Radically Inconspicuous Absence: Truncated Sonata Forms in Interwar Paris

Abstract

This article identifies a set of sonata-form movements written in interwar Paris that do not recapitulate their secondary theme and yet end simply in major rather than performing cataclysm or transgression. It argues that their ability to leave sonata-form conventions unfulfilled is a consequence of how these pieces make the primary-theme reprise a site of resolved structural tension, not of the theme-and-key mechanisms of sonata form but rather of processes independent from sonata-form logic. These movements are also analyzed as exhibiting ironic troping; their juxtaposition of distinct attitudes toward sonata form negotiates a relationship between the interwar era and its compositional inheritances.