Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Schubert and the Ländler, part 2

Here are two further examples of rising figures that take advantage of the highest register of Schubert's pianoforte.

In D145n11—still another waltz in Db major, a true V9 in bar 3 hints at the much more dramatic figure of the consequent phrase, where Bb6 is reached. As in the first strain of D 145n9, the implications of these rising figures are realized as a line in the cadence of the second strain, where ^6-^7-^8 is harmonized with the functional SDT progression.
 In D 366n2—this time the key is A major—the same play of octave registers in the antecedent-consequent pair is obvious. B5 and B6 are now ^2, rather than ^6, but the treatment of F# as ^6 in A major is also prominent: see the escape tone in bar 1 (circled) and the neighbor note in bar 4. Still, I would say that the accented pitches strongly emphasize a constrained figure consisting mostly of scale degrees ^1 and ^2—see the lower system in the example below. At the end of the strain, note the doubled octave (in Schenker terms, "coupling").