Peut-être que la sonate veut un conte de fées?

The article discusses the similarity between textbook sonata form and the structure of the fairy tale as revealed and formulated by Vladimir Propp in his classic study Morphology of the Folktale. The general parallels between the two are characters and functions. While in fairy tales, the characters are dramatic personae, and the functions are their actions and situations, in a sonata, the characters and functions are analogous, respectively, to the musical themes and the tonal development (whether motivic or otherwise). The article also argues that the formation of the classical sonata form in the mid-eighteenth century was prepared by a decades-long flourishing of the fairy tale as a genre of Parisian salon literature. Beginning with Charles Perrault in the 1690s, who wrote or arranged folk tales as part of his polemics with the Ancients (led by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux) and the Moderns (represented by Perrault), the genre underwent a massive development far into the first half of the eighteenth century. Its popularity greatly impacted public consciousness. Considering that both fairy tales and sonatas existed at the same salons with the very same audience, the perception of the sonata form as a playing out of familiar conflicts in musical works could be fully prepared.