E. F. Richter, "Frühlingsglaube"

Ernst Friedrich Richter is known mainly as a very successful theory and composition textbook author. In the mid-nineteenth century, he taught at the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory.  He was also a composer. "Frühlingsglaube," the first of two choral pieces for soprano voices on poems by Ludwig Uhland, is striking in its treatment of an ascending cadence gesture, a parallelism with a descending cadence formula, and the artistically sensitive expression of text achieved through the cadence parallelism.

The poem is in two verses of nearly equal length (7 lines in the first, 8 in the second), its parallelisms made clear by repetition of the final line, "Nun muss sich alles, alles wenden" ("Now everything, everything must change"). In the usual mode of Romantic irony, the poem lauds the pleasures and new life of spring—but as an escape from pain and suffering. (It's easy to make light of that now, but in an era when death was likely by the age of 50, and not uncommon by 40, and where the worst urban diseases, small pox, tuberculosis, and syphilis, were still largely not understood, such oppositions were serious and had considerable immediacy.)

The music for the two verses is very similar, the first half (with a cadence to the dominant) being essentially identical, the second half altered in the second verse as it approaches the cadence. The first phrase of this second half emphasizes ^4 over a progression that extends the dominant, and then resolves to ^3, but over C# minor harmony. After that, repeatedly rising figures considerably expand the setting of "Nun muss sich alles, alles wenden" but a cadence does finally arrive in the lower register, not the upper.

The parallel place in the second verse expands the setting even further, reaching E5 a third time (circled in the second system below).

The original cadence phrase then starts up but its rise to ^5 is continued onward to ^8 this time. Note the common substitution of ^2 (or ^9) through a voice exchange with the alto.

The expansions of the two verse endings develop the material nicely as a way to express "everything must change" but their insistence also throws off the symmetry of the verse halves and the pairing of pleasant spring imagery against what amounts to a half-despairing cry, not "Everything is changing" but "Everything must change."