Unraveling Nineteenth-Century Medial Caesuras: A Corpus-Based Study of the Sonata-Allegro First Movements of Ferdinand Hiller's Chamber Works

Abstract

The concept of MC devised by Hepokoski and Darcy, along with Richards's refinements to address the complexities of nineteenth-century medial caesuras (MC), remains insufficient owing to the under-explored temporal aspects of the MC. Hepokoski and Darcy define the MC as a specific rhetorical point occurring between the end of the transition (TR) and the beginning of the secondary theme (S), considering it structurally important to sonata form. Richards further elaborates on this concept, presenting MC as a three-stage process that enhances our understanding of MCs can be obscured. However, their frameworks for MC prove inadequate in addressing situations where misaligned interthematic parameters led to overlapping interthematic functions (TR and S), a common occurrence in Romantic forms. This study delves into the temporal dimensions of the MC, using Hiller's sonata-allegro first movements from chamber works as a sample, given that some of his MCs serve as an ideal benchmark for the newly identified obscured MC sub-types. Additionally, this study introduces a novel forensic approach to obscured MCs, diverging from Richards's method of grouping various types of obscured MCs into the same category based on the number of elements obscured. Instead, it focuses on a specific type of obscured MC and examining how it becomes increasingly obscured. This study also draws on examples from figures influential to Hiller's musical milieu, namely Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann.