Hugo Wolf songs, part 2

"Erschaffen und Beleben” (from the Goethe Lieder, no. 33) is in four quatrains, each set differently by Wolf in the voice, but throughout with a consistent left/right quarter-note alternating rhythm in the piano. At the outset, B4 (as written) is established as a focal tone:

The setting of the fourth quatrain recovers and prolongs that B and eventually leads to a ^5-^6-(^8)-^7-^8 ascending Urlinie in the major key.

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Hugo Wolf songs, part 1

In my rising lines table (link), songs by Hugo Wolf take an unexpectedly prominent place:

“Fussreise.”     (Mörike Lieder)
“Lieber alles.”   (Eichendorff Lieder);
           -- see Everett, Journal of Music Theory 48/1 (2004): 51-4
“Frech und Froh I.”   (Goethe Lieder);
           -- see Everett, Journal of Music Theory 48/1 (2004): 51-4
"Cophtisches Lied II.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Dank des Paria.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Erschaffen und Beleben.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Frech und Froh II.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Komm, Liebchen, komm!”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Nimmer will ich dich verlieren!”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Der Schäfer.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Die Spröde.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"St. Nepomuks Vorabend.”  (Goethe Lieder)
"Trunken müssen wir alle sein!”  (Goethe Lieder) 

From these I have chosen four as the material for a series of posts beginning today. Those are

"Cophtisches Lied II.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Erschaffen und Beleben.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Komm, Liebchen, komm!”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Trunken müssen wir alle sein!”  (Goethe Lieder)

I have already written about "Der Schäfer" (Goethe Lieder no. 22) on the blog: see this post. In this song, the relation of a rising line to text is quite simple: a lazy shepherd suddenly perks up and becomes industrious when a romantic relationship blooms (or possibly when a nagging spouse gets him moving). The rising line -- and closing cadence -- mimics the new energy. Overall, one can hear a rising line from ^5:   -- see the earlier post for details of the reading --

"Trunken müssen wir alle sein!”  (Goethe Lieder no. 35; published in 1889). The poem is in two verses, each of which is six lines long, consisting of three rhymed couplets. An English translation of the first verse is here: link.

Not your average drinking song, this one is more forceful than exuberant and it is predominantly in a minor key, including in the ending. The initial F#5 (as written) is maintained throughout as a focal tone ^8. Its chromatic descent is marked with circles below. The box shows the first instance of a vigorous ascending figure that becomes more and more prominent as time goes on.

The second couplet goes the opposite direction, with a diatonic line upward from C#5 through D5 to close on E5. The piano interrupts with its ascending figure (boxed), here set in a wedge.

The third couplet offers a rare example of a ^5-^6-(^8)-^#7-^8 minor key ascending Urlinie, against which the left hand of the piano part offers another version of its rising octaves (boxed). The coda has still another one of those to end, this time as a simple minor key rising line through an octave.

The first and second couplets of the second verse are set to even more vigorous music, eventually reaching an interval frame E#5-C#5 with a third line at the PAC—end of the example below.

The third and final couplet of the second verse offers an expanded version of the minor-key ascending Urlinie. Note, incidentally, that the two unfolded thirds, D5-F#5, E#5-C#5, expose the minor key problem in an even more obvious way than did the end of the first verse: D5 moves to C#5 and has to be reconceived in order to be heard as moving upward (against the grain of the voice leading) to E#5. A familiar Schenkerian dodge has to be called into play to make this happen: the device Allen Forte called overlapping (and which is one species of upward register transfer or Übergreifen). In a sequence, a note may be obliged to resolve downward, but another voice may overlap it, and still a third overlap that--and the resulting "line" going up may nevertheless be regarded as a unitary figure. In this case, ^6 resolves down to ^5 and is overlapped by ^8, which also moves down. There is no ^9 to overlap again: ^8-^7 just repeats itself.

Here is the entire texture. The piano hammers away at the rising figure -- see the box in bar 2 -- and finally bursts out in an extended chromatic run (boxed in the second and third systems). Both voice and piano, then, provide an ascending line to ^8 in this structural cadence. (The final bars look like they might be a reprise (see at "Wie zu Anfang"), but they are in fact a fairly brief recall acting as a coda.)

Cécile Chaminade songs, Part 3

"Bonne Humeur" was published in 1903. The poem is by Amélie de Wailly (Mesureur). An English translation is available here: link. About firm companionship despite obstacles (those are represented by the adverse weather), the song expresses this sense immediately through "Nous marchions," from which the composer takes her cue.

The poem has four verses, using the rhyme scheme 1 1 2 3 3 2. The music for each verse varies, with verse 4 being a varied version of verse 1, thus musically the setting is ABCA'. The point of interest for this blog is in a wedge figure at the end of verse 3. More on that below. Otherwise, Chaminade works with the same ^5-^8 interval as she does in "La fiancée du soldat." Notice at the beginning that the lower element shifts up a step to end the first idea (E4-F#4)—see the arrow—and the upper element moves down a half-step to end the varied repetition (A4-G#4; see the second arrow).

A register change takes the interval to an upper fourth, B4-E5, which turns to a fifth, B4-E4, and then contracts to its original fourth E4-A4.

The wedge is a very prominent and dramatic passage that might have been played for humor (the line in the third bar of the example below has the companion Ninon stamping through mud puddles) but instead is transfigured with octave leaps and long held notes for "elle sourit": "she smiles."

Here are two versions of the voice leading: at (a), a simplification of the piano's chords; at (b), a reduced, registrally compressed four-voice version.

The end of the song could be said to be framed by a descending line—see the scale degree numbers—but the F# substitution for ^2 in the antepenultimate bar (boxed) leaves open an easily imagined E5 and a possible proto-background ^1/^5 as A4-E5 (boxed) in the penultimate bar.

Cécile Chaminade songs, Part 2

"La fiancée du soldat" was included in a two volume edition of songs published by G. Schirmer in New York (1892-93) with translations by several writers. The original French publication was in 1890. This song is in the first volume, which opens with "Ritournelle," still the best known of Chaminade's songs, which were quite popular in her lifetime but by no means to the same extent as her many piano compositions.

The music aptly expresses the woman's alternating moods of happiness and fear with minor/major contrasts between verses, but the expression isn't so simple as that sounds. Note below, for example,  that the shift from minor to major is to the text "Lon lon la, je chante ma peine."  The two segments of the poem, btw, become two verses in the music, each designed as A A ( = repeat) B1 B2 ( = varied repeat of the first phrase of B1). The beginning of the example also shows the importance of the fourth interval C5-F5, and of ^8 (F5) as focal tone.

The second part of B1 consists of a rising line from C5 to F5, followed by the first segment of the descending line from the beginning of B1.

The ending expresses the fourth interval in still another way.

The close of the song—the repetition of B2—varies this ending slightly to draw attention equally to C5 through the chromatic neighbor note Db5.