Haydn's Early Altered Recapitulations as Evidence of Early Sonata-Form Logic

Haydn's "altered recapitulations" have long been considered trademarks of his style and evidence of his virtuosic freedom from convention. In this article I examine and contextualize Haydn's early altered recapitulations, arguing that they did not break with convention, but instead emerged from an earlier set of conventions rooted in baroque binary form, which was then beginning to subsume the double return. I show that Haydn's early recapitulations are not fettered to an underlying rotational logic, confirming the tonic through mostly functional changes and transpositions of expositional material to the tonic. Instead, Haydn's early double returns are only weakly prepared, and they are subsequently undermined by recomposed material, rendering them a temporary sojourn at the tonic, after which the final and more emphatically prepared tonic return arrives only with the commencement of the end-rhyme. Through comparisons between Haydn's practice and that of mid-century composers, these recapitulations emerge not as dialogues with sonata convention, but rather as an important link between Baroque binary form and sonata form of later years.