Society for Music Theory

Chopin and the Romantic Sonata: The First Movement of Op. 58

Author(s): ANDREW DAVIS
Source: Music Theory Spectrum , Vol. 36, No. 2 (FALL 2014), pp. 270-294
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Music Theory
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90012063

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 Chopin and the Romantic Sonata: The First Movement of Op. 58
 

This article proposes that Romantic sonatas exploit in their formal structures multiply directed
temporal narratives, comprising a temporal stream and various other streams that can be broadly char-
acterized as atemporal. The temporal stream articulates the principal sonata trajectory and correlates
with the concept known in structural narratology as the first narrative; the atemporal streams reside
on alternate temporal levels and remain external to, or disengaged from, that of the first narrative.
The structural and expressive implications of this opposition, together with the view of sonata-formal
conventions made available in recent work on Sonata Theory, provide a framework within which the
article explicates Chopin’s robust dialogue, in the first movement of his Piano Sonata in B Minor,
Op. 58, with Classical German-Austrian sonata conventions and contemporary Romantic aesthetic
currents. The reading provides a foundation for reassessing Chopin’s work in the sonata genre, the
norms and expressive potential of which he is often thought of as never fully apprehending.

Keywords: Chopin, sonata, Sonata Theory, temporality, Romantic, Romanticism, narrative,

narratology.

his article proposes a reading of the first movement of

T
Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, in which
I suggest that the movement is fully engaged in a dia-
logue with Classical sonata conventions as well as with an array
of Romantic aesthetics contemporary with the period in which
the piece was composed. This view is meant as something of a
corrective: that is, as James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy have
recently observed, the movement exhibits an example of one of
the most common of the options available in Classical sonata
design1—the option known in Sonata Theory as the Type 2
sonata, a teleologically oriented, double-rotational cycle through
the normative sonata “action spaces” of primary theme (P),
transition (TR), secondary theme (S), and closing (C).2 The
I wish to thank James Hepokoski and the anonymous readers of this
journal for reading and thoroughly critiquing earlier drafts of this article.
The analysis is much improved as a result of their input. Any inadequacies
that remain are entirely my own.
 Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 364).
 On the concept of rotation, central in Sonata Theory, see Hepokoski and
Darcy (2006, 611–14). Here and throughout the essay normative (as in
“normative sonata form”) is used not in the sense of “normal” or “well-
formed” but rather in the sense of expected: the “background constellation
of standard or traditional options (norms)” in a genre, which itself “fur-
nishes an ongoing horizon of expectations for the receiver. All genres
(indeed, all familiar actions) involve systems of norms and guidelines,
typical and expected procedures,” which, in music, are “grounded in incre-
ments of elapsing time.” See Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 614–21). To
define a musical event as normative carries no aesthetically charged under-
tones: “no serious scholar could maintain, within an analytical situation,
that merely recognizing a familiar compositional choice as a ‘norm’ or as
‘normative’ inevitably connotes a tacit personal approval or moral endorse-
ment of that norm. On the contrary (of course), it is merely an acknowl-
edgement of standard operating procedure . . . , an awareness of what
usually occurs, for whatever historical reasons, under certain circumstances
and traditions of musical manufacturing” (ibid., 615 n. 9).
Type 2 form has no full recapitulation in the traditional sense,
substituting in its place (on the second pass through the rota-
tional layout) a developmental treatment of the P and TR
modules followed by a tonal-resolution zone in which the S and
C modules appear in the tonic key. Such a reading of Op. 58
stands apart from views of this movement in the existing
Chopin literature, as well as from views of other late sonata
forms of Chopin (including the first movements of the Piano
Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 35, and the Cello Sonata in G Minor,
Op. 65; all three exhibit similar renderings of the Type 2
schema). Much energy has been expended over the years in
trying to come to terms with why all these movements seem-
ingly have “recapitulations” that omit their P-themes—recapit-
ulations that have been inevitably described as compressed,
truncated, or otherwise special or unusual.3 This perceived
“problem” has been addressed in various ways. Zofia Helman
simply adopts the view that “a ‘textbook’ definition of a sonata-
allegro form” makes “Chopin’s sonatas seem excessively
fantasy-like, complicated, and badly constructed.”4 Others,
especially in the Polish literature—seeking to evaluate the works
more positively—have concluded that Chopin’s sonata forms
cannot be justly measured against Classical norms.5 Still others
have been prompted to make far-reaching declarations—such as
Alan Walker’s claim that Chopin’s “intense compression” of
his recapitulations was “one of [his] chief contributions to the
 Sources making this claim are too numerous to cite individually. For a
summary of historical analytical approaches to Chopin’s sonatas, see
Helman (2000).
 Ibid. Influential examples include Niecks (1890), Huneker (1900), Leich-
tentritt (1921), and Newman (1972).
 Opieński (1928), Opieński (1929), Chomiński (1950), Jachimecki (1957),
Chomiński (1960), and Tomaszewski (1999).



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     :     . 
history of sonata form, and one which has been widely misun-
derstood.”6
But such views misconstrue the close historical relationship
of Chopin’s sonata practice with that of other composers in the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sonata tradition. Even the
seemingly innocuous assertion, common in the literature, that
the recapitulations in Chopin’s late sonatas are excusable
because they have roots in an earlier eighteenth-century sonata
practice—the “binary sonata”—is problematic, as it lends (even
if inadvertently) the impression that Chopin’s preferred formal
type is deficient in some way.7 Binary sonatas, rather than being
recognized as the source of a normative formal type (Sonata
Theory’s Type 2), have often been thought of as underdevel-
oped, underprivileged versions of a more complete, structurally
sound sonata (the Type 3) that emerged later in the eighteenth
century.8 This thinking furthers the notion that Chopin’s affin-
ity for the Type 2 sonata makes him unusual, when in fact
numerous others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
also exhibited a preference for the same form at one time or
another.
One of the results of having misconstrued Chopin’s sonata
practice in such ways is that his contribution to the evolution of
the genre in the Romantic period has been mostly overlooked.
Chopin is too often misunderstood as one who abandoned the
tradition and forged a completely new genre, or as a miniaturist
incapable of deploying his considerable creative powers within
the expansive dimensions of a large Classical form, or—worse
—as a composer who never fully apprehended the basic princi-
ples of sonata logic. In reality, Chopin should be understood as
a composer who availed himself of the sonata’s rich generic
conventions to construct complex, expressive works that situate
 Walker (1966, 242). Certainly I would endorse Walker’s view that
Chopin’s contributions to sonata form have been “widely misunderstood.”
Note in this context that some have also tried to justify Chopin’s late
sonatas by asserting that any of their perceived oddities pale in comparison
to the all-tonic expositions and tonally disparate recapitulations of his
earlier sonata forms. In the Piano Concerto in E Minor, Op. 11 (1830), for
example, the exposition sounds P in E minor and S in E major, while in
the recapitulation P is in E minor and S opens in G major. In the Piano
Concerto in F Minor, Op. 21 (1829), a more normative exposition (P in F
minor, S opening in A♭ major, closing in C minor) proceeds to a recapitu-
lation in which both P and S open in exactly the same keys as before—F
minor and A♭ major again. The Piano Sonata in C Minor, Op. 4, is simi-
larly idiosyncratic. But to simply dismiss even these pieces out of hand as
anomalous and immature is to prematurely oversimplify the issues involved.
For an alternative view of the C-Minor Sonata, for example, see n. 78 below.
For more on Chopin’s early sonatas, see Gould (1967), Samson (1985, 38–
40), Leikin (1992, 166–67), Rink (1992), Nowick (1995), Tomaszewski
(1999), Helman (2000), Nowick (2003), and Heineman (2003).
 Both Rosen (1995, 72–73) and Leikin (1992, 170) invoke the “binary
sonata” to justify Chopin’s practice. Rosen also invokes a broadly drawn
version of the Classical sonata principle, asserting that only material origi-
nally stated outside the tonic needs to appear in the tonic in the recapitula-
tion. An older source of the same argument is Dammeier-Kirpal (1973).
 For a discussion of historical views of the Type 2 sonata (with a list of
important representative works that use the form, in music from Scarlatti
through Mahler), see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 355–65).
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
Classical procedures in a dialogic opposition to strategies that
can be productively understood as having roots in the Romantic
aesthetic currents of his own time. The first movement of
Op. 58 is one of those works: the movement exhibits not only
an underlying Classical approach to sonata organization but
also characteristically Romantic features. The latter are associ-
ated primarily with a fragmentation of the musical structure
into what would be regarded in structural narratology as multi-
ply directed narrative or temporal, trajectories or streams. In the
broadest possible sense, one of these streams resides on the
principal, or first, narrative-temporal level—what Gérard
Genette, for example, would call the “first narrative,” or what
Byron Almén has recently characterized as the “primary narra-
tive level.”9 The others reside on any of a number of possible
alternative temporal levels, where all these are in some sense
separate from, or external to, the level of the first narrative. In
what follows I will characterize the distinction in terms of an
opposition between temporal music and atemporal music. The
music on the first-narrative level is the temporal music—tempo-
ral in the sense that it articulates the principal narrative stream
or the primary trajectory through the sonata structure (the
sonata temporality proper, perhaps). The music on the other
levels, whatever its specific signified temporal relationship to the
first-narrative music might be, can be categorized broadly as
atemporal music. I will use the term “atemporality” in a narra-
tive sense, in which it means not so much an “absence of time”
(or an “absence of moving time”) but rather connotes a negation
of the first-narrative temporality. The atemporal music is thus
regarded not literally as “music without temporal motion”
(although it may be possible for some forms of musical atem-
porality to signify just that) but instead as music that expresses a
narrative stream dislocated from that of the music’s principal
narrative-structural trajectory. Such an opposition has the
potential to describe a complex network of various temporal and
atemporal streams, all of which interact with one another to
form a wide array of narrative-temporal relationships.
This multivalent narrative-temporal environment provides a
compelling way of accommodating, structurally and hermeneu-
tically, some of the more idiosyncratic features of a Romantic
sonata form such as Chopin’s, and thus also provides an inter-
pretive framework within which we can reach a more nuanced
understanding of Chopin’s contributions to sonata evolution in
the nineteenth century. The movement’s problematic structural
and expressive discontinuities are understood not as manifesting
any kind of compositional shortcomings on Chopin’s part but
rather as reflecting a particular aspect of contemporary Romantic
aesthetics: that in which a deliberate fragmentation of traditional
Classical forms and genres constitutes one of the Romantics’ pre-
ferred modes of expressing a heightened skepticism toward
Enlightenment values of logic, clarity, and rationality. Such skepti-
cism forms a central facet of a wider aesthetic enterprise in which
the Romantics introspectively, self-consciously, and self-critically
sought to evaluate and comment upon the state of their own art.
 See Genette (1980, 48–49) and Almén (2008, 163–64).
      ()
  
Recent work of Karol Berger has drawn a distinction between
two kinds of forms that will prove useful in developing critical
categories that can be deployed in interpreting Chopin’s treat-
ment of the sonata genre. These are Berger’s narrative and lyric
compositional forms, which he regards as the two fundamental
forms (where form is a vehicle for the expression of content)
underlying a wide range of arts and genres, from literature to archi-
tecture, painting to music.10 This narrative-lyric opposition can
manifest in various ways in the arts: some art describes or depicts
(narrative), other art reflects (lyric); some art signifies motion in
time (narrative), other art signifies stasis (lyric). The distinction
has a long history in narrative theory, dating from Plato’s differen-
tiation between diegesis and mimesis, two modes in which a narra-
tive can transmit content. The diegetic mode entails a narrator
speaking directly to the audience, while the mimetic mode entails
a narrator speaking indirectly, usually through characters. For
Plato, diegesis and mimesis were among the principal determi-
nants of the two main poetic genres: epic poetry, characterized by
diegesis, and dramatic poetry, characterized by mimesis. Seven-
teenth-century narrative theory added a third genre, one that Plato
never considered: lyric poetry, or poetry concerned with the ideas
and sentiments, rather than actions, of a narrator.
Berger has asserted that although this three-way categoriza-
tion scheme—epic, dramatic, and lyric—remained standard
through the Romantic era and into the present, it invites confu-
sion.11 The distinction between epic and dramatic genres lies in
the mode of presentation, or the method with which poetic
content is delivered: one uses the diegetic, the other the
mimetic mode. But the distinction between the lyric genre and
both epic and dramatic genres lies in the nature of the content,
not in the mode of its delivery: lyric poetry has no linear plot,
whereas epic and dramatic poetry does. To avoid the confusion,
Berger proposes removing the mode of delivery from the equa-
tion and distinguishing the types solely according to the nature
of their content: the natural consequence is that lyric poetry
becomes one category, while epic and dramatic are folded into
another, called narrative. 12 These new categories constitute
forms, not genres, because—according to Berger—they distin-
guish ways of organizing narrative content into intelligible rela-
tionships between the smaller parts and the larger whole. In
 This discussion draws mainly on Berger (1992). This article clearly shaped
Berger’s later book (2007), although his examination of the narrative-lyric
distinction does not appear in the book.
 In German Romantic literary criticism these three are the highest of the lit-
erary genres, on the uppermost level in Schlegel’s hierarchical categoriza-
tion of “fundamental forms.” For a discussion, with references to works of
Schlegel, see Daverio (1993, 24–34).
 Berger’s (1992, 454–57) conflating of epic and dramatic into one category,
narrative, follows from Paul Ricoeur’s (1984, I:32–45) observation that the
aim of all narrative poetry, epic and dramatic alike, is the representation of
action, or the plot—what Aristotle called muthos. The mode of representa-
tion, whether diegetic or mimetic, does not affect the emplotment in narra-
tive poetry, and thus we can justify ignoring the modal distinction in favor
of focusing only on the thematic distinction.
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Berger’s formulation, narrative forms impart discernible, causal
(“one motivates another”) relationships onto what would other-
wise be mere ad hoc arrangements of unmotivated rhetorical
events; in narrative forms, the order of events in time becomes an
essential facet of those events’ identities and expressive poten-
tial.13 Lyric forms, on the other hand, represent not actions but
rather thoughts, mental states, emotions, or situations (not “the
actions one does” but “the states one finds oneself in”), none of
which depend on time, and as such lyric forms allow events to
occur in any order, or even simultaneously, without changing
either their meaning or the form’s ultimate expressive outcome.14
At the same time, work in structural narratology has recog-
nized that even in a narrative form dependent for its expressive
meaning on the order of rhetorical events in time, not all these
events must participate in the governing narrative structure in
exactly the same way with regard to their temporal-significative
value. Some of these modules may lie in one sense outside the
narrative’s principal temporal space. This is possible because, as
Gérard Genette (following Christian Metz) has explained, any
narrative, whether oral, written, or cinematic, necessarily exists
within a kind of temporal duality, in that it engages simultane-
ously with two temporal spaces:15 that of the narrative’s content
(the time of the story itself, or what some have described as the
erzählte Zeit—literally the “narrated time” or, in Genette’s ren-
dering, “story time”), and that of the actual narration (the time
it takes to recite or otherwise tell the story, or the Erzählzeit—
literally the “narrative time,” which Genette says we must
accept as a “quasi-fiction” or “pseudo-time,” “a false time
standing in for a true time”).16 To assume that all rhetorical
events in a narrative participate in that narrative in temporally
equivalent ways is to confuse (“naively,” says Genette)17 a narra-
tive’s syntagmatic presentation of its events with the signified
temporal value of those events within the story. That the two do
not necessarily coincide is one of the most basic aspects of
Western literary narratives in all their forms.
According to Genette, any narrative by definition engages
with the temporal duality outlined here. As a result, any narra-
tive has the capacity to disengage its narrative time from its
story time, where such disengagements may effect multiple
temporalities within the space of the narrative itself: these
include, on the one hand, what may be thought of as the
 Berger (1992, 458). Note Berger’s important observation (459) that most
narrative forms contain numerous nonimmediate and long-range relation-
ships among phases of the narrative; the relationships of causing and follow-
ing from are not restricted to immediately adjacent phases. See also below,
n. 21, for more on Berger’s view of causality in narrative forms.
 Ibid., 459.
 On this point Genette takes Metz (1974, 18) as a point of departure: for
Metz, narrative is a “doubly temporal sequence” in which “there is the time
of the thing told and the time of the telling (the time of the significate and
the time of the signifier)”; “this duality . . . invites us to consider that one
of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of
another time scheme.”
 For erzählzeit and erzählte Zeit, see Müller (1968, cited and discussed in
Genette [1980, 33–35]).
 Genette (1980, 85).
     :     . 
temporal space proper, comprising the principal narrative
stream (as mentioned, Genette’s “first narrative,” or Almén’s
“primary narrative level”), and, on the other hand, atemporal
(non-first-narrative) spaces comprising various forms of alterna-
tive streams that remain secondary or otherwise subordinate to
the first. The latter might include flashbacks, anticipations,
descriptions, reflective pauses, or any number of other similar
deflections away from the principal pathway through the
story.18 Such a formulation applies just as well to novels, narra-
tive poetry, film, and, I would suggest, music, in that some
musical forms must be understood as narrative forms and, as a
result, can be understood as having the capacity to engage—in
some specifically musical sense—with the multiple temporali-
ties and multiple narrative streams outlined here. Such musical
forms include, most obviously perhaps, the sonata form, the
Classical identity of which depends on temporal order and a tel-
eological trajectory in time: that is, a sonata’s expressive argu-
ment, and ultimately the expressive meaning of the entire work,
is premised on a cogent, ordered succession of rhetorical events
and affective or expressive states, all of them staged by the com-
poser as aiming at particular goal-points within a governing,
forward-driven, linearly directed sense of time.19
This particular aspect of the genre may be best contextual-
ized analytically using tools provided by the recent Sonata
Theory of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy. Sonata Theory
seeks to apprehend a sonata temporally—as a narrative that
unfolds within a formal framework comprising multiple passes,
or rotations, through a series of zones. The zones are conceived
not necessarily as musical “themes” or “groups” thereof but as
action spaces inhabited by what we might think of as narrative
agents—perhaps themes in the traditional sense or, more gener-
ally, musical-rhetorical modules; principal sonata action spaces
include those that house the traditional formal units of P, TR,
S, and C.20 Sonata Theory also understands the sonata as
having a fundamentally teleological character, in which a series
of causal or reactive relationships among rhetorical modules
motivate a directed linear trajectory through time. Together
these modules are directed toward certain governing rhetorical
objectives or structural punctuation marks, the most important
of which are those known as the Medial Caesura (MC), the
 This formulation follows that proposed in Genette (1980, esp. 48–51).
 The specific issue of whether we must “prove” that a sonata, or music, for
that matter, is “narrative,” and, if we must, how such a proof might be
carried out is not entirely germane to the present discussion—itself a theo-
rizing of the treatment of various narrative-temporal streams within a
sonata environment, where that environment is understood as analogous to
a narrative environment even if it may not be specifically narrative in all the
complex senses of that word. The literature on this issue is vast: for an
introduction to the central concerns, see, e.g., the discussions in Klein
(2004), Monahan (2007), and Almén (2008). See also Monahan (2008,
esp. 11–17), in which he expresses a concern for “how music is ‘like’ narra-
tive without wrangling over whether it ‘is’ narrative” (15). For more on the
sonata-as-narrative view latent in Sonata Theory, see also Monahan (2011a
and 2011b).
 For an introduction to the Sonata-Theory concepts and terminology
invoked here, see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 9–22).
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
Essential Expositional Closure (EEC), and the Essential Struc-
tural Closure (ESC).21
Within this sonata-as-narrative framework, I propose that
one of the ways of effectively confronting structure, musical
meaning, and expression in a sonata such as the first movement
of Chopin’s Op. 58 is to recognize that (recasting now an
earlier point on narrative forms in specifically musical terms) a
sonata may comprise certain musical-rhetorical events not all of
which necessarily participate in the governing sonata-narrative
structure in exactly the same way with regard to their temporal-
significative value. Some of its rhetorical modules—the tempo-
ral modules—will articulate what could be characterized as the
“first sonata narrative” (or even the “sonata proper”), while
others—any number of other atemporal modules—may be
understood as disengaged in some way from the first-narrative
stream, or as external to the principal sonata-temporal plane of
action. Atemporal musical modules defined as such may be in
various temporal relationships with the music of the first narra-
tive and with one another. It may be possible to think of many
as specific musical forms of analepses or prolepses, for example,
while in other cases the signified temporal meaning may be
abstract enough that it might be more productive to think of
them as musical analogues to what Genette would refer to as an
achrony: a passage in a literary narrative that lacks a clear tempo-
ral identity or an unambiguous temporal relationship with the
material that surrounds it.22 For Genette, literary achronies
suspend or divert the first-narrative trajectory and invite the
reader into alternative narrative streams: some of these streams
might signify a mimetic interiority, for example, when a charac-
ter sinks into a reminiscence, reflection, dream, or trance; others
might signify a diegetic exteriority, when a narrator’s voice is
revealed as intruding to offer a commentary or a description
delivered from outside the first narrative. Musical achronies, or
musical atemporality more generally, may be understood as
functioning similarly: in a sonata context, for example, atempo-
ral passages might temporarily deflect, divert, immobilize, sup-
press, or suspend the sonata’s generically obligatory forward-
vectored progress through time in favor of what can be con-
strued expressively in terms of—just as in a novel or a poem—
descriptions, commentaries, reminiscences, reflections, dreams,
crises, corrective actions, or any number of other types of narra-
tive or non-narrative events. Whatever the precise temporal
relationships among the various streams, and even if the specific
temporal relationships remain ambiguous within the abstract
world of musical discourse, the essential point is that the atempo-
ral music should be understood as negating, as remaining external
to, or as superimposing (“from outside”) new material onto the
 Note that here Berger’s (1992) view of narrative forms may be a bit too
restrictive, in that he focuses closely on rhetorical relationships defined by
causality (“one motivates another”) at the expense of reactivity (“one
follows from another”). Clearly some phases of most narratives may also
have reactive qualities, in which they respond to events that have already
unfolded in earlier phases. For a musical view of reactive modules and their
importance in sonata narratives, see Hepokoski (2012, 230).
 Genette (1980, 59).
      ()
principal narrative stream. Many atemporal modules, as I will
discuss presently, might even be best understood structurally as
interpolated into the first narrative, in the sense that they comprise
parenthetical digressions that could be removed from the sonata
without disturbing the form’s larger outlines (similar to William
Kinderman’s “parenthetical enclosures”).23
Exactly how we identify and construe the specific expressive
meaning of these kinds of atemporal narrative streams is an
exercise in hermeneutics or musical semiotics just as much as it
is an exercise in structural analysis. Existing work in semiotics
and literary criticism as well as music analysis provides tools that
can guide interpretation. One might say, for example, that shifts
in music among temporal and atemporal streams should be
marked by what Christian Metz has described as “change[s] of
intelligibility, in the sense in which one speaks of a change of
gears in automobiles.”24 Such changes might be cued by rhetor-
ical procedures known in recent musical-semiotic literature as
“shifts of level of discourse”—shifts that often manifest as
various forms of musical non sequiturs, perhaps triggered by
interrupted themes, deflected or rhetorically charged harmonic
progressions or modulatory schemes, stalled developmental pro-
cedures, sudden or unusual tonal shifts, or marked changes of
style or topical register.25 And, more generally, the principles
according to which such multivalent, fragmented narrative-
temporal structures are conceived in music might conform
to interpretive tenets outlined in the work of, for example,
Roland Barthes (for whom multiple voices, or “codes,” inter-
weave throughout a text—a short story or a novel, for instance
—to articulate various levels of meaning), Mikhail Bakhtin
(whose dialogism involves multiple languages, modes of speak-
ing, or voices, interrelations among which produce “the funda-
mental liberation of cultural-semantic and emotional intentions
from the hegemony of a single and unitary language”), and, in
music, Carolyn Abbate (who draws on Barthes, Bakhtin, and
others such as Julia Kristeva to formulate a view of musical nar-
rative involving shifts among multiple “voices,” some of which
may or may not be specifically narrative).26
Finally, before moving on to my reading of the Chopin
Sonata, I should note that my use of a narrative-lyric, temporal-
atemporal opposition overlaps with—but should not
be confused with—other recent music-analytical treatments of
similar concepts. Raymond Monelle in particular drew a dis-
tinction between what he called lyric time and progressive time in
music: lyric time is duration, or time-in-a-moment, and occurs
in music in presentational modules with a foregrounded melody
and relatively stable harmonic and phrase structures; progressive
time is mobility and action, and occurs in destabilized, less the-
matic modules with more complex harmonic and phrase
 Kinderman (2009). See below, n. 54 and the associated text.
 Metz (1974, 74), emphasis original.
 Hatten (1994, 174–83 and 2004, 47–52).
 For Barthes’s five codes, see Barthes (1966 and [1970] 1974); see also
McCreless (1988). For dialogism, see Bakhtin (1981, 367, quoted in
Korsyn [1993, 99]). For Abbate’s view of multiple voices and narrativity,
see Abbate (1991).
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structures and heightened rhythmic activity.27 In Monelle’s
view, themes (P and S in a sonata form, for example) typically
signify lyric time, while the transitional passages bridging these
themes typically signify progressive time. Monelle’s claims draw
on those of such figures as Adolph Bernhard Marx, who
posited that musical form juxtaposes stable, periodic Sätze
(themes) with less organized Gänge (transitions, or sections of
passagework—all athematic, semantically weak, and syntacti-
cally loose), yielding the basic formal archetype Satz–Gang–
Satz. 28 Marx maps his archetype onto a “rest–motion–rest”
metaphor,29 while Monelle, and later Michael Klein, make the
temporal implications more explicit, positing that narrative time
was time in motion and lyric time was time suspended.30 For all
three authors, however, the temporal distinction derives from
thematic rhetoric, not formal function. Often the two coincide,
but not necessarily: themes can have aspects of Gänge, while tran-
sitions can be thematic and thus have aspects of Sätze. 31 Like-
wise, in a narrative-temporal sense (as I have outlined it above) a
sonata’s Sätze and Gänge can coexist within the same temporal or
atemporal streams: the P–TR region, for example, includes one
Satz and one Gang, but both modules would be thought of as
normatively residing within the first-narrative stream. In my
approach, then, temporality is a formal-structural strategy in
which a shift from a temporal to an atemporal stream indicates
not a shift from one sonata-spatial module to another, but rather
a change in how the sonata engages with and advances the teleol-
ogy of its first narrative.
 ,  ,  . 
Under the definitions of musical temporality and atemporal-
ity as I have drawn them here, we might regard two passages in
the exposition of Chopin’s Op. 58 as manifesting in their
musical rhetoric atemporal narrative streams. The first occurs in
the exposition’s first half, on the way to the MC, and the other
occurs in post-MC space en route to the EEC. Chopin’s locat-
ing the digressions as such is probably not accidental: as men-
tioned, these two events are the most crucial structural
articulations in any sonata exposition. The MC is the “brief,
rhetorically reinforced break or gap that serves to divide an
exposition into two parts, tonic and dominant (or tonic and
mediant in most minor-key sonatas),” while the EEC is “the
 Monelle (2000, 115–17). For more discussion, and for critical commen-
tary, see also Klein (2004).
 Marx (1841). For translations and discussions of key passages, see Monelle
(2000, 104–10). Marx’s meaning of Satz and Gang, especially the latter,
originates in earlier work of Joseph Riepel (1754, 26–40); for translations,
see Monelle (2000, 101–04).
 Marx (1841, III:99): “Insofar as the Satz is closed on itself and at rest, while
the Gang is in movement, finding its close and goal not in itself but in some
other feature, we find here the fundamental contrast and basic form of all
musical structure: rest,–movement,–rest” (trans. Monelle [2000, 105]).
 Klein (2004, 37–38).
 This problem causes Marx some confusion in his discussion of Gänge. See
Monelle (2000, esp. 106–09).
     :     .  

most important generic and tonal goal of the exposition, the

moment when S attains a satisfactory perfect authentic cadence
in the new key and gives way to differing material.”32
The movement opens with a grandiose P-theme, shown in
Example 1.33 The theme’s first eight measures can be under-
stood as a deformational period, articulated with a basic idea
in mm. 1–2 and a return to the same basic idea in mm. 5–6
—events that together suggest the presence of an antecedent
module in m. 1 and a consequent in m. 5.34 But mm. 3–4 sup-
press the cadential motion that might be expected at this point
in a normative period, while mm. 7–8 produce a tonicized half
cadence in the home key of B minor. This latter event in partic-
ular is striking, in that the cadence on F♯ is undercut by a denial
of closure in the melody, which remains on ^2, C♯ (at m. 8 b. 1)
when it may have been expected to leap to ^5, F♯; this is followed

 . Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement: P, mm. 1–8.
by a sudden deflection to E minor, through its own dominant,
at m. 8 b. 2. It may be that—following the thinking of Klein
and others, including Robert Hatten—we should understand
this move to the subdominant key area as evidence of the first
important narrative shift in the movement, in this case a shift in
tense (specifically to the past tense), or maybe even as evidence
of a shift toward the pastoral mode, both of which appear to be
common strategies employed at or near the beginnings of
Chopin’s large works.35 In any case, these first eight measures

 On the MC, see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 24: “brief, rhetorically rein-
forced”). For more, see Hepokoski and Darcy (1997); for a critique of
Hepokoski and Darcy’s theory of the medial caesura, see Caplin (2004,
esp. 98–100). On the EEC, see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 117: “the
most important generic and tonal goal”).
 Unless noted otherwise, I will refer throughout to the Paderewski edition,
reprinted as Chopin (1981).
 For more on the period and the sentence, and their constituent antecedent,
consequent, presentation, and continuation functions, see Caplin (1998,
9–13). For further discussion of the complexities in these definitions,
including the status of these entities as “phrases,” see esp. Hepokoski and
Darcy (2006, 84 n. 14, 106, and 106 n. 8).
Deformation, as I am using it here, is “the stretching of a normative [empha-
sis added; see n. 2 above] procedure to its maximally expected limits or even
beyond them—or the overriding of that norm altogether in order to produce a
calculated expressive effect. . . . The expressive or narrative point lies in the
tension between the limits of a competent listener’s field of generic expecta-
tions and what is made to occur—or not occur—in actual sound at that
moment” (Hepokoski and Darcy [2006, 614–15]). As is the case with “nor-
mative,” “deformation” does not connote aesthetic defectiveness, imperfec-
tion, ugliness, structural unattractiveness, or misguided compositional
execution; it is a technical term describing the treatment of a generic norm,
and it carries no negative subtext. For more on the notion of the “competent
listener” and the importance of stylistic (or generic) competence in interpreting
musical meaning, see Hatten (1994, 10–11, 269–72, and 288 [glossary entry
“competency”]); and, for a more generalized theoretical discussion of symbolic
competence in a semiotic system of interpretation, Hatten (1982, esp. 87–128).
 Klein (2004, 35–44) hears tonal motion toward the subdominant region as
marking a shift to the past tense, with important narrative ramifications.
Similar narrative strategies, including flat-side tonal shifts, occur near the
beginnings of all four Ballades as well as the B♭-Minor Sonata (Op. 35),
the Barcarolle (Op. 60), and the Polonaise-Fantasy (Op. 61). On the latter,
see Newcomb (1994). On the pastoral as an expressive mode, see Hatten
(2004, 53–67).

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      ()
also thematize several ideas (all of them marked in Example 1)
that later prove important to the movement’s structural and
expressive profile: a ^ 6–^
5 appoggiatura gesture, sounded in
various voices and elaborated in various ways; an anapestic, Bee-
thovenian “fate” figure ( /, notated ); a three-
note escape-tone figure (rising whole step, descending minor
third) marked “motive α” in Example 1; and a reference to a march
topic (across the entire theme, but especially in the deliberate quar-
ters of m. 1 and eighths of m. 2) which, here in the minor
mode, might be understood as funereal.36
The deflection to E minor in m. 8 is accompanied by a third
iteration of the basic idea; this event has the effect of anchoring
the theme’s profile more firmly within sentence rhetoric, where
m. 9 can now be understood as initiating a continuation module
(tonally deformational, with regard to its subdominant opening)
that follows from the compound presentation module of mm.
1–8 (basic idea in m. 1, repeated in m. 5). The theme’s sentential
characteristics would appear to point to a cadence at m. 16—
assuming the continuation will be a normative eight measures
long—and, indeed, as shown in Example 2, a dominant-lock in
B minor arrives in m. 14, perhaps signaling that just such an
event, in some form, is imminent. But a cadence never material-
izes: the module appears to become stuck on a composed-out
dominant seventh in B minor (mm. 14–16, with the upward-
spiraling, chromatic spinning-out of the initiatory motive from
the original basic idea), and, following m. 16, it simply abandons
B minor entirely in favor of an enormous expansion that delays
any sense of cadential arrival all the way until the III:HC in m.
39—a half cadence that, of course, functions as the exposition’s
MC. The tonal-rhetorical dissolution around mm. 16–17, along
with the terminal III:HC in m. 39, together invite a retrospective
reinterpretation of m. 9 as the beginning of the sonata’s transition
—a transition we can now understand as one of Sonata Theory’s
dissolving-continuation TR-types and thus also as one fully
engaged with normative Classical options for TR-space. (This
conclusion seems reasonable despite that certain aspects of this TR
do not fit comfortably into any one of Sonata Theory’s TR-cate-
gories: the off-tonic, subdominant opening in particular would be
a normative feature of an independent—i.e., separately thematized
—transition. As a result, this TR may be best regarded as a mixed
transition, or one that combines features of multiple types.)37
 For exhaustive motivic analyses of the movement see, among others,
Walker (1966, 250–54); Samson (1985, 133–36); and Leikin (1992,
175–84). Rosen (1995, 283–85) suggests that the widespread historical
tendency toward demonstrating motivic unity in Chopin’s sonatas may be
a response to Schumann’s famously negative and widely cited review of
Chopin’s B♭-Minor Sonata (in which he suggested that Chopin simply
took four disparate pieces and published them as a four-movement sonata:
“he seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them
together, perhaps thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company
where they might not be considered individually presentable”); see Schu-
mann ([1841] 1988, 173). For further discussion especially of the Schu-
mann, see Petty (1999, 285, 289–90).
 On transition types, see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 95–113: 95 on the
independent type, 101 on the dissolving-restatement types, and 111–13 for
mixed-type transitions).
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But this TR’s Classical teleology does not go undisturbed.
Chopin stages the dominant-lock in mm. 14–16 and its pro-
posed, if unrealized, cadence as a highly problematized
( perhaps desired but unattainable) event that triggers, first, a
destabilization of the sonata narrative, and then, second, a more
significant rupture in the form. The rupture itself yields to a
large narrative digression that, in its context within TR-space,
rejects the dominant-lock in B minor and retreats into a second-
ary narrative stream that can be understood as temporarily sus-
pending the first sonata narrative—the TR proper—via an
excursion into distressed contemplation or into a reconsidera-
tion of how the ongoing sonata trajectory might be emended.
The initial destabilization occurs in m. 17 (refer to Ex. 2),
where Chopin abandons the dominant seventh in B minor by
reinterpreting it as an augmented-sixth chord (m. 16 b. 4) that
proceeds (at m. 17 b. 1) to a chord—probably best understood
as an arrival in B♭ major, locally one of the most distant possi-
ble keys.38 The F♯ bass pedal of mm. 14–16 remains hanging
and unresolved: the half-step descent to F♮ occurs two octaves
higher than the F♯ from which it originates, as if it cannot be
regarded as following directly from the F♯ in a normative voice-
leading sense. This invites an interpretation that the F♯ has
been cast aside, apparently in favor of a deflection (mm. 18–19)
into musical material sharply differentiated from what we have
heard thus far with regard to tonality (the distant B♭ major,
which, one should note, itself proves unstable—pointing, via
the dominant seventh at m. 18 b. 4, toward its own relative, G
minor), rhythm (these measures introduce a triplet figure not
yet heard in this movement), and texture (which becomes
loosely imitative for the first time). The sonata’s trajectory has
thus been nudged, not so gently, into a detour; if these measures
seem to some listeners to introduce into the movement a prob-
lematic discontinuity, this should be regarded as precisely the
expressive aim. Certainly it may be possible to rationalize these
events, but doing so would fail to render their immediate,
surface-level experiential effects any less striking; “attempts to
neutralize” these moments, one might say, “by way of analytical
sophistry will therefore miss the point.”39
These two measures, mm. 17–18, prove only the beginning,
only a preparation for—a gateway into—an even more problem-
atized passage, that of mm. 19–28. At m. 19 (last measure
of Ex. 2, first measure of Ex. 3), the earlier disturbance of m. 17
—the earlier tremor, perhaps—becomes a veritable earthquake:
the dominant seventh of m. 18 b. 4 crashes onto a jarring,
sforzando, fully-diminished seventh chord that denies a
 Hatten (1994, 15) uses the term arrival to describe, as we find here, a rhe-
torically emphasized chord that has no overt impulse to complete a
cadence in the manner of a cadential . For another discussion of the use of
such chords in Chopin, see Klein (2004, 45).
 The quotation is from Daverio (1993, 53), from a discussion of discontinu-
ities in music of Schumann. Certainly Chopin’s B minor–B♭-major rela-
tionship, for example, may be coherent in some sense: Leikin (1992, 178)
unifies the passage by noting the shared third (D) between the two tonic
triads. For a Schenkerian approach to unifying this moment as well as
others in the movement, see also Arnold (1992, 169–211).
     :     .  

 . Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement: TR, mm. 13–18.

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     ()

 . Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement: first atemporal digression (mm. 19–28).

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     :     . 
harmonic resolution onto the local goal of G minor (as men-
tioned, relative minor of the already distant B♭ major) even
while ostensibly supporting the expected F♯–G melodic resolu-
tion in the upper voice (m. 19 b. 1). This diminished seventh
heightens the sense of digression, initiated in mm. 17–18, away
from the structural demands of normative TR-space, intensify-
ing the chromatic crisis by forcibly refusing to allow the TR to
settle into a more Classical, forward-vectored, traditionally tele-
ological sense of directed tonal-formal motion. Indeed, the
diminished-seventh chord itself functions throughout this
movement as an expressively marked signifier for formal rupture
—Chopin, as we will see, uses it again in just such a fashion
later in the movement—and in this instance it opens up a
fissure in the sonata fabric into which Chopin inserts a ten-
measure block of music (mm. 19–28) that appears to step
outside, in a narrative sense, the principal sonata-temporal
action plane. These ten measures can be regarded as searching
for a way back onto the principal sonata pathway. Indeed, they
seem to be groping, with a somewhat incoherent urgency that
may stem from the distress, or at least the temporary indecision,
of a revealed narrative agent. As indicated in Example 3, the
music becomes rhythmically and tonally disoriented within an
environment characterized by markedly heightened tonal com-
plexity. Whereas mm. 17–18 had been occupied with the “fate”
figure derived from m. 1 (as if the TR was somehow looking
back to P as part of an initial effort to reorient itself), mm. 19–20
now become more rhythmically fragmented; observe the rests,
for instance, in the formerly active bass voice. An inverted,
unresolved dominant-seventh chord at m. 20 b. 1 and a func-
tionally ambiguous 6/4 triad at m. 21 b. 4 both point toward an
E♭ tonal center that is slow to materialize. Measures 23–27
suggest a fleeting, insecure D minor ( parallel minor of an
emerging D major—the key, of course, toward which the TR is
headed) and may well be aiming toward the dominant in that
key; the A that materializes in the bass at m. 27 may signify a
fleeting glimpse of the correct tonal pathway—still ill-formed,
still emerging—for which the narrator is anxiously searching.
Measure 28 appears to imply dominant function in G minor,
specifically via the F♯–E♭ dyad on the downbeat, the upward-
leading F♯ in the upper voice on beats 3–4, and the downward-
leading C♮ in the inner voice on the second eighth of b. 3;
should we regard this as a reversion to the abandoned, unre-
solved V7 in G minor from m. 18 b. 4? And neither the upper-
register imitative texture (starting at m. 23) nor the structural
rising line in the bass (F–G–A, on the downbeats of mm. 23, 25,
and 27, respectively—which anchors the rather impressionistic,
fully chromatic left-hand scalar activity) produces a directed voice-
leading motion in a conventional sense: the upper two imitative
voices, rather than entering into a sequential pattern as might
be expected, instead become stuck on A—perhaps again provid-
ing a glimpse of the forthcoming dominant in D major—while
in the bass the pitch content in the rising chromatic lines,
except for the downbeats themselves, remains otherwise
unchanged within each two-measure group. Thus, the entire
passage seems to be reflecting upon the foregoing events and
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
disturbances; it retreats into a space of contemplative interiority
in the wake of the turbulent P–TR events just witnessed in mm.
9–18, even as it also looks forward to what is yet to come (the
S itself ) and ponders the options for a viable sonata continua-
tion.40
As such, mm. 19–28 occupy an atemporal stream, in the
sense in which I defined such streams above. Measure 28, in
turn, can be regarded as the end of this atemporal stream,
because the TR module seems to regain its footing at m. 29—a
moment that Chopin stages as at once the realization of local
harmonic goals and a disjunction from the material that imme-
diately precedes it. As shown in Example 3, m. 29 arrives har-
monically at an E♭-major triad which, as mentioned, had been
obliquely suggested earlier (mm. 20–21) but not fully realized,
and which locally resolves (deceptively) the implied dominant
of G minor in m. 28. At the same time m. 29 reverts rhythmi-
cally to the triplets with which the TR had been occupied
earlier, before the diminished-seventh disjunction, as if some-
how revisiting the events of mm. 17–18; in addition, the E♭ in
the bass at m. 29 b. 1 interrupts, with a disjunctive tritone leap,
the ascending F–G–A structural bass line active in mm. 23–27
(which one might at least surmise was pointing toward B♭, if
not, as mentioned, explicitly foreshadowing D major via its
arrival on a dominant-functioning A). Thus one might read
m. 29 as resuming the rhythmic momentum established in mm.
17–18 but abandoned at m. 19, thereby foregrounding the dis-
junctive qualities that disengage this measure, in a narrative
sense, from the music that immediately precedes it. Measure 29
also resolves the dominant seventh from the end of m. 18 (the
resolution that was aggressively blocked in m. 19) via a deceptive
V7–♭VI move in G minor. In this sense m. 29 can be heard as
continuing the sonata’s TR from where m. 18 left off, before
the m. 19 rupture and subsequent suspension of first-narrative
teleology (mm. 19–28). Indeed, as shown in Example 4, the
large-scale metric structure of mm. 17–33 supports just such a
hearing, in that mm. 19–28 and the two-measure E♭-major
prolongation in mm. 29–30 mask an underlying, normative
four-measure unit. Example 4(a) shows the normative phrase—
the revelation of which requires only the removal of material
and almost no recomposition whatsoever—and interprets the
B♭ in m. 17 and E♭ in m. 29 as ♭VI and ♭II in the gradually
emerging key of D major. Example 4(b) reinserts the two-
measure prolongation of the Neapolitan E♭ in mm. 29–30.
Example 4(c) reinserts mm. 19–28, now understood as an inter-
polation, and shows the metric structure of the exposition
through the onset of S at m. 41 as a series of seven four-
measure phrases, the fifth of which is expanded twice (first by
the interpolation, then by the prolonged E♭-major triad).41
 Morgan (1969, 70–77) has viewed this passage as primarily forward-
looking, in an analysis—much of which intersects with my own in interest-
ing ways—aimed at explicating the tonal-rhythmic function of the
S-launch at m. 41 (and the parallel m. 151 in the second rotation) as a
large, long-delayed structural downbeat.
 See Rosen (1995, 258–78) for a discussion of the “dominion over musical
composition” (261) of the four-measure phrase in Romantic music. In an
     ()

 . Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement: metric structure in the TR.

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     :     . 
The large-scale narrative-structural trajectory of the TR can
now be interpreted retrospectively: the triplets in mm. 17–18
function as a gateway into a narrative digression, while in mm.
29–30 these same triplets function as an analogous gateway out
of the atemporal stream and back to the first narrative (the TR
proper). Measures 19–28 as a whole can be understood as an
example of the kind of atemporal digression I mentioned
earlier, in which a parenthetical interpolation into the sonata-
space proper can be removed without disturbing the sonata’s
larger outlines—something very much along the lines of the
parenthetical spaces William Kinderman and Karol Berger find
to be characteristic in late-period Beethoven (again, more on
this issue presently). Similarly, the rupture at m. 19 b. 1 might
also be thought of as initiating what Hatten would regard as a
shift of level of discourse, one that perhaps marks the emer-
gence or revelation of what Abbate, Klein, and others might
consider to be a separate, overtly narrative, musical voice. In
such a reading the diminished seventh of m. 19 might offer a
musical corollary for the narrator’s persona stepping into the
story, as if the tumult of mm. 16–18 caused that narrator to sud-
denly lose the requisite emotional detachment from the tale
being told. The music would be understood, furthermore, as
shifting temporarily to the indirect discourse of the narrator’s
own voice (the presence of which would correlate with the sec-
ondary, atemporal narrative stream), construed as distinct from
the direct discourse of the temporal stream proper; and the nar-
rator’s presence would be regarded as persisting throughout the
interpolated atemporal module, until m. 29 and the resumption
of the first narrative.42 After emerging from the atemporal
stream, the sonata promptly rights its own ship and resumes
motion toward its normative structural obligations: a dominant-
lock in the relative-major D arrives in short order (mm. 33–38),
at once subsuming the problematized fully-diminished seventh
from m. 19 (via a V♭9 chord in D major—as if signaling that
whatever warning the narrator may have provided has been duly
noted) and driving aggressively, as expected, toward a normative
MC (m. 39) and two measures of caesura-fill (mm. 39–40).43
analysis with interesting temporal ramifications, Rosen hears Romantic-
period departures from the four-measure Classical norm not as phrase
expansions in the Classical sense but rather as hypermetric “fermatas” func-
tioning as “expressive suspense” (262).
 Abbate (1991) and Hatten (1994) are among those who have sought to
correct the notion that music cannot project the voice of a narrator, which
is normally thought of as detached from the story it relates—by way of,
among other factors, a discourse that resides in the past tense. For a cogent
summary of the issues involved followed by an analytical application, see
Klein (2004, 23–27 and 35–44). Klein has also observed that the kinds of
ruptures, temporal deflections, and other discontinuities that we find here
in Op. 58 are part and parcel of what makes Chopin’s music sound narra-
tive, or what makes readers seek narratives in this music (see p. 39: “In
Chopin’s music action is often suspended so that the narrator may indulge
in the poetry of evocation and also contemplate a scene from the past”).
 The most normative option in the Classical sonata at the MC-point is a
brief rest in all voices (a “general-pause gap”) before the onset of S; almost
as common—and even more common in Romantic sonatas—is a technique
in which the gap is filled in, and the MC linked to S, with activity in one or
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
The second such shift into an atemporal stream appears after
the MC and in the middle of what proves to be a complex sec-
ondary theme zone. Chopin chooses for S a lyrical nocturne in
D major that, in quintessentially Chopinesque fashion, signifies
a desired, idealized expressive state—an Arcadia, perhaps, lost
to the past and no longer attainable in present reality. In this
sense S exhibits consistencies with many other of Chopin’s
interior themes in his large works, numerous of which he sets as
nocturnes or pastorales and all of which, as Klein has observed,
can be construed as signifying “a difference from the ontological
reality of the surrounding musical material: [they are] past as
opposed to present, interior as opposed to exterior, there as
opposed to here,” and so on.44 Here S comprises a modulating
sixteen-measure sentence, with symmetrical eight-measure pre-
sentation and continuation modules. Its most noteworthy
feature may be its continuation module, which is itself also sen-
tential—with basic ideas in mm. 49–50 and 51–52, followed by
its own continuation in 53–56—and which problematizes the
S-space, in striking fashion, by suppressing tonal motion
toward the generically requisite cadence (the EEC) in D major.
The continuation’s own initial basic idea (mm. 49–50) begins
off the tonic (even while the melody opens on ^3, F♯) and pro-
ceeds back to it through a fifths cycle (F♯–B–E–A–D in the
bass) that prefigures an eventual D-major cadential arrival; the
second statement of the basic idea (mm. 51–52) then begins off
the tonic again (again with the melody on F♯), but this time
never manages to return to it, instead staging the bass D at the
end of m. 52 as ♭^6 in F♯ minor. This last move initiates an
unexpected tonal swerve into the key of the minor dominant, F♯
minor, followed by an arrival, at m. 56, on a full-fledged v:PAC,
which, one would presume in this context, must function as a
normative, albeit strongly negatively inflected, EEC, following
a tonally migratory S. While this series of events may be surpris-
ing and expressively rich—the Arcadian hope and tranquility of
the initial D-major, nocturnal S overturned in favor of a dark,
portentous shift toward a minor-dominant EEC, producing a
thoroughly tragic (i.e., minor–minor) expositional tonal plan—
none of it is necessarily unusual, in a strictly historical, sonata-
structural sense; tonally migratory S zones have their share of
Classical precedents, and the minor dominant is itself the
second-level default key choice for S in a minor-mode sonata.45
more of the voices. The link functions to “articulate with sound the most
important expressive obligation of this moment: the representation of the
energy-loss that bridges the vigorous end of TR (MC) to what is frequently
the low-intensity beginning of S” (Hepokoski and Darcy [2006, 40;
emphasis original]).
 Klein (2004, 32). On the meaning of the nocturne, see also Petty (1999,
286). Klein also notes that S’s nocturne topic can invite a gendered reading
of the sonata, where the nocturne signifies a femininity or a feminine
subject whose fate is inextricably linked to the sonata-narrative fate of S
itself. On the gendering of Chopin, see also Kallberg (1996, 30–86).
 On Classical precedents for the modulating S, see Hepokoski and Darcy
(2006, 120, 179). The referential example is Beethoven’s C-minor Coriolan
Overture, Op. 62, in which S modulates (as in Chopin’s Op. 58) from the
relative major to the minor dominant, E♭ major to G minor, cadencing in
G minor (in a v:PAC EEC) in m. 102. The phenomenon is common
      ()

What is unusual here—astonishing indeed, given Classical

sonata practice—is the way Chopin, as soon as he achieves the
presumed v:PAC EEC, rejects the tragic move to the minor
dominant, tonally reneges, and reopens the key of D major. A
rhetorically emphatic, upward-leaping octave in the melody in
m. 56 returns to the same F♯—now understood as ^3 in D major
—from which several of the foregoing sentential basic ideas had
departed (see mm. 41, 49, and 51). An A pedal in the bass—
now ^ 5 in D major—simultaneously appears and persists for five
measures, such that we might understand it not simply as a
pedal, but a dominant pedestal, from which the melody’s F♯ can
stand and confidently herald the rejection of F♯ minor and the
impending approach of another cadence—perhaps a corrected
EEC in D major. A new theme emerges, one that we can now
hear as a proposed replacement for the original S (now S2,
where the previous S is retrospectively S1)—a new nocturne in
D major, as it were, to replace the original nocturne that strayed
into F♯ minor and proved not up to the task of securing the
expected cadence. S1 and S2 even share numerous features in
addition to their melodic openings on F♯, as if S2 literally
recomposes S1 right before our ears: both include an upper-
neighbor G (downbeat of m. 57; compare m. 41); both contain
a^6–^5 appoggiatura figure (compare m. 58 with mm. 43, 47–48,
and 55; the gesture originates in P, as mentioned); and both
exhibit sentential organization—S2 compresses its presentation
module into four measures instead of eight, as if accelerating
the structural pace in anticipation of the EEC—in which the
continuation modules are themselves sentential. But, just as
S1’s continuation problematized the S-space and initiated the
modulation to F♯ minor, S2’s continuation introduces subtle
changes that have larger expressive consequences. As Example 5
shows, eighth rests appear in m. 61 in the left hand and inter-
rupt the perpetual motion of the nocturnal accompaniment
figure that had persisted throughout the previous twenty mea-
sures (the only exception in that entire span was the rest in
m. 54, which provided space for the fioritura right-hand out-
burst, itself a preparation gesture anticipating the looming
minor-mode cadence). In its place appears a halting gesture
that invokes, because of its gap-producing rests, the eighteenth-
century musical-rhetorical figure known as the suspiratio. 46 At
the same time, the right hand sounds a typically lyric, bel canto-
style melody for which the Chopin nocturnes are so well
known, but now, for the first time in the S zone, Chopin
doubles the line in octaves.47 These rhythmic and textural

enough in the Romantic era: among others, the S in Chopin’s Cello

Sonata in G Minor, Op. 65, makes the same modulation, from the relative
B♭ major to the minor dominant, D minor (v:PAC EEC in m. 92); the S
in Brahms’s Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5, modulates—with very differ-  . Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first
ent hermeneutic implications—from the relative major, A♭, to D♭ major movement: S2 continuation, mm. 61–65.
(♭VI).
 On the suspiratio and, more generally, catalogs of musical-rhetorical figures changes imbue the next four measures with a sense of longing
in the seventeenth-century Figurenlehre, see Bartel (1997) and Buelow
for a moment of satisfaction—finally, a (corrected) EEC in D
(2001).
 References to Chopin’s affinity for the bel canto style abound in the Chopin major—which seems close at hand; even the melody’s twice-
literature; for a detailed discussion see, e.g., Samson (1985, 81–99). repeated attempt to complete a D-major octave line correlates

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     :     . 
expressively with a sigh (especially its series of two-note appog-
giatura figures on almost every beat)—as if signifying a long,
calming, reassured exhalation.48
This octave line’s first attempt at completion stalls at ^2
(m. 62), leaping back up to D and starting over again at m. 63
—signaling, as mentioned, a second sentence embedded within
the first, as a sentential continuation module. Measures 63–64
comprise an embellished variation of mm. 61–62 (basic idea
restated), and nothing yet seems structurally out of the ordinary
—even while added layers of signification (including the addi-
tional rhythmic activity and fuller texture) intensify and deepen
the octave line’s desire for completion. But in mm. 64–65 the
music veers off course, using, in a striking way, the same signi-
fier employed earlier in the movement for a rupture: the
diminished chord in the second half of m. 64 gives way, at the
downbeat of m. 65 (last measure of Ex. 5, first measure of
Ex. 6), not to a tonic triad in D major as might have been
expected, but instead to another fully-diminished seventh, cre-
ating a harmonic disjunction that, within its formal-functional
context—the initial gesture in a sentential continuation module
—sounds rather startling. The diminished seventh at m. 65 b. 1
shares no common tones and has no apparent functional rela-
tionship with that at the end of m. 64, and it undermines an
anticipated and more rhetorically normative viio –I6 resolution
in D major (which occurred at the parallel moment earlier in
the presentation module, mm. 62–63). Thus it can be regarded
as sharing structural and expressive functions with the earlier,
also markedly disjunct fully-diminished seventh at m. 19 b. 1,
where the chord at m. 65, like that of m. 19, may be heard as
rupturing the sonata trajectory. Whereas the earlier event rup-
tured a turbulent TR-space, this one ruptures an already dis-
turbed S-space and initiates another digression (in this case mm.
65–75) into what, again within the definitions offered above, can
be construed as a secondary, atemporal narrative stream.
This second digression of the movement recasts Classical
generic norms in a conspicuously Romantic fashion. Some
commentators have recognized that a certain kind of “rewind-
ing” of the sonata clock in order to retrace previously navigated
paths is a familiar, essential facet of many Classical S zones; the
strategy functions therein as an expansion device or a delaying
tactic that rhetorically emphasizes the eventual closure provided
when S finally achieves a long-impending cadence. One of the
most common local-level manifestations of the technique is
Schmalfeldt’s “one more time” technique—usually carried out
via a repeated cadential progression on the way to an important
structural juncture such as the EEC.49 Clearly the events of
mm. 65–75 exhibit just such a concern with delaying the
 Klein (2004, 30) hears the descending half-step figures in the bass of the
fourth Ballade’s coda similarly, as sighing gestures.
 Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 150–79) provide a detailed discussion of the
available options for extending S. See also Caplin (1998, 97–124), and, for
a more extended discussion of the “one more time technique,” Schmalfeldt
(1992). On the temporal meaning of these kinds of cadential repetitions as
“rewindings” or shifts “back in time,” see Schmalfeldt (1992, 3–6); Caplin
(1998, 103); and Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 150).
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
promised cadence. But in addition, especially given the prece-
dent of the m. 19 rupture and the subsequent interpolation in
mm. 19–28, we might also hear these measures as concerned
not so much with Classical cadential postponement as with sig-
nifying a more overt discursive shift—a shift colored with
Romantic aesthetics, in that it produces another temporary ces-
sation of, or at least a digression from, the first-narrative stream.
Measures 65–75 thus set aside the sonata’s obligatory teleologi-
cal processes—and, indeed, they can be heard as setting aside a
more normative version of the sentential continuation that
might have been expected here in place of what we actually hear
on the sounding surface—in favor of another prolonged narra-
tive diversion, reflection, or contemplation.
Many of the surface musical details in mm. 65–75, marked
in Example 6, invite just such a reading and can be regarded as
signifying a detour into a narrative stream in which the protago-
nist becomes preoccupied with reminiscent longing. The dis-
junction at m. 65 b. 1, for example, may be heard as signifying a
crisis of confidence, one in which the narrator’s voice—dis-
tinctly audible here via the diminished-seventh rupture, just as
at m. 19—intrudes diegetically into the tale and uses pre-MC
material (thus shifting discursively into present-tense exterior-
ity) to consider or contemplate the plausibility of the sonata’s
Arcadian S ( past-tense interiority) and its idealized objective,
the D-major EEC.50 Also at m. 65 the distinctive left-hand,
three-eighth-note-plus-rest groupings characteristic of the fore-
going S2 material immediately disappear, as does any trace of
S2’s distinctive descending octave line. Both are replaced
instead by wandering sixteenths in the right hand (see mm. 66–
68), which recall the sixteenths from the first interpolation (see
mm. 19–21) or perhaps those of the earlier dominant-lock and
caesura-fill (mm. 31–40)—any of which, of course, derive
directly from the descending arpeggiated sixteenths that opened
the movement; and by another anapestic rhythmic figure in
mm. 69–70, which recalls the fate motive from mm. 17–18,
itself also derived from the movement’s first measure. An
ensuing fifths cycle and sequential appoggiatura figures in the
upper voice (mm. 66–67) lead normatively to a cadential
module (mm. 68–69), as if a return to the first-level sonata-
temporal stream is close at hand, but m. 70 undercuts the
expected closure with a swerve onto the dominant of B minor—
thus initiating another fifths cycle (mm. 70–71, with the same
upper-voice appoggiatura figures) and prolonging the narrator’s
 Clearly the narrative reading proposed here could also be construed as
having nationalist implications, where the narrator’s (Chopin’s?) own
apprehensions raise inner doubts about the attainability of a Utopian goal
(Polish nationhood?). Such extramusical specificity should be entered into
cautiously, with a full understanding that the music remains narrative—in
the sense that it constructs a narrative of expressive states—with or without
direct references to historical or other tales. Note also in this regard Edward
T. Cone’s (1974) famous warning not to confuse the composer with the
virtual persona in the music that projects the narrating voice; on this
problem, see also the recent discussion in Klein (2004, 25–26). Among the
numerous sources on Chopin’s nationalism, see Kallberg (1990), Milewski
(1999), Pękacz (2000), and Goldberg (2004). See also n. 62 below.
     ()

 . Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement: second atemporal digression (mm. 65–75).

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     :     . 
indecision.51 Another cadential module emerges in m. 72: this
time the narrator regains the high tonic D at m. 74 (the same D
that initiated the octave lines in mm. 61 and 63), via the slowly
rising upper voice in mm. 72–73. This reclaimed high D finally
opens the door to the long-awaited D-major EEC, and the
octave descent to the tonic in mm. 74–75 projects a striking
sense of finality—as if the narrator’s doubt has finally been
overcome, or at least temporarily pushed aside. The final octave
line opens over a cadential chord just as the bottom drops out
of the texture, and the unadorned thirds and sixths that follow
in strict rhythmic unison signify a confident, utterly satisfying
completion (“at long last”) to what has been an arduous
journey, fraught with discontinuities. The EEC arrives at
m. 76, initiating the sonata’s C zone and segueing smoothly
back into the first-narrative stream.
Relative to the rest of the movement, both of the exposition’s
digressions into alternative, atemporal narrative streams may be
best understood as structural interpolations. Interpolation in this
context is a formal-functional term (in the sense that primary
theme or transition are formal-functional terms) for, as men-
tioned, a parenthetical insertion that may be regarded as lying
outside the temporal stream of the first narrative. Atemporal
interpolations such as Chopin’s appear to be common structural
and expressive strategies in Romantic sonatas and other genres
in the Romantic period. Their presence in the music of Schu-
mann, for example, has been noted by John Daverio, who dis-
cusses at length the Im Legendenton interpolation near the
beginning of the recapitulation in the first movement of the
Fantasie in C Major, Op. 17; Carl Dahlhaus likewise observes
that Schumann interpolates an Andante before the develop-
ment section in the Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54,
“bringing to a halt the formal process and sequestering it in a
momentary idyll.”52 And, returning to another point men-
tioned earlier, the strategy seems to begin emerging with consis-
tency around the time of late-period Beethoven and Schubert,
both of whom appear to signify multiple narrative-temporal
streams using shifts from minor to major, striking modulations
or other harmonic deflections, sharp thematic contrasts, or
expressive turns toward the pastoral. As Hatten observes,
“Tonal music has an independent capacity to cue various tem-
poral realms by means of sharp musical oppositions.”53 William
Kinderman has described the markedly contrasting spaces thus
created in late-period Beethoven as “parenthetical enclosures”
 Some might construe the fifths cycles here not necessarily as signaling an
impending cadence but as signifying “atemporality” in a more literal sense:
for Karol Berger, some circles of fifths musically manifest a pre-modern,
circular approach to time (as exemplified in music of Bach) that stands in
fundamental opposition to the modern, linear approach of the modern era
(as exemplified in music of Mozart). See Berger (2007, esp. 10–12): “The
circle of fifths is, well, exactly that: a trajectory—broken by one diminished
fifth to confine it within a single diatonic scale and thus keep it from modu-
lating—that, if followed long enough, will get you back to where you had
started from” (10).
 Daverio (1993); Dahlhaus ([1980] 1989, 141).
 Hatten (2004, 55).
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
cueing temporal disjunctions, naming as examples the “et incar-
natus est” from the Missa solemnis, Op. 123, and the m. 9
Adagio in the first movement of the Piano Sonata in E Major,
Op. 109—the latter an interpolation entered into, like
Chopin’s, through a disjunctive fully-diminished seventh chord
that, according to Kinderman, “gives the effect of a suspension
of time in the contrasting [Adagio] section, or the enclosure of
one time within another.”54 Inclinations toward such strategies
may well appear even earlier: Berger finds that Beethoven was
fond of similar procedures in his early- and middle-period
music, and we may even be able to find them earlier still in
Mozart, whose Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 332, for example,
deploys a P2-theme (mm. 13–22) expressively marked in regis-
ter and texture and thus perhaps signifying a shift of level of dis-
course and concomitant suspension of temporality not unlike
those in Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin.55
All such interpolations can be understood as stemming natu-
rally from contemporary Romantic aesthetics, embodying in
music a Romantic reaction against what Karol Berger has
described as one of the hallmarks of the Classical style: a capac-
ity for signifying in music a linear, forward-vectored, teleologi-
cal trajectory. According to Berger, this capacity was one of the
key indicators of the mid-eighteenth-century transition to a
modern, Classical style from an earlier, pre-modern, Baroque
style (which he regards as cyclic, or circular), just as the intro-
duction of extended passages of atemporality and the attendant
suspension of the linear narrative help mark the early-nine-
teenth-century move from musical Classicism to Romanticism.
“Music had no sooner acquired its ‘classical’ ability to represent
linear time, than it began ‘romantically’ to undermine and
question that ability by exploring moments of timelessness.”56
In this sense, Chopin’s use in Op. 58 of atemporal streams to
suspend the underlying Classical sonata structure places this
movement, and his compositional strategies more broadly, cate-
gorically in the Romantic mainstream. Berger’s characterization
of atemporality in late-period Beethoven, in fact, describes just
as well features I have already observed in Chopin’s exposition:
The normal flow of time, characterized by a fairly regular and
orderly succession of events and endowed with a clear sense of
 Kinderman (2009, 239–52 and 269–79 [240 for “gives the effect”]). See
also Kinderman (1985, 1986, and 1988). On the interpolation in Op. 109,
see also Berger (2007, 318–29 and 386–87 n. 6), who characterizes it as a
“written-out keyboard improvisation, both motivically undefined and
uncertainly groping for harmonic direction” (323); and Hatten (2004,
169), who cites it as one of the most celebrated of extreme rhetorical ges-
tures, one in which the harmony and voice-leading ruptures brought on by
the diminished-seventh chord and the simultaneous shifts in tempo,
meter, rhythm, and texture together signify a “gesture of radical annihila-
tion.”
 On early- and middle-period Beethoven specifically, see Berger (2007,
293–318), who comments—as have many others—on the well-known
oboe interpolation in the recapitulation of the Symphony No. 5 in C
Minor, Op. 67.
 Berger (2007, 340). Berger’s use of the terms “time” and “temporality” are
somewhat different from my own usage, although his larger point, on the
relationship of Classicism to Romanticism, stands.
      ()
tonal direction, is interrupted and then resumed. Inside the
interruption . . . , the normal laws governing musical time and
space, the sense of directed motion and the concomitant sense of
change and time passing, are suspended. . . . [This] alternative
world is not one of action and change but of contemplation of
the eternal and timeless.57
Viewed in the wider context of Romantic ideology, Chopin’s
movement reflects the Romantics’ attraction to fractured, frag-
mented Classical structures; the fascination with such forms
stood among the central aesthetic impulses in an age defined at
once by restlessness and skepticism toward eighteenth-century
cultural and artistic norms and by an objectified admiration of a
long-lost paradise—that rural, unspoiled, uncomplicated (and
highly idealized and completely fictitious) golden age or place
known as Arcadia.58 This impulse was explicated by, among
others, the German critic Friedrich Schlegel, who proposed a
system of critical categories for positively valuing features of
Romantic art in which others found only disintegration and
decay.59 Schlegel’s categories included what he called the ara-
besque (Arabeske) and the fragment: the former is a digressive
interruption in an artwork otherwise whole and intact, and the
latter is a complete work that remains in some sense imperfect
or incomplete—a fragment of a larger whole that is no longer
present. Schlegel borrowed the concept of the arabesque from
eighteenth-century art theory (in which it describes, in Greco-
Roman or Renaissance painting, for example, an ornamental
style wherein long, flowing, curving lines create formal distor-
tion or grotesquerie and, in the most extreme cases, threaten to
obscure or overwhelm the main image) and used it, especially in
the sense of its disrupting an orderly arrangement of events, to
explain episodic structural features in the modern novel (the
Roman). In the context I have established here, such features
would be regarded as atemporal or as disengaged from the prin-
cipal temporality of the first-narrative level.60 The fragment is a
Romantic literary genre originating in the late-eighteenth-
century fashion for publishing partial works (fragments) of
poetry or prose; all fragments, according to Schlegel, regardless
of their outward form, have a certain self-surpassing quality
(they invoke a past that occurred before their actual beginning
and a future that will continue after their actual end), and all
suggest themselves as having been torn from some larger whole
(where any completeness they may appear to exhibit derives not
from conventional structural mechanics but from their infinite
openness at both formal boundaries, beginning and end).61
 Berger (2007, 330).
 The following draws on Daverio (1993, 19–88), Rosen (1995, 95–236),
and Hatten (2004, 53–67).
 What follows draws on Daverio (1993, esp. 19–47).
 In Schlegel the narrative-temporal meanings remain mostly implicit,
although they occasionally rise to the foreground, as when he equates the
arabesque with the Greek parabasis, a rhetorical device (definitive in Greek
comedy) in which a speech by the chorus interrupts and suspends the nar-
rative (see Daverio [1993, esp. 28–32]).
 On the paradoxical, closed yet open structural nature of the fragment form,
see Rosen (1995, 50–51) and Satyendra (1997, 193–94). On the fragment
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Fragments and arabesques are both fundamentally Romantic:
both are anticlassical and thus artistically modern; both overtly
renounce enlightened, Classical values of precision and clarity
in favor of ambiguity, incompleteness, and open-ended expres-
sivity; and both are liberating, in that they free the Romantics
from the Classical artistic enterprise—including Classical
notions of what form and structure should look like in a well-
made artwork.62
Chopin’s interpolations overlap with both categories: each
comprises a digressive interruption (an arabesque) in an
ongoing narrative-structural process, and each may be under-
stood as a fragment of some larger, inaudible musical whole.
Both intrude abruptly by way of fully-diminished seventh
chords, as if they open in the middle of a harmonic progression
—not the progression in progress before their appearance, but
some other progression, perhaps even from some other piece.63
Both, but especially the first, end as if remaining unfinished:
the sudden deviation at m. 29 to the E♭-major triad leaves the
first interpolation hanging and incomplete, implying it might
be continued, but not necessarily in a stream audible to the lis-
tener.64 Both seem to have surface features borrowed
from another genre—especially the nineteenth-century lyric
character piece, the genre that perhaps best manifests the
Romantic fragment in music.65 And both break the sonata into
disjointed pieces, in effect shattering the well-made, logical
Classical form. The movement can thus be regarded, like many
other Romantic sonatas from late-period Beethoven onward, as
a musical manifestation of an ancient architectural ruin—the
more generally, see Daverio (1993, 49–88), Rosen (1995, 41–115), and
Satyendra (1997, 193–99). For nonmusical sources, see Levinson (1986)
and Janowitz (1998).
 This need for freedom and the need to question established values grow
out of—as do many aspects of the Romantic worldview—the radical crisis
of confidence in the wake of the French Revolution. The crisis was pro-
longed by waves of political and cultural upheavals across Europe in first
half of the nineteenth century, including, and particularly relevant for
Chopin, the failed anti-Russian insurrection in Poland in 1830–31 and the
revolutions of 1848. For more, see Kallberg (1988), Berger (1994), and
Goldberg (2004); see also n. 50, above. For a useful nonmusical source on
the messianic Polish Romantic nationalism of the period, see Walicki
(1992).
 Daniel Chua (2009, 610–14) hears a similar strategy in the Cavatina of
Beethoven’s String Quartet in B♭ major, Op. 130, at m. 42, which he reads
not as a logical continuation of the Cavatina’s central section but rather as a
temporal interruption (a backward-looking “memory”), achieved by bor-
rowing, and commenting on, music from another piece (in this case the
Piano Sonata in A♭ major, Op. 110).
 For a discussion of similar fragmentation strategies in music of Liszt,
including an emphasis on sustained denial of tonal resolution, lack of deci-
sive syntactic closure, and weakly articulated formal boundaries, see Satyen-
dra (1997, 185–97).
 In this sense the interpolations can be regarded as an attempt by Chopin to
overcome ( perceived?) generic limitations of the sonata genre and mix
within it aspects of the Romantic character piece. Generic blending has
long been recognized as an important facet of Chopin’s work: see Samson
(1985, 213–31).
     :     .  

Classical style in ruins, perhaps, wrecked not by the forces of

nature but by the forces of a new artistic spirit.66

Consider now the rest of the movement. As mentioned, it

exhibits a fully normative approach to sonata organization
known in Sonata Theory as the Type 2 sonata. Example 7 pro-
vides a generic diagram of the Type 2 organization; Example 8
maps the form of Op. 58/I specifically. The Type 2 layout is
different from that of the more familiar version of the sonata
form, Sonata Theory’s Type 3 sonata, the latter exhibiting a
triple-rotational design with expositional, developmental, and
recapitulatory rotations.67 Type 2 and Type 3 match one
another in the organization of their first (expositional) rotation,

 . The Type 2 sonata (adapted from Hepokoski and Darcy [2006, 354, Figure 17.1]).
but important differences emerge in the post-expositional
space. There the Type 2 schema comprises only one rotation
through the P–TR–S–C modular cycle: the second rotation
usually opens, sometimes after a short linking passage, with P
material or some elaborated reference to it, always off the tonic
and usually in the key in which the exposition just ended
(usually V or III); it then immediately expands into more explic-
itly developmental, modulatory activity based on P and TR,
normatively in that order. The second rotation’s first half ( pre-
MC half ) typically concludes by retracing the end of the exposi-
tion’s TR: a crux, the point at which a recapitulation rejoins the
events of the exposition, arrives just before the MC, after which
comes a series of correspondence measures—bar-for-bar restate-
ments ( perhaps at a different tonal level) of measures from the
exposition—that drive to the MC. There follows a reprise of S,
now in the tonic; the Essential Structural Closure, or ESC—
structurally parallel to the exposition’s EEC; the closing
module, C; and sometimes an extra-rotational coda. Note that
this means the point of tonal return to the tonic occurs in the
middle of the rotation, coinciding not with the start of the P
module but rather with the start of S. This event in particular
seems to be the source of most of the confusion surrounding the
Type 2 sonata and attempts to interpret it hermeneutically:
many have misconstrued Type 2 movements because of a wide-
spread insistence on the presence in a sonata of a “recapitula-
tion,” where this term means a simultaneous arrival of the

 For a well-developed discussion of the ruins aesthetic in the eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries (and for a reading of the first movement of Beet-
hoven’s String Quartet in E♭ major, Op. 127, as gradually consuming an
ancient architectural ruin in a natural landscape—as in a Romantic land-
scape painting), see McKee (1999, 18–21). On the Romantic interest in
ruins and its relevance for fragment aesthetics, see also Daverio (1993, 42–
47), Rosen (1995, 142–50), and Satyendra (1997, 193, 204). For a nonmu-
sical source, see MacFarland (1991).
 Sonata theory identifies five sonata types—“interrelated families of musical
processes that are generically appropriate for similar types of compositional
situations” (Hepokoski and Darcy [2006, 343]). Types 2 and 3 are dis-
cussed here; the Type 1 sonata is often known as the “sonata without devel-
opment” (or “sonatina”); the Type 4 is widely known as the sonata-rondo;
and the Type 5 is the Classical (Mozartean) first-movement concerto form.
See Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 343–52 [on Type 1 sonatas], 388–429
[Type 4 sonatas], and 430–602 [Type 5 sonatas]).

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     ()

home key and the P-theme.68 But in a Type 2 sonata such an

event never occurs, thus rendering the term “recapitulation”
inappropriate for describing what happens in the second half of
a Type 2 movement. As shown in Example 7, and as Hepokoski
and Darcy have discussed, the best strategy is to avoid the term
altogether when interpreting Type 2 forms, referring instead to
a “development” space and a space of “tonal resolution.”69
Chopin’s second rotation in Op. 58 engages with a fully nor-
mative, albeit Romantically fragmented, version of Type 2 post-
expositional space. The rotation opens at m. 99 by diving head-

 . Formal organization (two rotations) in Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement.
long, in parallel octaves, into two full measures of P. The
theme’s distinctive opening arpeggiation now projects—as is
normative in the Type 2 form—the key of the dominant, F♯:
compare the arpeggiation here, G–F♯–E–C♯–F♯ (Paderewski
edition), with the pickup to m. 1.70 B minor briefly asserts itself
(in m. 99, perhaps now as subdominant of F♯) before the theme
veers strongly back toward an F♯ tonal center (mm. 100–01).71
Preceding these events is a short, five-measure transitional-link
typical of many Type 2 s; this one’s basis in a motive from the
exposition’s closing module (“C2.2” in Ex. 8; compare the left
hand in mm. 88 and 94) lends the effect of C lingering briefly
before giving way to the authoritative opening of the second
rotation proper. Following mm. 99–100 is a developmental
space comprising the normative, elaborated pass through P and
TR, in this case also integrating C2.2 material, which continues
to linger insistently (see m. 101 where the P dialogically
engages C2.2-derived sixteenths). By m. 111 P-based material
resumes control, assertively signaling the onset of the rotation’s
 On recapitulations (so defined) as crucial for sonata forms, see, e.g.,
Webster (1986, 127) and Webster (2001), both on the notion of the
“double return”: the simultaneous return of the tonic key and the P theme.
For a critique, see Hepokoski (2002) and Hepokoski and Darcy (2006,
242–49). See also Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 355–72), for a review of
the scholarship on the Type 2 sonata as well as a summary of some of the
( problematic) interpretive claims made about it.
 Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 353–55).
 Some editions, including the autograph and the first German edition
(Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, ?1845; plate no. 7260), show an arpeggia-
tion, F♯–E–C♯–A♯–F♯, at m. 98 b. 4–m. 99 b. 1. The essential point is that
the P-launch at this point is in the key of the dominant.
 That the tonic B minor retains a presence here, however fleeting, suggests
the possibility that the movement may be in dialogue with the “expanded
Type 1” sonata instead of the Type 2. In such a view m. 99 might be
regarded as initiating the recapitulation, with mm. 110 (TR) and 137 (first
crux) continuing it and mm. 101–09 and 117–36 as representing expanded
developmental modules. Expanded Type 1 forms are similar to Type 2s:
the crucial difference is the tonic launch of the P theme in the post-exposi-
tional second rotation in the Type 1, and—following from this—the par-
ticipation of its entire second rotation in “the psychology of recapitulation”
(“It is a recapitulation, but one with a developmentally expanded P–TR
zone”); see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 350). For this movement I favor
the Type 2 reading: the articulation of tonic B minor at m. 99 is too weak
to initiate a tonic-oriented, recapitulatory rotation; and the presence of the
dominant F♯ minor in the opening arpeggiation ( pickup to m. 99) and
again in mm. 100–01 engages strongly with the nontonic P-incipit-launch
normative at the outset of rotation 2 in a Type 2 form. The movement’s
expositional repeat (m. 92) would also be highly deformational in a Type 1
(even an expanded Type 1) sonata.

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     :     . 
TR module (recall that P and TR shared similar openings in
rotation 1).
But P material subsequently disappears completely from the
texture at m. 117, at the sforzando advent of a dominant-
seventh chord in D♭ that abruptly truncates an ongoing senten-
tial continuation module after only two measures (the sentence
in question begins with a four-measure presentation in m. 111;
the continuation follows in m. 115). The formal and expressive
functions of this event and the twenty-measure module that
follows in mm. 117–36 are hardly unambiguous. Is m. 117 an
extraordinarily deformational MC, misplaced with respect to
the normative hypermeter, and what follows supposed to be the
tonal resolution space? I would suggest that both can be com-
pellingly interpreted as another manifestation of Chopin’s frac-
tured, Romanticized treatment of temporality, as I have
outlined it above. That is, mm. 117–36 are most likely best
understood as the movement’s third atemporal interpolation.
The immediate dynamic reversal at m. 117 (the sforzando on
the downbeat reverses instantly to piano) cues a rupture that
invokes a separate narrative voice—again the voice of the narra-
tor, perhaps, or at the very least a voice spoken from outside the
first-narrative stream. What follows can be regarded as a deflec-
tion into an atemporal stream, where the next twenty measures
are at once disengaged from the immediately preceding material
with regard to register, dynamic level, texture, and topic. These
measures are controlled thematically almost entirely by the har-
monically static, upper-register, dominant-pedal-supported—
and, very importantly, lyrical and emotionally idealized—S2
presentation material (compare mm. 57–60). This is the very
music that rescued, in astonishing fashion, the earlier S1 from
its swerve into F♯ minor at m. 56. The introduction of this
material—in this location, in rotation 2 in a Type 2 sonata—is
almost certainly best regarded not as logically continuing an
ongoing sonata-rotational process but rather as contravening
the fundamental sonata principle of rotational ordering;
Chopin has skipped over the S1 music in favor of a move
directly to S2.72 The S2 music can thus be regarded as remain-
ing external to the sonata’s first-narrative stream; together, all
the foregoing factors invite an interpretation of the passage as a
dream-like vision of the rescue music, temporally estranged
 In accordance with the inherent temporality of the sonata form (and with
the views expounded in Sonata Theory—see Hepokoski and Darcy [2006,
205–20]), even sonata developments should be understood as normatively
rotational, not arbitrary, with respect to the order in which they sound their
themes: the sonata form depends for its meaning on an ordering of events
in time, and this order, in any part of the form, is not expressively neutral.
Moreover, the Type 2 sonata’s double rotational schema dictates that one
should “normally expect no elements of S or C to intrude” in the develop-
mental space (the first half of rotation 2); if S and C do intrude, “we would
be dealing with an exceptional procedure (an expressive deformation) that
would call for a special explanation” (Hepokoski and Darcy [2006, 378]).
Samson (1985, 136) has also called attention to the problematic nature of
m. 117, averring (in a comment that has interesting temporal ramifications)
that the S2.1 material that intrudes here “weakens the sense of flow” in the
development, “the only unsure step in [an otherwise] masterly presentation.”
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
from the sonata proper, interpolated anachronistically into the
sonata’s second rotation. The vision is, furthermore, hazy and
incompletely realized, in the sense that the S2 continuation
module (from m. 61) goes missing and the entire passage strug-
gles to escape the troubling reality of un-Romanticized P-space;
that is to say, almost the entire block of music is controlled on
a middleground level by a modulatory scheme (D♭ major,
mm. 119–22, to E♭ major, 125–28, to C minor, 133–34) that
composes out one of the important motives from the P-theme,
motive α in mm. 1–2 (refer to Ex. 1). We are invited to imagine
a narrator dreaming of the lost Arcadian ideal, all the while
struggling to overcome continuing doubts about its viability.73
Narratively speaking, the appearance of a third interpolation
at this point in the movement may not come as a complete sur-
prise, as the music sets up its appearance according to narrative
precedents established earlier. Hints of instability in mm. 99–
117 imply that the sonata may be veering toward another
rupture: the C2.2-derived sixteenths competing with the P-
based music in mm. 101–10 suggest a rather agitated defiance
of the normative formal paradigm (i.e., a strictly P-based devel-
opmental module); and when the TR module at m. 111 nudges
the C2.2 material out of the way, the module only manages to
proceed as far as m. 117 before the dominant seventh and its
attendant multidimensional rupture denies the expected arrival
of a more normative crux and the associated correspondence
measures. Together this sequence of events comprises an
expressive cycle—intimations of a disruption in the first narra-
tive followed by a more significant formal rupture and deflection
into an alternative narrative stream—heard twice already, in
both halves of the foregoing expositional rotation. There, in the
P–TR cycle, the shifts to the subdominant in m. 9 and B♭
major in m. 17 signified disturbances that prefigured the m. 19
rupture and subsequent interpolation; similarly, in the S–C
zone the F♯-minor cadence, the immediate reopening of
D major in m. 56, and the distinctive rhythmic and textural
changes in mm. 61–64 opened the door for the rupture at
m. 65. Thus all three of the movement’s interpolations (in fact
all four: mm. 175–85 reiterates interpolation 2, as I will note
presently) function as culminating events in what can be under-
stood as an ordered, recurring series of expressive modules,
shown in Example 9, that collectively comprise an expressive
rotation—a concept that recalls Robert Hatten’s notion of the
expressive genre, a broadly conceived schematic category of
expressive states and their paradigmatic relationships.74
The music emerges from the third interpolation just as it
emerged from the previous two: with a graceful exit from the
atemporal stream, this time via another gateway passage. C
minor (the last step, as mentioned, in the D♭–E♭–C tonal
scheme) arrives with the bass G in m. 133, but yields immedi-
ately to a wandering, three-measure chromatic modulation
 Reimagining the lost Arcadia as an unattainable Utopia might again bring
into relief latent nationalist undertones in the narrative; see also nn. 50 and
62, above.
 Hatten (1994, esp. 67–90).
     ()

(mm. 134–36) back to B—this time, notably, not B minor but

B major, the idealized modal state toward which a B-minor
sonata strives. These three measures contrapuntally develop the
melody from S2.1 (compare beats 1–2 and 3–4 in m. 133 with
m. 119, for example) but simultaneously mediate this nocturne
topic with the march topic drawn from P—audible especially in
the deliberate eighth-note rhythms that expressively contradict
the nocturne’s much freer, more improvisatory profile. A single
measure of triplets (m. 136) invokes what seems to have been
one of Chopin’s preferred means of signaling impending
closure,75 and we proceed with an unambiguous move onto the
first of two cruxes (in an apparent “double-crux” situation) at
m. 137—thus signaling a resumption of the sonata’s normative

 . Expressive rotations in Chopin, Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, first movement.
temporal space.
Double-cruxes occur when a recapitulation rejoins (via corre-
spondence measures) the music of the exposition, only to then
slip away into more recomposed music before regaining a
second crux (and more correspondence measures) later on.76
The expressive effect can be one of settling into a familiar
pattern (crux 1), only to abandon it in favor of more rethinking
or reconsideration of the narrative trajectory before finally reset-
tling into familiarity again (crux 2), this time—now satisfied
with the course of events—permanently. This describes well
what happens here: following the first crux at m. 137 (= m. 17),
the disjunctive fully-diminished seventh chord at m. 139 (=
m. 19) causes Chopin to abort the strict correspondence mea-
sures (“Wait! There is more work to be done!”) in favor of a
compression and summary of the first interpolation—the origi-
nal mm. 19–28, now condensed into mm. 139–41, complete
with a variation on the original, impressionistic sixteenths.77 In
a narrative sense, the compression is perhaps only logical, in
that one atemporal digression has just ended and to enter
immediately into another may be redundant; any skepticism or
doubt that may have prompted interpolation 3 (mm. 117–36)
has passed, at least for now. This strategy also reflects what
seems to have been a common procedure in Romantic sonatas,
in which an interpolation that fragments a sonata’s exposition
(in the P–TR segment of the rotational cycle, for example) dis-
appears from that sonata’s recapitulation. There may be a
number of expressive motivations for such deletions; moreover,
many of them seem to occur in sonatas that find some way of
fragmenting, obscuring, or otherwise undermining the stability
of their P-themes in the recapitulation (or post-expositional
rotation). In the case of Op. 58, the very nature of the Type 2
form dictates that the P–TR material will be presented in a frag-
mentary fashion in the second rotation, and it may be that this
mitigates the need for restating an expositional interpolation in
full in the parallel, post-expositional spot. Thus whether inter-
polation 3 had been introduced or not, Chopin may well have
 Recall the triplets in the gateway out of the first interpolation, in mm.
29–30. Similar triplets also mark the end of the exposition in the Op. 35
B♭-Minor Sonata (see m. 93).
 Hepokoski and Darcy (2006, 240).
 For another view of these measures, again with a view toward the weight
given to S as a large-scale structural downbeat, see Morgan (1969, 75–76).

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     :     . 
removed or condensed interpolation 1 at m. 139 anyway. He
does adopt just such a procedure, in the absence of a develop-
ment-space interpolation, in the first movement of the Cello
Sonata in G Minor, Op. 65 (as mentioned, a Type 2 sonata), in
which mm. 52–60 from rotation 1 are deleted from rotation 2
(actually the material is overwritten by new, first-narrative mate-
rial, in mm. 169–74).78 But the procedure also does not appear
to depend on the sonata type; something similar happens in the
first movements of Brahms’s Piano Sonata in F♯ Minor, Op. 2
(mm. 16–38 are removed from the recapitulation; see m. 139)
and his Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5 (mm. 7–16 are deleted;
see m. 137), both of which are Type 3 sonatas and both of
which comprise destabilized recapitulatory openings. For a con-
trasting example one might compare the first movements of
Schumann’s Piano Sonatas in F♯ Minor and G Minor,
Opp. 11 and 22, both of which maintain an expositional inter-
polation in their recapitulations, apparently at least in part
because the P–TR block stands nearly intact and unfragmented
(see Op. 11, mm. 107–34, = mm. 358–81; and Op. 22, mm.
44–56, = mm. 237–49).
In Op. 58 the second crux arrives at m. 142 (= m. 31 varied),
and the recapitulation adheres to the expositional layout from
this point forward: the new dominant-lock, now back in B
minor following the attempted brightening to B major in
m. 137, appears at m. 144 (= m. 33), MC occurs at 149 (= 39),
CF in 149–50 (= 39–40), S1—now finally securing the tonic
major—at 151 (= 41), and S2—also in the tonic major—at
 Regarding the form of Op. 65, the movement includes an expositional
rotation (P, m. 1; TR, m. 24; S, m. 69; C, m. 92) and a normative, Type 2
second rotation (developmental P–TR-space at m. 114; tonal-resolution S,
m. 183; C, m. 206). The first movement of Op. 35 is formatted similarly:
another Type 2 sonata, with one rotation (P, m. 5; TR, m. 25; S, m. 41; C,
m. 81) followed by a second (developmental P–TR, m. 106; tonal-resolu-
tion S, m. 170; C, m. 210).
The first movement of Chopin’s seldom-studied Piano Sonata in C
Minor, Op. 4, is somewhat different, even while—just as in the three later
sonatas—it is also in dialogue with Classical sonata principles as well as a
Romantic worldview. This is a Type 3 sonata probably best regarded as
comprising a failed exposition, with a P in m. 1, a dissolving-continuation
TR in m. 9, and an S that opens, in highly deformational fashion, in the
tonic C minor at m. 17; it yields to a series of frantic intrusions ( pickup to
m. 43, for example) that seem to gradually apprehend, with some horror,
the looming possibility of an exposition that might close in the minor tonic
(oppressive present-day reality from which one cannot escape?); and it
finally succumbs, as might only be expected under such circumstances, to
complete expositional breakdown, with no satisfactory EEC. The recapitu-
lation begins at m. 180, in B♭ major (♭VII) and in dialogue with the princi-
ple of off-tonic recapitulatory openings; and S opens in m. 196 in the
minor dominant, G minor, again a highly deformational key choice and
one that Chopin stages as, again, a completely inadequate tonal home for S
(Arcadia unrecoverable? Utopia unattainable?). The recapitulatory S breaks
down quickly, around m. 207, giving way to a dark, violent close in C
minor (ESC, m. 246). (For more on the Sonata-Theory concept of the
failed exposition as a staged failure of the sonata or some portion thereof to
carry out its generic obligations—and not in any sense a failure on the part
of the composer—see Hepokoski and Darcy [2006, 177–78]. For more on
sonata “success” and “failure” as seen against a Romantic aesthetic back-
drop, see also Monahan [2011b].)
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
167.79 Note that—in accordance with the earlier expositional
precedents—the S1 module again fails to cadence in the tonic
(iii:PAC, m. 166 = v:PAC, m. 56), and the subsequent S-space
interpolation stands intact (mm. 175–85 = 65–75). These fea-
tures together leave a lingering doubt as to the viability of
Chopin’s idealized S1 nocturne, which remains incapable of
producing a PAC in the key in which it started. This may signal
the presence of a narrator who continues to harbor some mis-
givings about the feasibility of the movement’s ostensibly posi-
tive (triumphant?) trajectory—in which a major-mode ESC
(m. 186) and lyrical coda (mm. 198–204) overcome the despair
and turbulence of the opening B minor.80 Even until its end,
the movement remains fragmented, and thoroughly Romantic.
    
Given an appropriate semiotic framework within which to
interpret its discontinuities, and given a fuller understanding of
the formal tradition with which it is in dialogue, the first move-
ment of Op. 58 should be regarded as encapsulating a Romantic
view of history, articulated by Schumann, that frowns on the
uncritical replication of older works and genres as a gesture of
admiration for the past but still seeks to preserve these works
and their Arcadian values in the new artistic endeavors of the
age. In an era in which the sonata was viewed as having “run its
life course” and the piano concerto, symphony, and string
quartet were considered in danger of becoming obsolete, the
Romantic composer’s solution to the problem was not to try to
reproduce and sustain the older genres but instead to seek new,
fragmented forms in which the old and the new, the then and
the now, could merge in a provocative expressive dialogue that
captures the Romantics’ penchant for admiring not only the
relics of the past but also their decay, all from a critically objecti-
fied distance.81
The movement thus at once articulates the Romantic aes-
thetics of its time even while remaining in a dialogue with
 Strictly speaking, in Sonata-Theory parlance m. 142 is probably best
thought of as a “referential measure” and not a “correspondence measure,”
in that it contains some notable differences, in particular in its first two
beats, from m. 31—discrepancies that apparently result from the recompo-
sition of the interpolation in mm. 139–41. Strict correspondence measures
resume at m. 143, which differs from m. 32 by only one note—specifically
the missing B on the second eighth of b. 3 in the left hand (which, inciden-
tally, is missing in every edition of the piece, including the autograph). On
referential measures versus correspondence measures, see Hepokoski and
Darcy (2006, 241–42).
 Again, nationalist implications would seem to accrue here (see above, nn.
50, 62, and 73), now perhaps with the added burden that the longed-for
Utopian goal will remain only a distant hope or dream, with the earlier
apprehensions unresolvable within the space of this movement (within the
space of Chopin’s own lifetime?).
 On these fears of Schumann, see Daverio (1993, 21–24). For a more thor-
ough discussion of the Romantic, post-Beethovenian “crisis of continua-
tion” and the contemporary views of Schumann and others, see Hepokoski
(2004, 424–30).
     ()
historical sonata conventions; it therefore belongs in the main-
stream of a sonata tradition dating from the first half of the
eighteenth century and extending through the end of the nine-
teenth and beyond. It neither ignores nor conforms to Classical
precedents; it uses the generic conventions as a backdrop against
which to pursue a vigorous expressive discourse with contempo-
rary Romantic values. Its most truly radical features reside not
in its formal organization, as is commonly thought, but rather
in its seemingly unmotivated discontinuities and disruptions, all
of which are understood here as challenging the Classical pref-
erence for temporally cohesive, linear, teleological forms. These
structural irregularities must not be construed as providing evi-
dence of a Romantic composer’s difficulties with Classical
forms; nor should they be construed as confirming suspicions
that Chopin may have been better served by the small forms in
which he had found such success. Rather, we can better under-
stand Chopin’s fragmented sonata to have taken up and suc-
cessfully defended, with all the vitality and creativity expected
from one of the great artists of the period, not only the Classical
sonata tradition but also the spirit of nineteenth-century
musical Romanticism.
 
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Taplinger. DOI: 10.1093/mts/mtu013

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