Sonatina

A shortened sonata, two or three brief movements, clear texture, mostly for teaching

Related

ClassicalSonata FormPiano

A sonatina is a shortened sonata, two or three brief movements, clear in texture and limited in range, long used as keyboard teaching material.

Origins and era

In the eighteenth century composers called simplified, shortened sonatas sonatinas, and Clementi's Op. 36 with Kuhlau's Op. 20 and Op. 55 became the teaching canon. Diabelli and Dussek produced quantities of the same. In the nineteenth century the title belonged mostly to children's tutors and school recital lists. In the twentieth century Ravel and Busoni wrote refined sonatinas back into the concert hall, and the name stopped belonging only to beginners.

What you hear

Two or three movements, the first often omitting the development or compressing it into a few transitional bars. The texture leaves only melody and broken chords, the range rarely exceeds two octaves, and rhythmic figures repeat. The finale is a rondo or minuet, fast and short. Decide first whether the opening movement has a real development, whether the theme returns unchanged, and whether the left hand does nothing but hold harmony. The smaller scale has structural consequences, fewer modulations and more reliance on repetition than on development. Authors also isolate difficulties, one piece drilling scales and another double thirds, so a student who plays through the set has covered the basic technique in order. Clementi's six are ordered from easier to harder, each changing the left-hand figure, so the sequence itself is the syllabus.

Key figures

Clementi's six sonatinas Op. 36 are the models, Kuhlau and Diabelli wrote dozens for teaching, Ravel and Busoni brought the genre back to the concert hall, and Beethoven's Op. 79 shows how loose the border with the sonata can be.

Lineage

It comes from the classical sonata and from short teaching pieces in binary form and leads to children's tutors, the twentieth-century neoclassical sonatina and the keyboard teaching repertory.

Common misunderstandings

A sonatina is not a child's sonata, since Ravel's and Busoni's are technically demanding. Nor is it a single movement of a sonata, because most keep a complete movement layout.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Sonatina, 用于核对体裁与教学用途的关系
• Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms, 用于核对展开部省略后的结构后果

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.