Luigi Fragna, "'O Café chantant"

 Luigi Fragna, "'O Café chantant," was written for the 1901 Piedigrotta Festival in Naples. I have written about songs from this long-running event before, in Part 4 of the survey of dominant ninths chords after c1890 (link).

Reduction. If you want a traditional background, it's marked out at the top: a simple neighbor above ^8. As I remember, Arthur Komar was the first to offer the "stationary" ^8 as background focal tone--see my article in Music Theory Spectrum 2009 for details. More notes but equally simple play of neighbors make a controlling middleground.

Song by Pauline Viardot

 Thanks to Poundie Burstein for this one, which he describes as follows:

The piece is "Aime Moi” (1864), a song by Pauline Viardot based on a Chopin mazurka [op. 33 no. 2] to which she added a vocal melody (with text by Louis Pomey). At the end of her song, she superposed a ^5-^6-^7-^8 in the melody above Chopin’s original mazurka (and she does something similar in the key of V twice earlier within the song).   (email communication 22 March 2026)

Here is a comparison of the designs of Chopin's original and Viardot's arrangement.

Chopin's main theme from the first edition:

Viardot's opening. Note the inner-voice potential for ^5-^6-^7-^8 (in magenta).

Same with some parsing of intervals and lines. Note the wedge created by the rising line below and the descending line above.

In the final statement of the theme, clear realization and superposition of the rising line:

An excellent example of a professional musician's frank knowledge--and in this case exploitation--of the rising line from ^5 to ^8.

Two pieces from the 1730s

"La bouillonnante" is a gigue, a lively harpsichord piece by Jean-François Dandrieu, from his Pièces de clavecin, Book 1, Suite no. 3 (1734). Here are the beginning and the end, with the overlappings in the latter marked as they lead toward the final cadence. The example is from Steve Wiberg's edition. (If I were obliged to choose a focal tone, I would take the B4 in bar 3, but that would take quite a bit of time and detail to argue.)

The other example is the sarabande from Telemann, Ouverture à 5 in F major, TWV 44:10. I am using the modern notation by Gabriel Bachmanov, though I've condensed it and--I do apologize--deleted the horn parts.

If you want to think of focal tones and a background, this is obviously not a rising line, but ^8 with some neighboring figures.

Crüger, Jesus, meine Zuversicht

Johann Crüger Praxis Pietatis Melica (1653/1668). The example comes from C. S. Terry, Bach's Chorals, Part II (1917), 412.

Here is a parsing of the intervals and lines. The assumption is Ionian mode with secondary emphasis (I am reluctant to call it dominant or reciting tone) on A (see *).

The strongly defined perfect interval frames for lines are common in modal melodies and in the early Lutheran chorales. If we need a focal tone, it would be C5 in the first phrase, with D5-C5 in the final cadence. The immediately preceding E5 is a simple expressive high note or "one note too far" of the kind I have seen in many 17th and 18th century melodies, songs, and dance-songs.

This is the melody Bach uses for the first movement of Cantata 145, in a four-voice chorale setting that is clearly Easter-related (Terry says the cantata was meant for Easter Tuesday).

There's a bit of Leipziger-style tone-painting in bar 4, where louring chromaticism in the bass is sparked by "Nacht" and "Tode" but note also that Bach really pushes the Resurrection ascent motif in the melody by rewriting it to expand to a 6th in bars 9-10. The chorale in its original text isn't obviously associated with Easter morning though it does mention Jesus as alive; the focus is on our death and on the final resurrection. Still, a setting by Christoph Graupner using the original first-verse text is dated April 1734 and a librarian's note indicates that it is meant for Easter Tuesday (the manuscript is in the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt; see IMSLP for a digital copy).

The melody discussed above is the one Bach uses for the first movement of Cantata 145. Terry gives an alternate version from Crüger (from the 1653 edition? unclear). This was not used by Bach (or anyone else, to judge from scores I've collected so far) but is interesting because of its much stronger emphasis on the Ionian/Phrygian connection.

The last line parsed:

Waltzes from c1800

Matthew Cooke, 12 Spanish and Portuguese Waltzes and a Hornpipe. Cooke's dates are 1761-1829; the Waltzes aren't dated but from the notation and the style of the music I think they probably come from 1790–1800, at the very latest 1810. His music was published in London; whether he worked there, I don't know. The manuscript is in the British Library.

Three of the 12 waltzes have strains with upper-register cadences. In no. 1, it's the second strain of the main or A section. The design is a very common one as ABACA; it's ubiquitous around this time (see my post about this: link). The same in no. 3; not quite so in no. 7 but it could have been easily adjusted in performance to end with B.

Ignaz Pleyel, on the other hand, was a major figure in what we still call "Classical" music. Born in Austria, he was one of the principal students of Haydn; he spent most of his life in France, where he managed to survive the dangers of the early Republic and in later years flourished in business, particularly in music publishing and piano manufacture. The edition I have is for guitar and violin, and its connection to Pleyel is tenuous at best: it was published by Johann André in 1805. Here is a detail of the title page:

False attributions by publishers were commonplace in the era (an especially egregious and long-standing one made Beethoven the author of Schubert's Trauerwalzer, D365n2). I would refer the reader to Rita Benton's Thematic Catalogue for further information.

Regardless, these waltzes are characteristic of the period. Notice the ABCA design of the first one, where C is in the relative minor, as would be expected of the more common ABACA, to which this could easily be adjusted. In no. 3 is one of those exceedingly simple and direct rising lines that one very occasionally finds--and that demonstrates once again how easily such figures arise even in the simplest kinds of harmonic and voice-leading situations. Number 7 is interesting for the same reason, but also in that it shows the classic 2-voice frame where ^5 ascends to ^8 while a counter-voice moves down by step to ^1. The ascending voice is obviously the primary one.

Ascending Lines in the 18th century

 This continues the series of posts about a short section in William Caplin's Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (2024). Here as a reminder is the basic design of chapter 5, with §5.1.2.11.

Caplin begins the section with "Despite what is often taught in elementary harmony classes, a melodic line that ascends to its goal tonic occurs infrequently in the classical repertory" (265) and ends it with "In both cases, we sense the composer giving special emphasis to the ascending line in a manner that highlights all the more this nonconventional melody." I know of no textbook that does what Caplin claims; perhaps he is referring to the rule about the leading tone ^7 resolving upward to ^8, but two notes are not a line. And as we'll see below it is Haydn's treatment in op.77, no 2, that is "special," not the ascending line in general, even in the 18th century.

In his review of Cadence, Poundie Burstein is a bit more generous, beginning with "[the book] explores at length various standard top-voice paradigms for cadential progressions. One such paradigm that it briefly addresses is the melodic pattern ^5-^6-^7-^8,"--note "standard" and "paradigm"--but then he emphasizes what seems the opposite:

What is particularly striking about the ^5-^6-^7-^8 cadence is that its top voice surges entirely upwards, which tends to militate against the sense of closure expected at a cadence. As Caplin rightly notes, such a cadence is a “nonconventional" one that "occurs infrequently in the classical repertory” (265). In contrast, cadences whose top voice is framed by 5-6-7-8 in the upper voice are far more typical of nineteenth century practice.

This last is certainly true, but the generalizing that Burstein does is more of a problem. According to him, the ascending line in the Haydn quartet example (see below) has an "odd character," a "striking nature" that suggests it might better be called a "non-cadential 'tonic arrival'" rather than a "genuine cadence." Burstein also echoes Caplin's reading of "struggle" in this cadence.

I wrote in my earlier post (link): I hear it quite differently, as the most emphatic, in-your-face ascending ^5-^6-^7-^8 line in the Classical repertoire. It stands out in every respect, you can't miss it, and you know you're done when it's done. That's a cadence.

And to "odd character," "striking nature," and "non-cadential 'tonic arrival'": Consider that the simple descending line must cope with the disruptive ("striking"?) cadential 6/4 that was essential to the Italian style after its introduction into Neapolitan opera in the 1730s. Disruptive enough, in fact, that a few Schenkerians are still arguing about it three centuries later. By contrast, the harmony and voice leading for the rising line, with a pleasant set of parallel sixths or thirds even, are quite smooth.

Here is an example I found recently: Mozart, Divertimento [Trio] for Violin, Viola, and Cello, K. 563 (1788), Menuet 2, Trio 2. No mistaking this for anything other than a Ländler, or we should say the very recognizable Ländler topic within a typical ABA small form in a multi-movement instrumental piece meant for private or salon performance. 

The fact that Mozart includes the upper-register close, with the ascending line based on the focal note F5 as a bonus, shows not only what we would expect of him, a comprehensive, curious, and immediate knowledge of all the music around him, but also the definite possibility that musicians playing in public places like restaurants and taverns occasionally used these cadence figures in performance. The instrumentation, btw, invokes what became known in Vienna as the "Linzer Geiger," a popular type with two violins and bass.

Here is a reduction of the A-section:

Note that Mozart maintains the one-chord-per-bar convention of the Ländler.
-----

My series Ascending Cadence Gestures: New Historical Survey includes the time span 1650-1780 in Part 3 and 1780-1860 in Part 4. Link to a post directing to Part 3 files: link. Link to a post directing to a Part 4 summary: link.

Caplin, Chopin, and preluding

 I recently (link) wrote about William E. Caplin's Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (2024), which is in two parts, each at over 300 pages: the first concerns the familiar Viennese trio of composers, about whose music Caplin without doubt has the most detailed and most comprehensive knowledge of anyone alive; but the second part looks at cadences in the earlier 18th and later 19th centuries.

The final section of chapter 8 (of the book's 9) is a survey of all the Chopin Preludes. Of course, the one of interest here is no. 9 in E major. I repeat a paragraph from an earlier post: link.

[Quote from notes in my 1987 JMT article]: "Pieces that appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9 (three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above ^2 implied in the cadence)."  ---- I have already written about this at length: link to the first post; link to the follow-up post. The "short version": Until recently I was comfortable with the comment above, despite the work needed to imagine ^2; Carl Schachter repeated the analysis without giving me credit for precedent (and his editor Joseph Straus failed to catch it); but recently Emily Ahrens Yates revisited the piece and produced a thoroughly convincing analysis that shows the piece does have an ascending Urlinie.

Caplin doesn't dispute the ascending line in the cadence, but he interprets the cadence in a decidedly qualified way:

[Bars 9-12] see the melody again rise stepwise from ^5 in the context of a general ascending-step model-sequence technique. This time, however, the various modal inflections of the harmony yield chromatically flattened ^6 and ^7 degrees; only the final V-I leading into measure 12 resolves the leading tone to tonic in the melody. In itself, of course, this final progression qualifies as cadential, yet because it seems to emerge as the last link in a broader ascending-stepwise sequence, its cadential effect seems rather forced. Combined with the rhetorically powerful dynamic, it is as though Chopin were insisting hard that we take the final progression as cadential, even if it seems to be a part of the broader sequential process.

It is good to see Caplin venture beyond description to interpretation. What his comment suggests to me is indeed the "prelude" in its common 19th century role as introduction to performance of a featured composition. Over time there has been much talk of Romantic fragments, album leaves, and souvenirs, but not often enough about the everyday practice of preluding that was still firmly embedded through at least the first half of the 19th century.

So then, what might the E major Prelude be prelude to? It is clearly a slow and solemn march, and one would expect a serious follow-up, perhaps a sonata-like or large ABA movement at a moderately fast tempo, maybe even in a minor key. That's by no means guaranteed--like fantasies and potpourris, a prelude of any length was expected to offer a variety of textures, tempi, and figures. But preludes--at least as we see them in published collections--could also be short and uniform, and I will assume that here.

Preludes could also be tonally closed, despite our common experience of the very elaborate introductions in virtuoso pieces, where the most showy cadenza is either on or leads to a dominant. 

For some historical examples of the various possibilities as gathered in collections, see Czerny's opus 61 "Praeludien, Cadenzen, und kleine Fantasien im brillanten Style", his opus 696 "60 Prèludes pour Piano," and a book Die Kunst des Präludierens, op.300, about which there is literature and even a Schenker-influenced modern edition. Also see Paul Barbot, L'art de préluder au piano, op.94 (1868); and Clara Schumann, Praeludien (ms. c1895): link.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Józef Elsner, who was Chopin's composition teacher in Warsaw.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Chopin himself, from the Introduction and Polonaise for Cello and Piano, op. 3:

Both versions work appropriately in the manner of the 1830s and 1840s and demonstrate that the EM Prelude can be a prelude, but I admit that I favor the second version because of the continuation of triplet figures.