# Why so few piano sonatas in the romantic era?



## GodNickSatan

I don't mean from every composer, but some of the biggest names like Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Schumann all wrote so few. Was it felt Beethoven had just exhausted the genre?


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## Ukko

GodNickSatan said:


> I don't mean from every composer, but some of the biggest names like Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Schumann all wrote so few. Was it felt Beethoven had just exhausted the genre?


Hey, interesting question. Brahms, Chopin and Schumann each composed three piano sonatas, and "so few'" could just as well be "enough". Liszt's sonata is pretty close to being a 'Magnum Opus', and one of those is enough. Still, I wonder if the concept of _Sonata_ as at least _implying_ formal constraints had an inhibiting effect. Those Romantic folks spelled freedom with a capital 'F'.


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## Quartetfore

There were an untold number of Piano Sonatas composed during the "Romantic Era", it just a fact of life that only a very few survived down to our time. the German Music Publisher Hoffmeister listed 2700 sonatas published from 1844-1897, this includes those for Violin and Cello. Since the list mainly takes into account Sonatas published in Germany and Austria there is sure to be more. Once again, just a few survived.


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## Ukko

Quartetfore said:


> There were an untold number of Piano Sonatas composed during the "Romantic Era", it just a fact of life that only a very few survived down to our time. the German Music Publisher Hoffmeister listed 2700 sonatas published from 1844-1897, this includes those for Violin and Cello. Since the list mainly takes into account Sonatas published in Germany and Austria there is sure to be more. Once again, just a few survived.


Yeah; _GNS_ chose not to consider those 'also-rans' though. Hah; I wonder if the majority of those pieces 'broke the bonds' of Classical Sonata Form in order to be _Free_, and also managed to avoid being worth playing or hearing.


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## Mahlerian

GodNickSatan said:


> I don't mean from every composer, but some of the biggest names like Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Schumann all wrote so few. Was it felt Beethoven had just exhausted the genre?


For the same reason, more or less, that the same composers wrote fewer string quartets and fewer symphonies. The romantic style required that each new work be significantly different from the last in ways that the classical composers (even Beethoven) would not have thought necessary.

The same is of course even more true of modernism, which accounts for the smaller and smaller oeuvres of 19th-20th century composers.


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## Quartetfore

I would think that most of them kept to the sonata form as it was known. You would think that during the split between the Wagner camp and the Brahms camp ther would be a falling off in the production of sonatas, and yet they continued to be produced. Of course many of the works were labeled op#1, and were the last that were composed. For many it was a way of introducing them selfs as a "serious" composer.


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## starry

Hilltroll72 said:


> Those Romantic folks spelled freedom with a capital 'F'.


Sonata form was surely a classical legacy that relatively few of those 19th century composers and even many in the first half of the twentieth century didn't shake off.


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## peeyaj

Schubert wrote 21 piano sonatas, but some of them were unfinished or fragmentary.

Schubert's piano sonatas ( according to Encarta) is considered the second most important body of works after those of Beethoven. And in my estimation, the last three of them (D.958, D.959 and D.960) is more or less the equal of LvB's greatest sonatas. The last one is the most sublime I have ever heard.


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## PetrB

Part of the inadvertent legacy of the works of Beethoven is that from one piece to the next, a composer began to be expected (and expected of themselves) that the following piece was to break new ground, i.e. the composer was to say something essentially new about both form and content.

Until then, we have composers writing in a similar vein, the better ones developing their vocabulary or honing the finesse of what they wrote, over the progression of hundreds of symphonies, forty symphonies, etc. Along comes Beethoven, practically re-inventing himself and the form and content of that medium from one piece to the next, with a total of only nine in his lifetime.

That tendency of making an entirely new and fresh musical statement held, and increased to such a degree that by the 1950's or so, even undergraduate composition students were being told their next work should be an entirely different investigation into music than the last -- before they even had the more well-advised practice of writing and writing until they found "their own voice."

That accounts, in one manner of notions in the air at the time, for why those more notable composers made fewer sonatas, and fewer symphonies. Too, there was a very strong interest in freer more rhapsodic forms, both small and large, to which they devoted a lot of their time.

Mozart, 20 + piano concerti. Beethoven, 5. Brahms 2. Prokofiev, 5. Shostakovich, 2 

etc. etc.


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## Three14

GodNickSatan said:


> I don't mean from every composer, but some of the biggest names like Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Schumann all wrote so few. Was it felt Beethoven had just exhausted the genre?


I read an article on this recently and it was mainly due to the lack of popularity with opera singers at the time.


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## millionrainbows

I think part of it is that Romanticism was experimental and "poetic," ideas better suited for short, poetic musings rather than to longer "novel-length" sonatas in three or four movements. Also, it was perhaps an escape from the overbearing legacy of Beethoven.


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## Vaneyes

Maybe they didn't want to make the same mistake Schubert did.


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