If this were a book on Mozart or Beethoven, one would have needed more than a single chapter to analyse all of the sonatas. Seventy sonatas of Mozart and fiftyfive of Beethoven make up substantial chunks of their output. In fact, almost everything they composed for one or two instruments, except for variation sets and a few trifles, were sonatas.

With the next generation of composers the sonata lost its overpowering dominance. Mendelssohn limited himself to thirteen sonatas; Schumann settled on eight (including the C major Fantasy); Chopin tried one at the age of eighteen, subsequently contributed two great sonatas to the piano literature and later added to them a cello sonata; among Liszt's dozens of instrumental compositions, there are only two sonatas.

One cannot say that Romantic composers lost interest in the sonata. It still remained the most prestigious instrumental genre, an obsession for many composers striving to prove their ability to handle complex structures. In this respect it might be compared with the fugue in the Classical era.

Composers’ uneasy relationships with the sonata were not at all alleviated by the readiness of nineteenth-century music criticism to disparage their attempts at the genre. Traces of this criticism persisted well into the twentieth century. Some writers still consider that sonata forms in Romantic music suffer from a lack of structural continuity, and from composers’ inexperience with large forms or their inability to develop material and to conceive large organic wholes.