Sonata da camera

(It.: ‘chamber sonata’).

An instrumental work common in the Baroque era, usually in three or four
movements and scored for one or more melody instruments and continuo. The
qualification ‘da camera’ suggests the music's function as domestic diversion, or
as more formal entertainment in public settings. According to Brossard
(Dictionaire de musique, 1703), ‘These are actually suites of several small
pieces suitable for dancing, and all in the same mode or key. This type of sonata
usually begins with a Prelude, or a small Sonata which serves as introduction for
all the others’. In the third edition of the Dictionaire (c1715) Brossard cited
Corelli's sonatas as exemplary, but in the period 1650–1700 Austrian and
German composers (Biber, Dietrich Becker, J.J. Walther and Johannes
Schenck) produced a larger number of such sonatas than did the Italians.
Rosenmüller's Sonate da camera (Venice, 1667) reflects this German tradition,
and found no direct imitators in Italy; indeed, it was only with Corelli's op.2
(1685) that Italians began to favour the term ‘sonata da camera’ for specific sets
of dance movements. Legrenzi's six chamber sonatas (op.4, 1656) are single
movements in binary form; in his op.3 (1669) G.M. Bononcini (i) also used the
term for sonatas in one movement rather than sets of dances. Corelli's chamber
sonatas have three to five movements, usually a slow prelude followed by an
allemande or corrente and other binary dances. After 1700, any distinction
between the sonata da chiesa and the sonata da camera disappeared as binary
movements took the place of the fugues in church sonatas, and expressive
grave or adagio movements appeared in chamber sonatas. Groups of dances
were also called by other names, such as partita, suite, ordre, ouverture and air
(as in English reprints of Corelli's chamber sonatas).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NewmanSBE
J. Sehnal: ‘Zur Differenzierung der sonata da chiesa und sonata da camera in
der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Musica cameralis: Brno VI 1971,
303–10
J. Daverio: ‘In Search of the Sonata da Camera before Corelli’, AcM, lvii (1985),
195–214
S. Mangsen: ‘The Sonata da Camera before Corelli: a Renewed Search’, ML,
lxxvi (1995), 19–31
SANDRA MANGSEN