by Samuele Guerzoni
Berlin, 4 October 1892. Carl Bechstein’s concert hall opens, and the opening recital is given by Hans von Bülow, at the piano: on the programme, among other things, Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor and Beethoven’s Sonata op. 81a, “Les Adieux”. It will be his last recital. In the audience, perhaps, sit jurists who love music and who, before the concert, were discussing that German civil code not yet approved but already at the centre of so many controversies.
To understand the scene we have to step back almost a century and ask what sonata form and code form are. Behind these two technical terms stand two of the most ambitious products of music and of law. They belong to distant disciplines, and yet they have a great deal in common. Both reach their peak between the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, in the German-speaking world. Both are linear forms: they can be understood only if the sections that compose them follow a precise order, a structure given in advance. And around each moves a great figure of European culture: the composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and the jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779-1861).
Let us look at them closely.
Sonata form is the emblem of Viennese classicism, the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, when Vienna was one of the cultural centres of Europe. It consists of three sections: exposition, development and recapitulation. The exposition presents the musical objects that will characterise the piece, the development works them out, the recapitulation brings them back to their initial state, a kind of happy ending after the adventures of the development. The comparison with storytelling is not accidental: themes, the most important objects of sonata form, work like the characters of a story. There are usually two, they converse with each other and have contrasting characters, the first more energetic, the second more lyrical.
Code form, by contrast, is a body of legal norms gathered in a single source that governs an entire field of law. A child of the French Revolution, it finds in the Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804 the model of all modern codes, and marks a real break with the past. On one side, completeness: the judge must find in the code the answer to any case. On the other, exclusivity: with the code, the other sources that before the Revolution contributed to resolving a dispute lose their value (technically, one speaks of abrogation). Linearity here means that each legal institution is first defined in its essential traits and only afterwards regulated in detail.
Now to the parallel. Beethoven is the link between the musical culture of the eighteenth century and Romanticism. From 1809 the annuity guaranteed to him by Archduke Rudolph and Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky allowed him to devote himself to composition with a freedom that no musician before him had known. Legendary, but sadly true, is his deafness, which progressively transforms his relationship with sound: music no longer passes through the ear, it becomes the domain of the imagination.
What are his innovations? First, the very linearity that is the heart of sonata form begins to creak. The three sections remain, but inside them the balance of power between the smaller parts changes, and what was meant to have a secondary function can become as important as the essential. The transition, for example, the passage that links the two themes of the exposition, in the mature Beethoven often has a theme all its own. Second, with the multiplication of themes, the sonatas reach dimensions unthinkable to his predecessors: the Sonata op. 106, the “Hammerklavier”, lasts roughly forty minutes. Listen for yourself.
Savigny looks at law as the result of a slow stratification of different sources over time. On one hand he takes Roman law as a model, the law developed in Rome over the millennium running from the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD; on the other he sees in law, as in language, a product of the spirit of the people, grown through custom. And custom, unlike statute, arises from constant and uniform behaviour, repeated over time by a community convinced that this behaviour is an obligation. For this reason Savigny distrusted the code: he feared that it would crystallise, that is, halt, the development of German law. The German civil code would nonetheless enter into force, on 1 January 1900, a date chosen not by chance, at the turn of the century.
We have taken a snapshot of a place and a time in which there was an objective link between sonata form and code form, and a subtler one between Beethoven and Savigny: both, each in his own field, inherit a form born to bring order and put it to the test, one by forcing it from within, the other by openly distrusting it. This is nineteenth-century Germany, cradle of reflections that would mark the following century as well. But of that, perhaps, we may speak in a future article.