Tinkering with Form: On W. F. Bach's Revisions to Two Keyboard Sonatas

This article examines the way Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's revisions to two keyboard sonatas (F. 1 and F. 6) reflect his engagement with the emerging sonata-form aesthetic. I show how the revisions update his older, essentially binary practice by introducing Classical sentence structure in the first themes; a differentiated theme in the dominant before the end of the first half; distinct development and recapitulation sections; and an enhanced tonic-dominant polarity, as well as other features that were to become characteristic of sonata form. Bach's conscious tinkering with his older works thus reflects a contemporary response to the way common practice was tinkering with binary form, gradually transforming it to what eventually became known as Classical sonata form.