Le 29 juin 2017
de 16h30 à 17h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance précomposée - Quel futur pour la Formenlehre? Challenging Recapitulatory Paradigms
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Rebecca Perry
Prokofiev’s sonata expositions often proceed in seemingly formulaic accordance with eighteenth-century models, leading most commentators to dismiss his formal process as unimaginative and unfit for close scrutiny. While these views are in step with the largely exposition-focused nature of the New Formenlehre’s conceptualization of sonata form, they give short shrift to Prokofiev’s often unpredictable treatments of post-expositional material, overlooking the manner in which his development and recapitulation sections often swerve wildly from the expected Anlage. This paper investigates one of Prokofiev’s strategies for creative recalibration of the development and recapitulation, namely the post-expositional erasure of all references to the secondary theme. I probe the structural and hermeneutic effects of this strategy in the first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 2 (1913) and third movement of his Violin Concerto No. 1 (1917).
While the strategy of truncating the recapitulation through omission of the secondary theme had a number of precedents in European sonata practice, Prokofiev at times took this practice to extremes, eliminating the secondary theme from all-post expositional space and thus obscuring the thematic layout to the point of structural ambiguity. The analyses featured here will be shown to have larger theoretical implications, pointing up the need for more contextually and historically sensitive adaptations of the New Formenlehre that customize Hepokoski and Darcy’s notion of “norm” and “deformation” for the analysis of early twentieth-century sonata repertories.
