Thursday, September 14, 2017

JMT series, part 4a-1 postscript

Work for yesterday's post about the Scherzo in Beethoven's Second Symphony involved examining the orchestral parts. I found that the upper winds "overshot" ^8 in the final cadence, complicating my reading of a simple rising line (those "extra" notes had been deleted from the piano reduction I relied on during research for the 1987 JMT article).

Having found that, I decided to re-examine some of my analyses of Haydn symphony third movements. Symphony 100 produced some interesting results. Here is the original post: link.

In the original post I noted that the inverted arch shape of the opening melody worked against a rising line, but the orchestration in fact plays on a low-then-high registral pairing throughout that supports the rising line at a higher level.

In the A-section, the flute and the first violins begin in the same octave -- circled below -- but in the re-orchestrated repeat (bars 9-16), the flute plays an octave higher -- circled notes in bars 9-10; see also bars 14-16 in the second system below.



The upper winds rejoin the first violins in the B-section -- boxed notes in bars 17 ff above. This holds till the stop on V in bar 28 -- see boxed notes below.  After that an interesting wedge figure brings out the registral differences as the flute moves chromatically down from D6, then returns to it -- circled notes and line --  while the first violins (and first oboe) rise from D5 before likewise returning to where they started.


The reprise is 8 bars rather than 16 and it combines the orchestrations of the two versions from the A-section: brass and timpani play as in bars 1-8 while the strings and winds play as in bars 9-16, except for the addition of the persistent rising figure (boxed) that motivically connects the ends of the first and second phrases and brings particular clarity to the flute's upper-register scale in the structural cadence.