Piano Sonatas in The Classical Era
Although various composers in the 17th century had written keyboard pieces which they entitled "Sonata", 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 the well-known Classical era composers, especially Joseph Haydn, Muzio Clementi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, wrote many piano sonatas. Muzio Clementi wrote more than 110 piano sonatas. He is well known as "The Father of the Pianoforte". Clementi's Opus 2 was the first real piano sonata composed. The much younger Franz Schubert also wrote many.
The 32 sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, including the well-known Pathétique Sonata and the Moonlight Sonata, are often considered the pinnacle of piano sonata composition.
Read more about this topic: Piano Sonata
Famous quotes containing the words piano, classical and/or era:
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)