Suite vs Sonata in the Baroque Era

Abstract

The article focuses on the suite and sonata as two important genres of instrumental music of the Baroque era. The author draws attention to the widespread misconceptions that Baroque suites were usually built on the basis of four dances: allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, and Baroque sonatas in general were divided into 2 types — church (sonata da chiesa) and chamber sonata (sonata da camera). He also points to the historical mistake in defining the form of any four-movement Baroque composition (“slow — fast — slow — fast”) as a da chiesa cycle, as well as to the principle error of the traditional interpretation of the sonata da camera as a suite based on the inaccurate translation of the original definition from Sébastien de Brossard’s “Dictionnaire de Musique” (1703). The main idea of the article is that the common comparison of suites and sonatas as two different genres of Baroque instrumental music is possible only in terms of modern musical practice. However, in the Baroque era, the genres, which we call sonata and suite, were actually different phenomena, and their comparison was largely meaningless. Baroque sonata was a form of multi-movement musical work intended to be performed entirely while the suite was formed from many separate and completed pieces; it was not a united work ordinarily. Despite the fact that suites were often formed on the basis of one or another typological principle, they, as a rule, turned out to be nothing more than repertoire collections for learning to play musical instrument or for playing music at home. And although multi-movement orchestral suites, unlike solo ones, had a better chance for full performance, they were also not generally considered as concert works, but were used mainly as a repertoire for Musique de Table, Music for a Firework, etc.