuation,which shuns a perfect cadence in favour of motion towards V/i.Adopting a broader view, Table 13 appraises the distribution of modulating and

non-modulating R1designs in sixty first movements from the period 1787^1850, encom-passing not only concerti in the London sphere but also Parisian works such as Herz’sfirst four concerti, cognate repertory including Chopin’s Opp. 11 and 21, and centralEuropean examples by Hummel and Weber.72 The majority of composers prefer the

TABLE 11. Dussek, Concerto Op. 14/i, F, Ritornello 1

Bars: 1–23 24–37 38–461 46–681 68–72 73–891 89–102Large-scale function:

R1


A TR B C RT A1 C1


sentential period

1.24–33 standing on I–model-sequence-fragmentation

2.34–7 standing on V

period post-cadential– digression to ii–cadential

standing on V

period–expanded cadential

post-cadential

Tonal plot: I ˜ V/V V ˜ I Structuralcadence:

⇒PAC ⇒HC MC ⇒PAC ⇒PAC ⇒PAC

71 It is worth noting that Steibelt’s first theme bears a similarity to that of the first movement of Chopin’s Op. 11that surely transcends coincidence.

72 An extensive analytical survey of formal characteristics in this repertory is supplied in Lindeman, StructuralNovelty and Tradition, Appendix. Lindeman provides tabular analyses of first movements by Beethoven, Bennett,Boie« ldieu, Burgmu« ller, Chopin, Cramer, Czerny, Dussek, Field, Hummel, Moscheles, Mozart, Ries, Steibelt, andWeber, drawing on the terminology developed in Jan LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis (NewYork, 1970).

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TABL

E12.Steibelt,Concertono.7/i,e,Ritornello1

611–796–09

98–160 6– 42

32 –1: sra

B Lar

ge-s

cale

fu

nct

ion

:R

1 (e

xpos

itio

n 1

)

Inte

r-th

emat

ic

fun

ctio

n:

AT

RB

⇒R

TA

1C

Intr

a-th

emat

ic

fun

ctio

n:

smal

l ter

nar

y?1. 24

–31

stat

emen

t-re

spon

se

2. 32–9

mod

el-

sequ

ence

3. 40–7

in

term

edia

te

them

e

4. 48–6

0

stan

din

g on

V

1. 61–8

peri

od

2. 69–8

1di

ssol

vin

g re

stat

emen

t

3.

82–9

st

andi

ng

on V

repr

ise

only

po

st-

cade

nti

al

Ton

al p

lot:

i ˜

III

V/I

IIII

I˜

V/i

i

Stru

ctur

alca

denc

e:

⇒PA

C⇒

IAC

⇒

HC

M

C

HC

⇒

HC

⇒

PAC

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modulating R1: forty-four movements contain a non-tonic R1 B. Two composers makemore or less equal use of both models: Dussek writes seven modulating and eightmonotonal ritornelli; Chopin employs one of each (Op. 21 modulates, Op. 11 does not,although the latter is of course distinguished by its tonic-major B and C in S1).Some composers overwhelmingly prefer the modulating R1. Herz and Steibelt alwaysuse it in concerti having a recognizable R1; Cramer writes a non-modulating R1 onlyonce, as does Hummel, despite his pedagogical debt to Mozart, and also Beethoven,whose only unequivocally monotonal R1 is that of Op. 73. Moreover, when acomposer does not adopt this strategy, it is not always because he favours a monotonalR1. Kalkbrenner’s Concerto no. 4, for instance, replaces the full R1with a brief orches-tral prelude, to which the distinction is not applicable. OnlyWeber adheres consistentlyto the monotonal model, perhaps reflecting an allegiance to Mozartian precedent.

Intertextuality: Field’s Concerto no. 7 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Op. 54

Consistencies of design are not only apparent in this repertory at a general level offormal-functional convention, but also in more localized processes of creative reception.One salient instance is revealed by comparing the first movements of Field’s Concertono. 7 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Op. 54.73 Both movements initiate their devel-opment sections with a self-contained nocturne episode; the start of each is displayedin Ex. 4. The material and formal similarities here are reinforced by documentaryevidence. In an 1836 article for the Neue Zeitschrift fu« r Musik, Schumann voiced his ad-miration for Field’s Concerto, professing that ‘I can think of hardly anything sensibleto say . . . except unending praise’ and continuing, ‘I shall happily let [Field] bind myeyes and hands, if only to express my total surrender, and my willingness to follow

TABLE 13. Distribution of modulating and non-modulating R1 designs in sixty first movements by elevencomposers written between 1787 (Dussek, Op. 15) and 1843 (Herz no. 4)

Composer Non-modulating R1 Modulating R1

Dussek 7 6Cramer 1 8Steibelt ç 7 (no. 4 not available)Beethoven 1 4Field 2 5Hummel 1 4Moscheles 1 4 (no. 5 not available; no. 6 has no ritornello)Kalkbrenner ç 2 (no. 3 not available; no. 4 has a brief orchestral

prelude rather than a full R1)Herz ç 3 (no. 2 not available; nos. 5^8 composed after 1850)Weber 2 çChopin 1 1TOTAL: 16 44

73 Schumann’s first movement of course began life as the single-movement Phantasie of 1841 and was enlarged intothe full Concerto in 1845. On the Phantasie, see Macdonald, ‘‘‘Mit einer eigener au�erordentlichen Composition’’’.

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EX. 4. End of tutti and start of nocture episodes in (a) Field, Concerto no. 7/i, and (b)Schumann, Op. 54/i

(a)

(continued)

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EX. 4. Continued

(b)

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him blindly’.74 Significantly, Schumann singled out for special comment ‘a moonlightnocturne ‘‘woven of rosedust and lily-snow’’’ in the first movement, ‘which remindedme of old Zelter and how, in a certain passage in The Creation he found the moonriseand, ironically rubbing his hands in the time-honoured gesture, exclaimed blissfully:‘‘This fellow will make a name for himself!’’’.75

Neither the Field nor the Schumann literature has duly considered this relationship.Engel and Piggott both acknowledge Schumann’s enthusiasm: Piggott notes the corres-pondence with Op. 54;76 Engel does not, and unfortunately misidentifies the key ofField’s Concerto as E minor.77 Lindeman also links Schumann’s positive receptionof Field’s Concerto with the first movement of Op. 54, without addressing Schumann’scritical identification of the nocturne or tracing the modelling of the one on theother; and following Piggott, he distinguishes Field’s nocturne from Schumann’son the grounds that the former is ‘completely unrelated to the primary theme’.78

Langley only goes so far as to observe that Schumann’s ‘many eulogistic reviews ofField’s music suggest a thorough knowledge of it, particularly of Concerto no. 7, theautograph full score of which he studied: hence the slower interlude in the firstmovement, the intermezzo style for a central movement . . . and the waltz-rhythmfinale, which his own piano concerto shares’.79 Macdonald cites Schumann’s article asevidence of a shared interest in the developmental nocturne episode, but does notcompare the two first movements extensively, stressing instead Schumann’s debt toField’s Finale.80

This neglect is unfortunate, because Field’s precedent is crucial to an understandingboth of the formal strategy of Schumann’s first movement and its broader obligationto the virtuoso concerto. The precise analogy between the two nocturnes’ formal loca-tions is meaningful not only because it signals the former as a precursor of the latter,but also because, as Macdonald observes, both movements access and expand a prefer-ence for the nocturne-like development ‘pre-core’ (to adopt Caplin’s term), whichoriginated with Dussek and subsequently acquired the status of a convention.81 Theyalso substantially increase the episode’s formal independence. Field’s nocturne, whichwas subsequently published separately as the Nocturne no. 12, turns out to be adislodged slow movement and as such establishes a limited strategy of double function-ality: the Concerto is a three-movement cycle, which resembles a two-movement cycle

74 ‘Denn bin ich ganz voll von ihm und wei� wenig vernu« nftiges daru« ber zu sagen als unendliches Lob. . . .Und ichwill mir von jenem Ku« nstler gerne Augen und Ha« nde binden lassen und damit nichts ausdru« cken, als da� er michganz gefangen und da� ich ihm blind folge.’ See Neue Zeitschrift fu« r Musik, 4 (1836), 122, trans. as ‘John Field: PianoConcerto no. 7 (1836)’ in Schumann on Music, 106; translation modified.

75 ‘in der Mitte ein Mondschein-Notturno ‘‘aus Rosendust und Lilienschnee gewoben’’, bei dem mir der alte Zeltereinfiel, der in einer Stelle der ‘‘Scho« pfung’’ den Aufgang des Mondes sah und dabei stereotypisch sich in die Ha« ndereibend selig sagte ‘‘der kommt ’mal auf die Stru« mpfe’’.’ See ibid. Schumann here misquotes Wieland’s poem‘Oberon’: the original reads ‘aus Rosengluth und Lilienschnee gewoben’. I am grateful to Nicole Grimes for pointingout this derivation.

76 Piggott,The Life and Music of John Field, 179.77 Hans Engel, Das Instrumentalkonzert, ii. 9.78 See Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition, 32^3.79 See Langley, ‘Field, John’, 782.80 See Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto, 100^4.81 Schumann acknowledged this practice in his review of E. Hermann Schornstein’s Concerto in Fminor, Op.1; see

‘Pianoforte: Concerte’, Neue Zeitschrift fu« r Musik, 4 (1837), 71 and also Macdonald, Robert Schumann and the PianoConcerto, 93. The division of the development into pre-core, core, and retransition is addressed in Caplin, ClassicalForm, 141^59, drawing on Erwin Ratz, Einfu« hrung in die musikalische Formenlehre: U« ber Formprinzipien in den Inventionen J.S. Bachs und ihre Bedeutung fu« r die Kompositionstechnik Beethovens (Vienna, 1973), 33.

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because the second movement is interpolated within the first.82 Schumann’s invocationof the same idea loses some of its impact in Op. 54, which of course also includes anintermezzo second movement, but is keenly felt in the first movement’s original incar-nation as the single-movement Phantasie of 1841.83 Together, Field and Schumannfurnish early examples of two of Hepokoski’s Formenlehre deformations: the ‘episodewithin development space’ and the ‘four movements within a single movement’paradigm.84 In both cases, the ambiguity of form and cycle capitalizes on the impliedgeneric self-sufficiency of an imported piano miniature: the nocturne, having beenabsorbed into concerto first-movement form, is then allowed to regain something ofits independence.At the same time, pace Piggott and Lindeman, both nocturnes are formally

integrated by thematic means. As Ex. 5 explains and as numerous commentators have

EX. 5. Schumann, Op. 54/i, derivation of nocturne from A theme

82 Macdonald surveys contemporary perceptions of this conflation, including that of Franz Liszt, in Robert Schumannand the Piano Concerto, 103.

83 Schumann himself noted ‘a lack of smaller concert pieces in which the virtuoso can exploit theAllegro-Adagio-Rondo sequence in a single movement’, elaborating this idea as ‘a type of one-movement compositionin moderate tempo in which an introductory or preparatory part would take the place of a first allegro, the cantabilesection that of the adagio and a brilliant conclusion that of the rondo’; see ‘Ignaz Moscheles: Piano Concertos Nos. 5and 6 (1836)’, in Schumann onMusic,107^9 at 106, and also Macdonald, ‘‘‘Mit einer eigener au�erordentlichen Compos-ition’’’, 252^3.

84 See Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony no. 5, 6^7. The term ‘double-function form’ was first coined by William S.Newman inThe Sonata since Beethoven (Chapel Hill, NC,1969),134. For a penetrating critique of this idea and a substan-tial alternative theoretical model, see Steven Vande Moortele, Two-Dimensional Sonata Form: Form and Cycle inSingle-Movement InstrumentalWorks by Liszt, Strauss, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky (Leuven, 2009).

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observed, Schumann’s nocturne theme is a truncated variant of his A theme; Schumannadapts A’s basic idea as an antecedent phrase in its own right, the transposed repetitionof which, beginning at bar 160, produces an antecedent^consequent presentation.85

The sequential continuation in bars 164^70 is constructed from variants of A’s initial3�1 descent, marked ‘x’ in Ex. 5. Bars 171^8 introduce new material against a bassderived in part from this continuation, and it is recalled again in the cadential phrasein bars 179^84.Field engineers a similar, if admittedly freer derivation, clarified in Ex. 6. His

nocturne also begins with a period, the antecedent of which preserves his first theme’s3�1 descent (here identified as ‘y’) in its basic idea, albeit without its characteristicsuspension of 3 over V; the start of the consequent then naturally preserves ‘y’ in anelaborated form. The rest of the nocturne is more rhapsodic, but the distribution ofmotivic variants, appraised in Ex. 7, still broadly anticipates Schumann: bars 311^15

EX. 6. Field, Concerto no. 7/i, derivation of nocturne from A theme

85 See e.g. Tovey, ‘Schumann: Pianoforte Concerto in A minor, Op. 54’, in Essays in Musical Analysis, iii. 182^4;Macdonald, ‘‘‘Mit einer eigener au�erordentlichen Composition’’’, 249^51, and Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto,229^32.

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EX. 7. Field, Concerto no. 7/i, treatment of motif ‘y’ in nocturne episode

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EX. 7. Continued

(continued)

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EX. 7. Continued

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comprise a modulating continuation making free use of ‘y’and its embellished variants;‘y’ is more heavily disguised, but nonetheless present, in bars 314^19; and the compo-nent marked ‘y1’ in Ex. 6 is reanimated as the structural cadence in bars 324^5. Thesimilarity of the two A themes is noteworthy in itself: the crucial Hauptmotiv is inboth cases a 3�1 line, embellished with 6^5 and 7^6 suspensions by Field and with ai6^3 anticipation by Schumann.Table 14 reveals that Schumann’s modelling is not only a matter of formal position-

ing and thematic derivation; it also embraces phrase-structural organization, as ifSchumann took Field’s nocturne as a functional template. Both nocturnes commencewith an antecedent^consequent presentation (‘part 1’ in Table 14), followed by atwo-part continuation (‘part 2’), comprising fresh material in Field’s case and afurther variant of the A theme for Schumann.The similarities of material and tessiturabetween the respective third parts are especially striking: both supply the melodicapex of the nocturne, elaborating a 5�3 descent (standing on V/V in Field and IV/bIin Schumann) before proceeding towards a cadence. The end of Schumann’s nocturneis more compressed than Field’s: Field closes with an expanded cadence spun out of aloose variant of ‘y’ and a coda; Schumann provides no coda, instead eliding a cadentialphrase based on part 2 with the ensuing allegro.Once these correspondences are acknowledged, suggestive affinities emerge else-

where in the movements. There are, for example, similarities in the first part of the de-velopment core, which in both cases sequences a piano flourish derived from the expos-ition: Field returns to his solo preface; Schumann to his movement’s exordium. Afurther parallel arises between the two retransitions, both of which elaborate adominant pedal with a descending chromatic sequence, terminating with a resolutiononto i at the start of the recapitulation and a tutti presentation of A.

CONCLUSIONS: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES OF CONCERTO FIRST-MOVEMENT FORM

The evidence collected here, although hardly comprehensive, is sufficient to exposeprevailing, lazily critical attitudes to Field’s first-movement forms as inadequate to thetask of explaining either their formal processes or historical significance. Adoptinga species of historical relativism, we might instead regard Field as the victim of an

TABLE 14. Comparison of nocturne episodes in Field, Concerto no. 7/i and Schumann, Concerto Op. 54/i

FIELD

Bars: 304–7 308–11 311–12 312–15 315–17 317–19 319–25 325–7 Intra-thematic function 1:

part 1 presentation

part 2 continuation

part 3 standing on V

part 4 cadential– post-cadential

Intra-thematic function 2:

antecedent consequent phrase 1 phrase 2 phrase 1 phrase 2 cadential coda

SCHUMANN

Bars: 156–9 160–3 164–7 168–70 171–4 175–8 179–84 Intra-thematic function 1:

part 1 presentation

part 2 continuation 1

part 3 continuation 2

part 4 cadential

Intra-thematic function 2:

antecedent consequent phrase 1 phrase 2 phrase 1 phrase 2 cadential (part-2 variant)

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epistemic shift, underscored by the sheer contrast between Schumann’s prolix andpresent indifference, which imposed aesthetic priorities that were alien to Field’s com-positional mentality. This has been defined by Dahlhaus as a transition from ‘theprimacy of virtuosity’ to ‘the principle of interpretation’ founded on ‘musical logic’, aprogression recently appraised with some regret by Dana Gooley, who notes thatcritics hostile towards virtuosity imposed ‘symphonic values . . . on a public that was ini-tially gravitating towards music of virtuoso character’.86 And although Schumannwas instrumental in this critique, his enthusiasm for Field betrays a lingering trace ofthe older aesthetic, on the cusp of which we must situate his critical response. In thisrespect, Field’s fall from grace reflects the demise not simply of a corpus of works, butof an entire ‘mode of cognition’, as Dahlhaus puts it, which any revisionist agendamust ultimately seek to reconstruct.I would, however, hesitate to embrace the ‘strong’ historicism that is the natural the-

oretical correlate of this argument: the assertion, recently elaborated with particulardexterity in Gjerdingen’s study of the Galant style, that past repertories are bestanalysed in terms of contemporaneous theory or pedagogy.87 It is not at all clear, for in-stance, that the rough contemporaneity of Koch’s model of concerto first-movementform and examples by Dussek, Field, and others of itself guarantees the analyticalefficacy of the former in dealing with the latter, unless we believe in some kind of en-compassing Zeitgeist that they all reflect, a Hegelian notion to which no card-carryinghistoricist would subscribe. Moreover, to reject theoretical anachronism is not to peelback the subsequent accretion of perspectives, but rather to accrue an ethic of recon-struction, which is itself essentially anachronistic. The idea that the past supplies itsown analytical ‘best practice’ would after all be unintelligible to eighteenth-centurycomposers, insomuch as they would have recognized the analysis of old music as mean-ingful at all. Strong historicism also betrays a uniquely postmodern suspicion of thepresent’s right of response, as if the development of novel theoretical attitudessomehow violates music’s historically enshrined essence. But we can surely honourhistorical particularity without concomitantly banishing the theoretical creativity,which, as Borges beautifully describes it, constitutes ‘the normal respiration of theintelligence’.88

Instead, I advocate the mediation of critical relativism with a kind of empiricism,which holds presentist theories responsible to the distribution and likely interrelationof forms in their historical contexts and dissolves general paradigms intocontext-specific models, paying attention to localized empirical data and analyticallytangible lines of dissemination. We need not, with Gjerdingen, dismantle entirely theconcept of form; and we may perfectly well adapt modern theories, in situationswhere they do not conflict and represent adequately the nature of practice. Suchtheories become problematic when they are considered normative beyond the historic-ally bounded sample repertory on which they are evidentially dependent.

86 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 137^8, and Gooley, ‘The Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity’, 104. Inaddition to Schumann, Gooley concentrates on the writings of Wilhelm Triest, G. W. Fink, Eduard Kru« ger, AugustKahlert, Carl Gollmick, Heinrich Hirschbach, and Ludwig Granzin. Jim Samson has similarly identified the early19th-c. replacement of ‘‘‘the perfect musical performance’’ with ‘‘the perfect performance of music’’’; see Virtuosityand the MusicalWork, 134.

87 Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style. The historicist attitude has been interestingly critiqued by Peter Schubert;see ‘Authentic Analysis’, Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), 3^18.

88 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, in Ficciones, trans. Anthony Bonner (New York,1962), quoted in Schubert, ‘Authentic Analysis’, 5.

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In these terms, the development of first-movement form in the early nineteenth-century piano concerto is construed as a complex web of transmission, on which theconcerti of Mozart have a relatively limited impact before 1820; at best, we have toregard their reception as one geographically and chronologically variable threadamong manifold, interacting parallel histories, each of which requires its own theoretic-al framework. We can sketch such a framework for Field’s concerti by drawingtogether first-movement characteristics of the London concerto from Dussek throughCramer and Steibelt to Moscheles and Bennett. At the level of large-scale function, itcomprises the seven-part R^S succession R1^S1^R2^S2^R3^S3^R4, overlaid onto asonata form with double exposition (R1 and S1). Both expositions modulate for theirsubordinate theme, although in R1 this modulation is cancelled before the soloistenters. The interaction of these two large-scale levels becomes less consistent in theform’s later stages. How we locate the start of the development depends upon the char-acter of R2: if R2 is entirely post-cadential within the closing key of S1, then the devel-opment begins with S2; if R2 modulates immediately and without substantialpost-cadential reinforcement of S1’s closing key, then R2 initiates the development;and if R2 divides into post-cadential and transitional segments, then the developmentproperly begins where the R2 post-cadential material ends. Similarly, therecapitulation is sometimes initiated by R3, and sometimes by S3, in which case R3has a retransitional function. Occasionally (as in Field’s Concerto no. 3), R3 straddlesthe retransition and A-theme reprise. The recapitulation is sometimes truncated,either by significant shortening of A and TR, or by the omission of an inter-thematicfunction. Invariably, R4 is entirely post-cadential and closes the movement withoutthe intervention of a cadenza.89

At the inter-thematic level, distinctive expositional features include R1/S1 A diver-gence and B correspondence, and the ternary R1 and bipartite S1 solo-entry designsconsidered above, as well as an increased proclivity for hybrid or compoundformal-functional types in both A and B themes, allied to a propensity for singularrather than multi-part B groups (in other words, B themes expand rather than prolifer-ate). Two development schemes become standardized: a three-part pre-core^core^retransition model, in which the pre-core is a cantabile episode, the core is a displayepisode, and the retransition is either a display episode or else R3; a five-part variant,in which the core consists of two display episodes framing a B-theme episode. Ingeneral, the London-school affiliation of topic and inter-thematic function is morerigid than in Mozart’s concerti: the bipartite S1 A almost always reflects bravura andcantabile topical attitudes successively; solo transitions, closing sections and the devel-opment core are usually brillant display episodes. Correspondence with Viennese prece-dent is clearer in the form’s tonal and harmonic properties, chiefly the structuralprimacy of I^V and i^III contrasts, which persist amid functional, topical, and

89 Pace Botstein’s assertion that ‘a crucial feature of practically all nineteenth-century concertos was the cadenza,usually placed immediately before the close of the first movement, after the orchestra pauses on a dominant or a 6^4’; see Botstein, ‘The 19th Century’, 255. Composers generally dispensed with the cadenza, or else modified itscontext and function. Field employed it once, in Concerto no. 5, where it appears briefly in the middle of the recapitu-lation C section. Otherwise, the cadenza was abandoned by Dussek in 1791 and his example was followed byCramer, Steibelt, Hummel, Czerny, Ries, Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Herz, Weber, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Bennett,Alkan, Hiller, Henselt, and others. In this respect, Beethoven’s expansion of the cadenza in its Mozartian location inconcerti nos. 1^4 is historically anomalous; his contraction of it in the ‘Emperor’ in fact brought him belatedly instep with contemporary trends. Tovey’s comment that Beethoven had here ‘for the first time, forbidden extemporisa-tion’ is thus entirely misleading. See Tovey, ‘Beethoven: Pianoforte Concerto in Eb, Op. 58’, in Essays in MusicalAnalysis, iii. 86.

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rhetorical innovations, and the cadential articulation of functional divisions, which ifanything becomes less flexible than Mozart’s practice and consistently reinforces themusic’s topical discourse.Intersections of this paradigm with those developed for coeval histories afford the

opportunity to make broader theoretical assertions and trace patterns of reception.Schumann’s response to Field is a significant example; Sterndale Bennett’s marriageof the London model with Mozartian and Mendelssohnian influences constitutesanother fruitful line of enquiry. Yet such points of contact will not be visible at all ifwe cleave to the habit of inductively inferring normative models from prestigious butisolated Mozartian cases, before deductively assessing the repertory in general aseither confirming or ‘deforming’ those models.Attempts to temper what Alexander Ringer has called ‘the nationalistic fallacy’

behind Austrocentric notions of late classicism are hardly novel.90 Reorientationstowards London have been periodically proffered, most substantially by AnselmGerhard, who proposes a wholesale English reformulation of the concept of musicalclassicism, taking Clementi’s piano sonatas as core repertory.91 This revisionism has,however, had little impact on the mainstream of formal theory, which at least in itstransatlantic variant continues to erect generalized conceptual frameworks derived pre-dominantly from the focal repertory of the nineteenth-century pedagogical canon.But if the postmodern suspicion of historical master narratives is to be taken at all ser-iously (and few today would argue for a vulgar-modernist notion of musical progress),then we need to absorb thoroughly its implications for theory. In this sense, an Anglo-centric model of classicism, while provocative, fails to address the essential problem,which is the very notion of a centre itself: there is no ‘true concerto’, as Tovey puts it.We require, in other words, not only a de-centred concept of history, but also ade-centred theory of form, which allows localized repertories to dictate their ownframes of reference and maps relations between them as instances of intertextuality.92

In such circumstances, Field’s piano concerti may at last be allowed, theoretically, tospeak for themselves.

ABSTRACT

Despite the prominent status John Field’s seven piano concerti enjoyed during hislifetime, lingering complaints of formal incompetence have combined with thecritique of virtuosity and collusion between Formenlehre and Austrocentric conceptionsof canon to guarantee their subsequent marginality. This essay re-evaluates theseworks as a platform for critiquing recent trends in Formenlehre. It contrasts the develop-ment of the theory of concerto first-movement form out of the reception of Mozart’s

90 Alexander Ringer, ‘Beethoven and the London Pianoforte School’, Musical Quarterly, 56 (1970), 742^58 at 743.91 See Eric Blom, Classics: Major and Minor (London, 1958), 88^117; Anselm Gerhard, London und der Klassizismus in

der Musik: Die Idee der ‘absoluten’ Musik und Muzio Clementis Klavierwerk (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2002); and also thereview of Gerhard by Michael Spitzer, Eighteenth-Century Music, 3 (2006), 330^6.

92 Perceptive responses to the disciplinary and institutional implications of these issues are offered in KevinKorsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence and Dialogue’, in Cook and Everist (eds.), RethinkingMusic, 55^72, and Decentering Music (NewYork and Oxford, 2003).

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piano concerti with the localized influence Mozart exerted over the genre’s develop-ment in the early nineteenth century. Situating designs in Field’s concerti that divergefrom Mozartian norms within a practice evolving in London in the last decade of theeighteenth century, I call for a more historically nuanced formal theory, arguing thatour persisting habit of theorizing concerto first-movement form in relation to adominant Mozartian archetype misrepresents a large proportion of the subsequentrepertory.

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