Sonata shifted from vague label to classical music's master plan
A sonata today usually means a three- or four-movement instrumental work, yet the word once covered many Baroque shapes. By the early nineteenth century it named a principle for organizing large concert pieces—alongside the fugue—still echoed in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century sonatas.
Baroque sonatas almost always rode continuo; later the label preferred solo keyboard or keyboard plus one melody instrument. Seventeenth-century overlap with canzona and sinfonia kept the genre blurry until suite, concerto, and sonata drifted apart. Corelli's twelve Op. 2 trio sonatas of 1685 modelled the chamber type and inspired Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, and Telemann. Brossard around 1710 split sonata da chiesa—slow, fugal, cantabile, lively—from dance-heavy sonata da camera. Only about four percent of Bach's roughly 1,100 surviving works are sonatas; Scarlattis Essercizi yield over five hundred mostly single-movement keyboard pieces; Vivaldi wrote over seventy, mostly solos.
Classical practice made the term decisive across fifty years. Haydn stamped his first piano sonata in 1771 and sidelined divertimento. Typical layouts opened with an allegro that worked themes, then a slow movement or minuet, then a fast finale rondo. Two-movement sets persisted into the 1790s; Beethoven's early sonatas and the string-quartet world pushed four movements—allegro in sonata form, slow piece, minuet or scherzo, brilliant finale—as the norm critics soon taught.
Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas plus duo sonatas became obligatory repertoire. William Newman's sonata idea treats a symphony as a sonata for orchestra. Nineteenth-century shelves added Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt's B-minor Sonata, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff. Theorists then codified sonata form from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Clementi, debating three-movement concertos versus four-movement symphonies. Sonatina remains the diminutive for short or easy essays in the same family.
Source: Sonata
