ANTHONY R. DELDONNA AND PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI, EDS THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY OPERA Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 pp. xxiii + 316, isbn 978 0 521 87358 1 (hardback); 978 0 521 69538 1 (paperback)

Abstract

his rigid opposition, but also, more forcefully, for his simplistic conception of musical temporality based upon Kofi Agawu's beginning-middle-end paradigm. This question of temporality opens immediately onto the issue of locating the EEC. Caplin's position has its own consistent logic: a theme is defined as that which ends in a cadence; the closing portion of an exposition after the subordinate themes has a post-cadential (after-the-end) function; there is nothing from a form-functional perspective to distinguish a so-called closing theme from a subordinate theme; only if the closing portion is limited to codettas rather than themes can a difference be maintained between ending and after-the-end; therefore the EEC comes with the PAC (perfect authentic cadence) at the end of the last subordinate theme. Hepokoski and Darcy, on the other hand, follow William Rothstein in granting EEC status to the first PAC in the secondary key, though they do devote a chapter to the ways in which the EEC may be deferred by the persistence of S-type material beyond this PAC so as to reopen the purported EEC. Both Wingfield and Michael Spitzer (Beethoven Forum 14/2 (2007), 150-178) argue that this suggests a greater degree of convergence in practice. The fact that this issue is raised once again in the present volume suggests, however, that it is important to insist upon the difference at a theoretical level. By locating the source of the divergence, one is, furthermore, able to return to the issues of temporality and of the function/type distinction. From a linguist's point of view, Caplin's model of temporality would seem impoverished to the extent that it accounts for only one of the dimensions present in the temporal constitution of the verb. Formal function is essentially concerned with aspect: that dimension of the verbal system that shows the degree to which the event referred to has been actualized-that is, whether it is still at its beginning, in the middle of its duration or even in its aftermath (Caplin's post-cadential function). Webster's criticism of Caplin's temporal model is that it does not allow for the multi-levelled character of music's various temporal dispositions. Perhaps this concern could be addressed by considering other ways in which musical form produces time, comparable with verbal tense and mood. Insofar as the three authors describe formal type as a means of ordering or locating events within a larger time span, type seems most related to the concept of tense. Thinking of function and type in this way permits one to begin exploring the interrelationship between them-though this issue remains unexplored in the book. Moreover, mood, which in verbal construction is able to differentiate between reality and mere possibility, provides a framework for pursuing the disagreement over the EEC. The difference between Caplin and Hepokoski is concerned with how one experiences each PAC in the secondary key as it comes along: whether it is an EEC-as-possibility, to exist in reality only retrospectively, or whether ...