Sor’s 5th Sonata…
A few years ago, in 2002, I was invited to contribute an article dealing with Fernando Sor’s guitar sonatas to the Sor Studies project. With the encouragement of the project editor, Luis Gasser, that article ending up at almost 16,000 words (15,949, to be precise)!
(The article, “Sor’s Guitar Sonatas: Form and Style,” has since been published, along with the rest of the articles in the project, in Estudios sobre Fernando Sor / Sor Studies, Musica Hispana, Instituto Complutense de Ciencas Musicales, Madrid.)
Researching this topic brought me in to contact with at least 100 nineteenth-century guitar sonatas as well as numerous other instrumental and orchestral sonata-form works by composers whom I felt might have influenced Sor’s sonata style. I learned an awful lot, not simply about Sor’s sonatas but also about the styles and sheer variability of the classical/early romantic sonata forms in general (in practice, only a small percentage of sonatas adhere to anything like our standard textbook definition of the form—though that’s perhaps something for another discussion).
Of the many interesting things I discovered as I worked on this year-long research project I’d like to mention one here (to go through all of them would of course take 15,949 words!)—in addition to the four generally acknowledged sonatas (Opp. 14, 15b, 22 and 25), Sor wrote a fifth sonata, namely the Fantaisie 7e, Op. 30.
Like most of Sor’s later large-scale works, Op. 30 is a very interesting piece of music, particularly it’s outer form (at this point in his career, Sor was employing original hybrid forms of his own invention). The piece begins with an introduction followed by a variation set (perhaps Sor’s best set) seamlessly connected to an extended sonata allegro. As stated in the full published title, the whole piece is based on two “well-known” songs (nevertheless, we have been able to identify only one of them!).
The sonata portion of the piece is excellent, reminding us of a Rossini overture in its forward movement and of Beethoven in the rhythmic displacement of the second theme group in the recapitulation. The piece is unpredictable yet highly unified and, as if providing us with his compositional credentials, Sor deals very skilfully with the transitions and other connective aspects of the form. The retransition, in particular, is elaborate and very clever.
The piece was published in 1828, shortly after Sor’s return to Paris from Russia, and was dedicated to his friend Dionisio Aguado. Sor performed the piece himself, most likely at his own benefit concert that year.
For those who may not be familiar with the piece, a copy of the original can be downloaded (legally) from the Danish Royal Library Website:
http://www2.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0724.pdf
SY
(on a more personal note: on the single occasion that I heard Andres Segovia perform - at the very end of his career - he opened the concert with this piece, albeit the introduction and variations only)
