On the "March" Prelude in Chopin's Opus 28, part 2

In part 1, I cited Carl Schachter's recent analysis of this Prelude, with its Urlinie from ^3, where ^2 had to be "supplied by the imagination of the listener" (61). I also indicated my priority in this reading of the background, having written about it twice in 1987.

In February, Emily Ahrens Yates presented a paper titled "Surface Motives in Tonal Music and Their Influence on Our Readings of Background Structures" at the TSMT conference in Belton, TX. In the well-established tradition of motive-driven Schenkerian readings, she "show[s] how ascending surface motives of 5̂ to 8̂ are composed out, are evident in the middleground and foreground levels, and are replications of an ascending Urlinie background structure resolving the conflict in readings between motivic parallelisms of rising motives and 'Ursatz parallelisms'" (from the abstract).

Emily shared her analysis with me beforehand. It was entirely convincing, and I now wonder why anyone (including me, you understand) would ever have proposed a background descent from ^3 at all: each of the march's three phrases is wholly occupied with rising stepwise gestures (and the subsequent relaxation from them), the "one-leap-too-far" quality of the Ab 6/4 chord in bar 8 is certainly accentuated/confirmed by its unstable status as a harmony, and the one truly remarkable thing in this musical context is the ending, which is the only one of the three phrases that refuses to drop away from its rising line from ^5 to ^8 (awkwardly chromatic though it is).

Additional comment: "each of the march's three phrases is wholly occupied with rising stepwise gestures (and the subsequent relaxation from them)": note that each rising phase is longer and each relaxation phase is shorter than the last. In the first phrase, ten rising beats are followed by six falling ones (numbers depend on where you place the three beats of E4). In the second phrase, twelve rising beats are countered by four falling beats. And of course in the third phrase, sixteen rising beats are not countered at all. What surely emerges as thematic in this march, then, is the withering away of descent, regardless of the dramatic surge into bar 8.

More than that is the Sisyphian struggle against a chromatic weight that bears down the already heavy diatonic chords in the second and third phrases. I have boxed those passages in the score below:

It is not difficult to "reconstruct" the diatonic version of all this, the state of the march "before" its chromatic deformation, its suppression by a half-step. (The notion of lowering to flat keys as expressive is something we've seen in Schubert, who dropped the "violin keys" of D and A to Db and Ab in his waltzes.) Here is the diatonic bass for the two chromatic passages.

What is truly remarkable -- and dramatic -- then is not the "one-leap-too-far" Ab6/4 chord, but the sudden emergence of the diatonic from the chromatic depths. The staircase down to those depths is also the way back up:

An entire slow movement of a heroic sonata is sketched in this miniature—an invitation perhaps to a skilful improvising pianist to fill it out.