Grieg, Lyric Pieces, Op. 68, part 2

The somewhat strange Valse mélancholique is no. 6, the last number, in Grieg's Op. 68. Sounding like a merger of Chopin's well-known melancholy waltz in A minor and the most repetitious of Tchaikovsky's ballet waltzes, the Valse mélancholique is also insistently dissonant, breaks up its harmonic progression oddly on more than one occasion, and includes a decidedly un-melancholic explosion in its structural cadence.

A rising line is a central figure in the opening. A four-introduction is followed by a thirty-two bar period that forms the waltz's first strain. The 16-bar antecedent phase, bars 5-20, brings a line very gradually up from D5 (doubled with D4) but it is broken after the F5 in bar 19 by a surprise harmonic break to a Neapolitan (G minor: an Ab6 chord) in bar 20, after which the consequent phase begins and plods along, becoming more and more insistent and finally pounding out the concluding notes of the rising line.

I hear the more active "alto" as thoroughly meshed with the octaves just discussed above, but it is entirely legitimate to hear the internal voice more or less independently. I have traced it in red below, an extra strand emerging after bar 28 being in green. Regardless of how it begins, however, the dramatic rising trajectory of the octaves takes over in the final bars.

The coda follows directly on the repetition of the fortissimo cadences in the reprise and takes a classic coda form with "reminiscences" over a tonic pedal point. Note that the octaves, having fulfilled their role, are gone, and we hear the alto's tune, still in the middle of the texture.