Sunday, April 16, 2017

Music in 17th century Vienna, part 3

Today's dance by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer is from the second of two ballets he wrote for a production of Cesti's Il pomo d'oro in 1667, an event that successfully initiated Italian opera into Viennese musical culture. The numbers in this ballet are Gran ballo, Aria, Branle di Morsetti, Sarabanda per la terra, Balletto per il mare, Trezza, Aria Viennense, and Gigue.

Here a triad space (circled) is defined at the outset: C#5-E5-A5), but as in the courante in the first post in this series, the continuation is firmly from E5, or ^5. The second strain has the longest stepwise ascent to ^8 that I have seen anywhere, beginning from E4 in bar 6 and ending on A5. Above and below the staff, I've identified two ways of parsing the upper half of this line.