Dec. 4, 2015:
Cadential Content and Cadential Function in the First Movement Expositions of Schumann’s Violin Sonatas

Guest Speaker
Dr. Peter Smith
Professor of Music, University of Notre Dame

Location: 2441 Humanities Bldg.


This paper analytically extends the theories of the classical cadence of William Caplin and Janet Schmalfeldt through exploration of cadential procedures in Robert Schumann—one of the most inventive manipulators of cadential techniques in the context of nineteenth-century instrumental forms.  My focus, like Schmalfeldt’s, is sonata exposition, exemplified by two generically related compositions illustrating the ingenuity of Schumann’s cadential practice.  In the first movements of his Violin Sonatas, opera 105 and 121, Schumann reimagines cadential strategies derived from eighteenth-century sonata form as integral components of his distinctive compositional voice.  He is thus seen to compose not at cross-purposes with signature elements of the classical style, as Charles Rosen has argued, but rather to exploit eighteenth-century conventions as a means to achieve his innovative artistic ends.
            The secondary key areas of these movements illustrate Schumann’s propensity for formal strategies based on an ironic separation of cadential content from cadential function.  His passages of cadential content paradoxically serve to: (1) initiate the secondary area; (2) develop tonal pairing rather than polarity as a foundation for expository harmonic relationships; and (3) either delay (op. 121) or withhold (op. 105) across the secondary area, the arrival of the mediant Stufe.  Throughout, Schumann is seen to draw on classical conventions not epigonistically but as integral components of his vital nineteenth-century formal-tonal processes.