Strauss, Die Fledermaus, addendum: Act II n10 Csardas

Apart from Adele's "Laughing Song" ("Mein Herr Marquis," n8b), the best known solo aria in the operetta is Rosalinde's Csárdás, n10. The two sections of the standard slow-fast design both make use of rising gestures.

In the opening section, unfoldings over a simple cycle of fifths progressions—ii-V-I, mostly in inversions—bring ^9 (E5) down to ^8 (D5) in the first four bars. A rising line fills the second fourth, A4-D5 (bars 3-4). The figure is repeated and stretched into the final cadence (bars 5-8). Considered abstractly, then, a background for this section would be a stationary ^8.

In the second, fast section, ^5 is the focal tone, aided by its upper neighbor (B4 circled in bars 2 and 6) and a descending figure running across V7 closes (also circled). A line of the rising fourth is now the bright flourish at the very beginning.

The Più Allegro—another of those codas that confound the difference between formal-structural and coda-accessory closes—takes the same figures, but shifts the focal note up an octave to A5 and carries that into the voice's ending, where ^5 substitutes for ^7 in order to give even more dramatic emphasis to the final D6!