In note 31, I mention the scherzos for the first two Beethoven symphonies. Until recently I thought the scherzo in Symphony no. 2 was the simpler of the two cases, and therefore decided to talk about it first here. The problem -- which nevertheless provokes some interesting opportunities for interpretation -- arises from orchestration, register, and arrangements.
Symphony no. 2, Scherzo. Comment in the note: "a very clear case." Here it is (below) as I analyzed it in the 1980s. I didn't specify a focal tone (aka first note of the fundamental line), though obviously I was assuming ^5; the shape of the cadence, however, is unmistakable. Note that ^6 rises to ^7 over the dominant.
My source was the piano reduction made by Otto Singer and published by Peters in 1906. Below is another version published a few years earlier by Ernst Pauer (London: Augener). [These are dates given on IMSLP; whether they represent time of the original publication, I don't know.]
The full orchestral version, however, has the following at the critical moment:
Curiously enough, Franz Liszt follows the original in his pianistically enhanced reduction:
And, more tellingly, so does Beethoven himself in the trio arrangement published in 1805 (the orchestral original appeared in 1804).
I've also aligned the two parts in an unattributed manuscript arrangement for piano four-hands from 1820.
What do we glean from all this? That any one of three backgrounds is plausible. Version (a) reads from ^3, with the upper octave as expressive doubling. Version (b) goes further, regarding the upper octave as consequential enough to warrant coupling [the Urlinie descends simultaneously in both octaves]. Version (c) shows my original reading, with ^5 as the focal tone and the simple ascent we have already seen above in several arrangements of the score.
Since (a) & (b) are marginally different in notation, I show only the details of (a) below.
Version (c) is below. I admit that I still prefer this one, despite its weaker claim on a firmly established focal tone at the beginning. In the graph below, note the expression of a neighbor note figure A5-B5 -- at (a) and subsequent places marked.
The weakness of ^5 at the beginning is that it's much easier to hear it as a one-too-far gesture. I've variously called it "one leap too far," "one note too far,"or just "one too far." Note how A5, as one-note-too-far, helps confirm ^3 (F#5), before the latter is undercut by another one-leap-too-far in the fortissimo D6. It's not hard to write off D6 as the emphatic expression of a cover tone, but it's now "two leaps," not one, which suggests a potentially different role for A5.
In the modulating consequent of this 16-bar period, the role of A5 as just described is confirmed: the figure of bar 2 continues upward in bar 4 and that register is maintained in the final phrase. The possibility of E6 as the interrupting ^2 for a focal tone ^3 is undercut by the fact that E6 is now where the undoubted cover tone was in the antecedent. The observation that things can get turned upside down in scherzos is not much of a defense.
The reprise is one of those -- common enough in Beethoven but found in others of his generation also -- that muddles the ending by introducing figures from the "development" (the B-section here). Unlike the scherzo in the first symphony, there is no possibility of hearing a structural cadence before the very end. Thus, the rising figure of the final bars attains considerable significance: not the falling resolutions in the seventh bars of antecedent and consequent above but the emphatically affirming fortissimo that follows.
