Corpus Studies, Sonata Typology, and the Nineteenth-Century Violin Concerto: Viotti, Saint-Saëns, and the Challenge of Recapitulatory Compression

Abstract A corpus study of first-movement form in the nineteenth-century violin concerto, encompassing works from Viotti to Elgar, addresses: the New Formenlehre’s lack of attention to the genre, the pitfalls of formal theory’s focus on canonical Austro-German repertoire; and the question of how concepts derived from late eighteenth-century practice need to adapt to nineteenth-century evolutions. In some geographic subcategories of the corpus, recapitulatory compression is as prevalent as the presumably normative tonic return of P and S. Composers explore multiple alternatives: bypassing recapitulation of either of these zones, merging them, or recapitulating neither in a truncated form that flows into the slow movement. These practices unsettle the tendency to treat the Mozartian type 5 form as a yardstick, reveal a heretofore unrecognized type 2 lineage originating in the eighteenth century and stretching across the nineteenth, and expose the shortcomings of over-reliance on canonical repertoire. Two case studies of Viotti and Saint-Saëns highlight related practices across the corpus’s long chronological span and counterbalance the corpus’s bird’s eye view with attention to the aesthetically compelling formal complexities revealed by close reading of individual compositions.