I have meant to get around to discussing Heinrich Albert's Sonata No. 1 in E minor for a while now. I noticed that back when I posted a link to a performance with score earlier at this blog that the score had some quirks. There were repeat signs interpolated into the exposition that gave an inaccurate impression of the structure of the piece. So I wanted to come back to this sonata again not just to provide a more detailed analysis (if not a sprawling discussion), but also because, since I have the score on me somewhere, to highlight a performance that observes the structural repeats in the published score that weren't observed in the video I linked to last time I mentioned this sonata.
So, here we go.
EXPOSITION
Exposition play-through 1
Theme 1 00:01-00:32 (E minor)
Theme 2 00:33-01:07 (E major)
Exposition play-through 2
Theme 1 01:08-01:33 (E minor)
Theme 2 01:34-02:08 (E major)
DEVELOPMENT
02:09-02:22 Theme 2 derived
02:22-02:26 Theme 1 derived (from secondary phrase)
02:27-02:40 Theme 2 derived
03:01-03:21 Theme 1 derived
Now there's a lot more I could say than just what I telegraphed in the above material. This is a sonata form that has an exposition, even a repeating exposition, but I think you could make a case that there are no transitions because in a "textbook" sonata form your transitions are supposed to get you from one key to another key but what if all you do is move from E minor to E major as happens here? Albert has a lovely transitional-function passage that starts about 0:25 and if you have the score handy it's the B minor 7th chord with a rising melodic D-E-F natural line in the bass strings that is answer by imitation in the following measure in the treble strings as the bass line goes down via F-E-D. In the next two measures we get B7 where the lower line becomes D#, E, F# and is given an antiphonal response in the trebles that has D#, E, and F# lead to the start of Theme 2 in E major with G#.
Heinrich Albert (1875 to 1950) published this Sonata in E minor in 1924. It's still under copyright, folks, at least for a few more years. This is as Romantic as Romantic style guitar sonatas get but in a good way. I tend to be anti-Romantic in my convictions with respect to the ideologies of Romanticism and especially Wagnerian art-religion but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate Chopin or tiny bits of Lizst or Brahms or even some Debussy. I'm more into 16th through 18th century music and 20th century onward, though. Yet Scott Joplin, firmly in the 19th century even if he died in 1917, has been one of my musical heroes. Now here we have this Heinrich Albert Guitar Sonata and I present to you that it would be easy to rag this classic. I don't mean that it would be easy to play! No! No, I mean it would be relative easy to rag the rhythms in the themes for this sonata. Where ever you hear or see straight quarter notes you could have eighth note, quarter note, quarter note, quarter note, eighth note. It's almost as simple as that. Albert's Sonata would lend itself beautifully to a ragged up version once it becomes public domain. Ragging the classics is something I've looked at in the past as part of a larger project.
Now I alluded to how this sonata has a repeating exposition and two themes that are in E minor and E major. What this sonata does not have is a recapitulation. Instead we get a development that shows Albert playing with a C major derivation of Theme 2 before getting around to a quasi reprise of Theme 1 material but with development. There's no recapitulation of Theme 1 followed by Theme 2. If in the Charles Rosen taxonomy of sonata forms a recapitulation happens when the Theme 2 or secondary key materials are brought back in the tonic key there's no need for that. Why would Albert "need" to bring back Theme 2 in the tonic key when it was presented in the tonic key twice in the exposition? Clearly he didn't think there was any need to have a recapitulation.
Now in Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory not having a recapitulation all by itself would count as a major deformation (non-pejorative term if you understand their usage). Having no transitions between Themes 1 and 2 is something of a first-order option in slow sonata movements but this is fairly fast. But far and away the biggest deviation from "textbook" sonata form or what Hepokoski and Darcy have called the "Type 3" sonata form is that Theme 2 is in the same tonal center as Theme 1.
I've thought about writing about the second movement of Albert's Sonata but for the time being I'll wrap up discussing the opening sonata form. Yes, it's a sonata form, despite the fact that there's no modulation to a contrasting key; there's arguably no modulating transitions as a result of there being no key change, even if Theme 1 and Theme 2 are just as arguably full of transitions by way of cascading half-cadences that lead to new musical moments; and there's no recapitulation once Themes 2 and 1 get their developmental moments in reverse order. In terms of thematic/gestural juxtaposition Albert's repeating exposition gives us a Theme 1, Theme 2, Theme 1, Theme 2--Theme 2 and Theme 1 pattern of presentation and development with an abrupt stop.
Years ago I went on a tour of sonata forms composed by early 19th century guitarist composers such as Diabelli, Molitor, Matiegka, Giuliani and Sor and showed how they could often compose "Type 2" sonatas rather than the "textbook" sonatas you may likely have been told about in a theory class. The aforementioned guitarist composers did work in the first quarter of the 19th century before a number of ideas about what a sonata form was expected to be had been theoretically codified. So you might easily find Diabelli writing a guitar sonata in F major that had a three-themed exposition from which Theme 1 was omitted in the recapitulation. Molitor would do something similar in his Op. 7 sonata. Sor could write a little sonata form in C major in which he'd bring back Theme 1 in a recapitulation only by way of being an accompaniment gesture to the recapitulated Theme 2. Sor might also slice out large chunks of material in a recapitulation. I floated some ideas, such as the prevalence of a Type 2 sonata is likely to happen when Theme 1 is repeated a lot and is relatively short compared to later themes presented in an exposition.
Why mention all of that? Well, I'd say that Albert liked his themes and liked them enough to play his exposition through twice but he was also smart enough to realize that a fully realized recapitulation would bore the listener. Why play Theme 1 up to four times in a row with only a few changes to it in a prescribed development section? If he developed Theme 2 into material in C major why bring it back in E major just to have a "textbook" recapitulation? Theme 2 was already in E major and, as we have discussed earlier, on the basis of a Charles-Rosen-prescribed rationale for what a recapitulation was "supposed" to do such a recap would be superfluous. By contrast, showing that there were unrealized possibilities for developing Theme 2 had not yet been presented. The return of Theme 1 materials functions not as a recapitulation of any kind but as a coda. Now I do enjoy me a few sonata forms that have conventional recapitulations but Heinrich Albert's Sonata in E minor is a notable example of a sonata form that has few of the signature structural elements that music theory students would often have been taught are supposed to be in a sonata form.
That can alternately be a reason guitarists have an idea that the music for our instrument is inferior to the traditions of piano literature but I prefer to follow the late Matanya Ophee's advice to fellow guitarists that we not go about having an inferiority complex about our instrument and its musical heritage. What I think we guitarists can do is draw upon the many sonata forms written on and for our instrument that are not quite orthodox "textbook" sonatas as a way to remind ourselves that our body of music, even among the 19th century guitar sonatas, reveals that things had not been so codified yet and, as Leo Brouwer has put it, that for guitarists the boundaries between "pop" and "art" music have for generations been far more permeable than they tended to be in other academic music traditions. I say we guitarists should take that up and run with it as best we can. Pianists may be content with some rigid schematic of highbrow vs. lowbrow but we guitarists don't have to be beholden to those conceptions of musical history. Becoming more intimately acquainted with the full range of musical possibilities realized for our instrument, however "not textbook" they sometimes prove to be, can help us chart musical paths forward where the boundaries between "art" and "pop" music can be seen as being as fluid and flexible for the instrument as they have so often been.
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