Chopin’s Craft of Musical Form: Making Romantic Music with Classical Theme Types and Galant Schemata

Chopin adhered to traditional practices in musical form to a far greater extent than hitherto acknowledged. He took certain standard formal paths with remarkable consistency throughout his compositional career and across almost all his favoured genres. His choices were grounded in eighteenth-century routines concerning intrathematic functions and schemata. Chopin pursued alterations and adaptations of those formal patterns, resulting in a kaleidoscopic range of variants, and in this way presented his compositions in a guise amenable to Romantic taste. This article captures Chopin’s craft of musical form by means of data drawn from a broad survey of his works, presented in tables and supported by discussion of his practices and preferences. The main focus in on Chopin’s treatment of the ‘compound period’ and his positioning of ‘Fonte’ and ‘Monte’ schemata in relation to implicit small binary forms. Chopin stands out as a musician engaged with the aesthetic concerns of Romanticism but from a traditionalist starting point. He maintained a craft ethos as regards musical form that points to broad continuities linking eighteenth-century compositional practices with later genres of popular music. In exploring these issues, the article aims to unravel something of the legacy of idealism for our understanding of nineteenth-century music.