Piano sonata
Categories: Piano sonatas | Sonatas | Classical composition stubs
A piano sonata is a sonata written for unaccompanied piano. Piano sonatas are usually written in several movements, usually three or four, occasionally just one or two. The first movement is usually composed in sonata form.
Although various composers in the 17th century had written keyboard pieces which they entitled "Sonata", most notably the over 500 virtuosic keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, it was only in the classical era, when the piano displaced the earlier harpsichord and sonata form rose to prominence as a principle of musical composition, that the term "piano sonata" acquired a definite meaning and a characteristic form.
All three of the great Classical era composers, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote many piano sonatas, as did the much younger Franz Schubert.
The 32 sonatas of Beethoven, including the well-known Pathétique Sonata and the Moonlight Sonata, are often considered the pinnacle of piano sonata composition.
As the Romantic era progressed after Beethoven and Schubert, piano sonatas continued to be composed, but in smaller numbers as the form took on a somewhat academic tinge and competed with shorter genres more compatible with Romantic compositional style. An important innovation was Franz Liszt's comprehensive "four-movements-in-one" form introducing the concept of thematic transformation. Piano sonatas have been written throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and up to the present day.