In history we find certain names associated with great movements: Luther with the Reformation, or Garibaldi with the liberation of Italy. Luther certainly posted on the door of the church at Wittenberg his famous Theses, and burnt the Papal Bull at the gates of that city; yet before Luther there lived men, such as the scholar Erasmus, who have been appropriately named Reformers before the Reformation. So, too, Cavour's cautious policy paved the way for Garibaldi's brilliant victories. Once again, Leonardo da Vinci is named as the inventor of chiaroscuro, yet he was preceded by Fra Filippo Lippi. And in similar manner, in music, certain men are associated with certain forms. Haydn, for example, is called the father of the quartet; close investigation, however, would show that he was only a link, and certainly not the first one in a long evolution. So, too, with the sonata. The present volume is, however, specially concerned with the _clavier_ or pianoforte sonata; and for that we have a convenient starting-point--the Sonata in B flat of Kuhnau, published in 1695. The date is easy to remember, for in that same year died England's greatest musician, Henry Purcell. Before studying the history of the pianoforte sonata, even in outline, it is essential that something should be said about the early history of the _sonata_. That term appears first to have been used in contradistinction to _cantata_: the one was a piece _sounded_ (_suonata_, from _sonando_) by instruments; the other, one _sung_ by voices. The form of these early sonatas (as they appear in Giovanni Gabrieli's works towards the close of the sixteenth century) was vague; yet, in spite of light imitations, the basis was harmonic, rather than contrapuntal. They were among the first fruits of the Renaissance in Italy. But soon there came about a process of differentiation. Praetorius, in his _Syntagma musicum_, published at Wolfenbuettel in 1619, distinguishes between the _sonata_ and the _canzona_. Speaking generally, from the one seems to have come the sonata proper; from the other, the suite. During the whole of the eighteenth century there was a continual intercrossing of these two species; it is no easy matter, therefore, to trace the early stages of development of each separately.