408 BENJAMIN DUANE

extended by its own standing on the dominant. Thus, while Mozart expanded his
dominant prolongations over the course of years, Beethoven took the technique
a step further. And in many later examples he goes further still. One instance
occurs in the retransition of his String Quartet in Bb, Op. 18 No. 1. Here the
dominant starts out tonicised at bar 139 and is then prolonged for 36 bars that
segment into three semi-autonomous sub-sections (bars 139–150, 151–158 and
159–174), the last of which dissolves into an extended passage of fragmentation.
It is a far grander gesture than those found not only in Exs 5a–e but also in most
of early Beethoven and in any decade of Haydn or Mozart.
The increasing length, complexity and commonness of the standing on the
dominant likely stemmed, in part, from two factors. One is the increasing
length of developments, which is illustrated by Fig. 1.23 This could have affected
composers’ decisions about standings on the dominant. In terms of rhetorical
balance, longer developments might often require a grander final gesture in order
to prepare a return after such a lengthy digression.
The second factor is the increasing frequency of tonally continuous devel-
opments. As discussed above and below, such developments became more
common from Haydn to Mozart, from Mozart to Beethoven, and also within
the careers of Haydn and Mozart. With no cadences – no tonal-rhetorical breaks
– tonally continuous developments generated a great deal of tension, which may
often have required a grander final gesture to dispel.
But why standings on the dominant became longer and more frequent is
perhaps less important than how these changes affected the style. This technique
went from a default to a first-level default – from happening sometimes to
happening most of the time. And the increase in length and complexity helped
cement this new norm. A grander standing on the dominant is a more distinctive
gesture, which makes its recurrence across the repertoire more obvious to
listeners. In other words, these stylistic changes helped an emerging norm set
itself apart from the idiosyncrasies of individual works.

Abandonment of the Late Cadence in vi

As the norm of standing on the dominant gradually emerged, that of the late
cadence in vi, so pervasive in Haydn and 1770s Mozart, slowly disappeared.
Sometimes this cadence was replaced with one in another key. A late half cadence
in the supertonic, for example, can be found in Haydn’s String Quartet in G, Op.
77 No. 1. A late half cadence in the mediant – and subsequent standing on this
key’s dominant – appears in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in Eb, op. 7. As Table 5
illustrates, these were not isolated cases. All three composers employed final
keys other than vi, at least from time to time. These alternative keys, moreover,
appeared more often as the eighteenth century unfolded. Haydn substituted
vi with i, ii, iii or iv more frequently in later decades. Mozart did the same
with iii and iv. Beethoven, unlike Haydn and Mozart, used iii twice as often
as vi.

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 THE DEVELOPMENT-ENDING DOMINANT AND THE LATE CADENCE IN VI 409

Table 10 Relative frequency of different types of core endings in developments from

the corpus that contain cores

Core ending
Standing on Standing on
Composer Decade tonic-key V other V Late cadence Total

Haydn 1760s 0 0 1 1
1770s 1 0 3 4
1780s 0 1 0 1
Mozart 1770s 2 2 3 7
1780s 3 3 3 9
Beethoven 1790s 8 4 1 13

Another option was to omit the late cadence entirely. As Table 4 shows, such
tonally continuous developments, which were fairly rare in Haydn and early
Mozart, became more common in 1780s Mozart and especially in Beethoven.
Although tonally continuous developments followed many different structures,
two were common enough to mention. One is a rhetorical scheme of which Haydn
was particularly fond. It is exemplified in the development from his String Quartet
Op. 76 No. 1, which is frenetic and rife with sequences, quick modulations,
dense rhythms and dissolving restatements of the movement’s head motive. The
closest thing to a respite comes about halfway through, when the submediant is
prolonged for four bars, though with no break in rhythmic activity (bars 108–
111). The frenzy culminates in an eight-bar standing on the home-key dominant
(bars 131–139), whose relatively long duration seems necessary to dispel the
accrued tension. This rhetorical formula – constant agitation followed by a long,
climactic dominant prolongation – appears in several of Haydn’s other tonally
continuous developments.
Another structure found in tonally continuous developments was the pre-
core/core scheme outlined by Caplin (1998). In such developments the
core begins with the usual large-scale sequence and then proceeds through
fragmentation of the sequence, which culminates in a standing on the home-
key dominant. Yet as Caplin makes clear, this scheme can also be coupled with
a late half cadence, with the fragmentation leading to a standing on V/vi (or V/ii,
V/iii, etc.). Table 10 shows the relative frequency of three possible core endings:
a standing on the home-key dominant, a standing on another dominant and a
late authentic cadence in a non-tonic key. While most of Haydn’s few cores end
with a late cadence, Mozart chose this ending far less often, and Beethoven never
used it. Thus, cores and late cadences were traditions of two different times, but
the traditions overlapped and were often combined when they did.24

The end of the development was a topic written about by many European authors
of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Beth Shamgar (1981) has
documented, these authors came to think differently about development endings

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410 BENJAMIN DUANE

over the course of these decades. Around 1800 development sections in the
major mode were believed typically to culminate in a cadence in the submediant
or mediant, after which a short retransition might or might not follow. Heinrich
Christoph Koch, writing in the 1770s, held this view:
In compositions which consist of three main periods [i.e. exposition, development
and recapitulation], the second one ends with a formal cadence in a closely related
key. [ . . . ] The [ . . . ] most usual treatment is that, after the first phrase has been
played in the key of the fifth, one or two melodic sections are repeated again in
the main key. [ . . . ] After this, a melodic section follows which modulates to the
minor key of the sixth or third. [ . . . ] ([1771–76] 1983, p. 237)

By means of a melodic section [i.e. the retransition] which is connected with the
cadence of the second period, there is first a modulation back into the main key
in which the third period begins. (ibid., p. 244)25

By later in the nineteenth century the focus had shifted more to the retransition
and the home-key dominant it contained, which came to be seen as a crucial
feature of the end of the development. As Adolph Bernhard Marx put it in 1868:
[The] general task [of the development] is as follows: to lead, with material selected
from the [exposition], from the conclusion of the [exposition] to the pedal point
on the dominant of the main key, and then to the entrance of the [recapitulation].
(1997, p. 97)

As Shamgar explains, the conceptual shift is apparent in other authors as

well. Like Koch, Johann Gottlieb Portmann, writing in 1789, suggested that
the average development’s primary goal was a cadence in vi, followed by a
retransition. Later, accounts similar to Marx’s, where the development was seen
as culminating in a final home-key dominant, were put forth by Anton Reicha
around 1825 and by Carl Czerny around 1840.
As the present article has shown, this change in the conception of the
retransition is mirrored by changes in compositional practice. The late cadence in
vi, to which Koch refers, was the first-level default in Haydn and Mozart during
the 1760s and 1770s, occurring at least two-thirds of the time. In the 1780s and
1790s Haydn used this cadence less and less frequently, though he continued
to employ it more often than not. Mozart, however, included the cadence only
half the time in the 1780s, and in the 1790s Beethoven almost never included
it.26 Meanwhile, as its use waned, composers became gradually more likely to
end the development with a standing on the home-key dominant, which often
involves the kind of ‘pedal point’ to which Marx referred. This gesture was
relatively uncommon in the 1760s and 1770s, but it became a first-level default
in the 1780s and 1790s, happening almost half the time in Haydn and well
over three-quarters of the time in Mozart and Beethoven. Thus, the disparities
documented by Shamgar in the treatises of Koch and Marx, Portmann and
Reicha reflect more than just a revolution in how the sonata was thought about
and discussed. Rather, these different accounts are manifestations of changing

© 2019 The Authors. Music Analysis, 38/iii (2019)

Music Analysis © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd