The Pianoforte Sonata Its Origin and Development

Excerpt

This little volume is entitled "The Pianoforte Sonata: its Origin and Development." Some of the early sonatas mentioned in it were, however, written for instruments of the jack or tangent kind. Even Beethoven's sonatas up to Op. 27, inclusive, were published for "Clavicembalo o Pianoforte." The Germans have the convenient generic term "Clavier," which includes the old and the new instruments with hammer action; hence, they speak of a Clavier Sonate written, say, by Kuhnau, in the seventeenth, or of one by Brahms in the nineteenth, century.