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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
… one of the most overanalyzed pieces in the history of music theory …
Eugene Narmour… that most overanalyzed piece of music …
Carl Schachter… the most-analysed piece in music history …
V. Kofi AgawuPity the poor Theme! Opinion has it (in the academy at any rate) that the Theme of the Theme and Variations of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, k331, has been talked to death and should be barred indefinitely from use as a musical example. While my epigraphs date from the 1980s, opinion has only hardened in recent years. Fast-forward to 2004: when she called for suggestions for pieces to be discussed in evening study sessions, the organizer of the stimulating conference that gave shape to this volume gently suggested that k331/i and others like it, which ‘have traditionally been debated in music-theoretical writings and handbooks of analysis’, should be avoided at those sessions.
Rhetoric about the Theme's overexposure can take a comic turn. For an adroit little article entitled ‘Dismembering Mozart’, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker borrowed the title of their piece from the exasperated hyperbole of an unnamed critic:
Mozart … A major piano sonata … receives a well-nigh weekly deluge of leaden analytical prose, so much so that one prominent critic publicly voiced the opinion that the sonata now recalls for him nothing less than the appalling fate of Lavinia in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. (Lavinia is violated by two brothers who – in order to ensure her silence – cut out her tongue – and – in case she might write their names – cut off her hands. The brothers, of course, receive their just de(s)serts: all too literally, in fact, as they end up baked in a pie and eaten by their mother.)
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