Abstract:
This study investigates the use of a small-scale musical pattern, known as the Fonte, in the work of early nineteenth-century composers. This pattern, or schema, comprises a two-stage descending sequence, which can frequently be found in minuets and similarly structured movements throughout the eighteenth century. My work demonstrates that this schema remained in wide circulation in the first few decades of the 1800s, suggesting that those years may have had more in common stylistically with the preceding century than traditional narratives of “Classical” and “Romantic” periods make out. Such narratives may lead to an arbitrary division more or less at the year 1800 or to the transitional view of those early years as Romanticism-to-be, dominated by Beethoven. However, in drawing on the works of around twenty composers, I have tried to convey a sense of the vibrancy of musical life in Europe at this time, and, by the common thread of the Fonte, to show a stronger connection, in terms of the elements of composition, to the preceding century. The idea that the Fonte and numerous other small-scale schemata were available to eighteenth-century composers, and employed by them in conventional configurations, is discussed in Music in the Galant Style (2007), by Robert O. Gjerdingen. My research draws heavily on his work, and although I examine only one schema, my findings nevertheless highlight the manner in which Gjerdingen’s theory of shared schemata provides an alternative to the “masterwork”-centred view of music, preoccupied with internal motivic relationships and claims of “influence” between “masterworks” rather than connection to stylistic common property. This study is divided into two parts, the first addressing some of the theoretical concerns, including a comprehensive description of the Fonte itself as well as a discussion of some of the issues surrounding the role of the listener in schema-based music. The second part presents case studies of the Fonte as used by four composers: Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Chopin. These chapters analyse in detail the different ways composers presented the Fonte, giving rise to questions of what effect those differences had and of how the schema itself may have come to change over time.