Strauss, Die Fledermaus n11, Act II finale

The setting of Act II is the ball to which Eisenstein and Falke have stolen away. Thanks to Falke's plan for revenge on Eisenstein, however, pretty much everyone shows up, although in disguise; the only person who isn't in disguise is the host, Prince Orlofsky. Unlike the first act, the second has no rising cadence figures outside of the finale.

The Prince opens with a toast to champagne. The music is mapped out as three eight-bar strains (A, B, C below; C is repeated as C') with a twelve-bar insert. Strain B, in the dominant, functions as Caplin's contrasting middle, a "B-section" in traditional form terms, to which the insert adds a retransition. Strains A and C are distinct, but both use ascending lines in their cadences.

The two phrases of A are essentially the same, and they would form a simple wedge figure except that ^2 in the descent has to be imagined. The ^3 (as F#5) is clear enough as a focal tone, but all the attention after the first bar goes to ^5 and then its tra-la-la-ing ascent in the cadence. The voice is accompanied by lower orchestral voices in this segment, and one can find the requisite ^2, though as E4 not E5 and in the third horn and viola, which placement doesn't inspire confidence about the musically revelatory.

Strain C has the toast itself, and its tune is built much like the one in A, but with the lower line stretched out to a sixth and the force of the upper ^3 as focal tone much diminished. In the cadence it's more plausible, to my ears anyway, to hear F# moving up to its similarly expressed neighbor G than it is to pull out the sixteenth-note E4 for a descent. The priorities I am hinting at here become obvious in C', where the cadence brings more attention to ^6 and an over-reaching ascent in the Flute 1 part (marked and notes circled below).