Recapitulation as Process: Some Nineteenth‐Century Strategies

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century sonata forms reveals a range of possibilities for approaching the recapitulation. Building on this work, I present select findings from my analysis of nineteenth‐century recapitulations composed between 1800 and 1850, slightly before and after sonata form crystallised in critical discourse. Prioritising lesser‐analysed composers, my analyses centre on pieces by Hélène Liebmann, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, George Onslow, Norbert Burgmüller and Niels Gade. Drawing connections to articles by L. Poundie Burstein and Yoel Greenberg, my examples foreground the process of recapitulating as manifest in these nineteenth‐century works. The notion of recapitulation‐as‐process is especially evident in these pieces, which contain examples of off‐tonic returns, formal hybridity between sonata types, recapitulatory overlap and reordered recapitulations.