Song by Pauline Viardot

 Thanks to Poundie Burstein for this one, which he describes as follows:

The piece is "Aime Moi” (1864), a song by Pauline Viardot based on a Chopin mazurka [op. 33 no. 2] to which she added a vocal melody (with text by Louis Pomey). At the end of her song, she superposed a ^5-^6-^7-^8 in the melody above Chopin’s original mazurka (and she does something similar in the key of V twice earlier within the song).   (email communication 22 March 2026)

Here is a comparison of the designs of Chopin's original and Viardot's arrangement.

Chopin's main theme from the first edition:

Viardot's opening. Note the inner-voice potential for ^5-^6-^7-^8 (in magenta).

Same with some parsing of intervals and lines. Note the wedge created by the rising line below and the descending line above.

In the final statement of the theme, clear realization and superposition of the rising line:

An excellent example of a professional musician's frank knowledge--and in this case exploitation--of the rising line from ^5 to ^8.

Caplin, Chopin, and preluding

 I recently (link) wrote about William E. Caplin's Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (2024), which is in two parts, each at over 300 pages: the first concerns the familiar Viennese trio of composers, about whose music Caplin without doubt has the most detailed and most comprehensive knowledge of anyone alive; but the second part looks at cadences in the earlier 18th and later 19th centuries.

The final section of chapter 8 (of the book's 9) is a survey of all the Chopin Preludes. Of course, the one of interest here is no. 9 in E major. I repeat a paragraph from an earlier post: link.

[Quote from notes in my 1987 JMT article]: "Pieces that appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9 (three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above ^2 implied in the cadence)."  ---- I have already written about this at length: link to the first post; link to the follow-up post. The "short version": Until recently I was comfortable with the comment above, despite the work needed to imagine ^2; Carl Schachter repeated the analysis without giving me credit for precedent (and his editor Joseph Straus failed to catch it); but recently Emily Ahrens Yates revisited the piece and produced a thoroughly convincing analysis that shows the piece does have an ascending Urlinie.

Caplin doesn't dispute the ascending line in the cadence, but he interprets the cadence in a decidedly qualified way:

[Bars 9-12] see the melody again rise stepwise from ^5 in the context of a general ascending-step model-sequence technique. This time, however, the various modal inflections of the harmony yield chromatically flattened ^6 and ^7 degrees; only the final V-I leading into measure 12 resolves the leading tone to tonic in the melody. In itself, of course, this final progression qualifies as cadential, yet because it seems to emerge as the last link in a broader ascending-stepwise sequence, its cadential effect seems rather forced. Combined with the rhetorically powerful dynamic, it is as though Chopin were insisting hard that we take the final progression as cadential, even if it seems to be a part of the broader sequential process.

It is good to see Caplin venture beyond description to interpretation. What his comment suggests to me is indeed the "prelude" in its common 19th century role as introduction to performance of a featured composition. Over time there has been much talk of Romantic fragments, album leaves, and souvenirs, but not often enough about the everyday practice of preluding that was still firmly embedded through at least the first half of the 19th century.

So then, what might the E major Prelude be prelude to? It is clearly a slow and solemn march, and one would expect a serious follow-up, perhaps a sonata-like or large ABA movement at a moderately fast tempo, maybe even in a minor key. That's by no means guaranteed--like fantasies and potpourris, a prelude of any length was expected to offer a variety of textures, tempi, and figures. But preludes--at least as we see them in published collections--could also be short and uniform, and I will assume that here.

Preludes could also be tonally closed, despite our common experience of the very elaborate introductions in virtuoso pieces, where the most showy cadenza is either on or leads to a dominant. 

For some historical examples of the various possibilities as gathered in collections, see Czerny's opus 61 "Praeludien, Cadenzen, und kleine Fantasien im brillanten Style", his opus 696 "60 Prèludes pour Piano," and a book Die Kunst des Präludierens, op.300, about which there is literature and even a Schenker-influenced modern edition. Also see Paul Barbot, L'art de préluder au piano, op.94 (1868); and Clara Schumann, Praeludien (ms. c1895): link.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Józef Elsner, who was Chopin's composition teacher in Warsaw.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Chopin himself, from the Introduction and Polonaise for Cello and Piano, op. 3:

Both versions work appropriately in the manner of the 1830s and 1840s and demonstrate that the EM Prelude can be a prelude, but I admit that I favor the second version because of the continuation of triplet figures.

JMT series, part 4d (simple rising lines)

The final post for note 28. The first post is here: link.

Schumann, Album für die Jugend, op. 68, no. 20, “Ländliches Lied.” No comment in the note.

Schumann, Albumblätter, op. 124, no. 3, “Scherzino." Comment in the note: "the first ^5 is somewhat muddled by registral confusion, but a rising motive is strong." Now I think the opening is less muddled than I thought in 1987, though there is consistent covering play. The line, overall, is quite clear and coordinates with the harmony as well as any I have seen.

Schubert, Schwanengesang, no. 7, “Abschied." Comment in the note: "the conclusion is strong, but ^8 could be the initial tone, and the piano overreaches the voice with a descent ^3-^2-^1." I have nothing to add to this comment.

Finally: "Pieces that appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9 (three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above ^2 implied in the cadence)." I have already written about this at length: link to the first post; link to the follow-up post. The "short version": Until recently I was comfortable with the comment above, despite the work needed to imagine ^2; Carl Schachter repeated the analysis without giving me credit for precedent; and recently Emily Ahrens Yates revisited the piece and produced a thoroughly convincing analysis that shows the piece does have an ascending Urlinie.

Administrative post: updated links to some files

Early next year, Dropbox is changing the public folder to a shared folder. Therefore, I have moved all files that were formerly on Dropbox to Google Drive. Here is an alphabetical list with the new links:

Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28n9: link.

Guide to my blog Hearing Schubert D779n13: link.

Guide to the blog Hearing the Movies: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Ab major, menuet, my graph, page 1: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Ab major, menuet, my graph, page 2: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Ab major, menuet, score: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Eb major, II, my graph, page 1: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Eb major, II, my graph, page 2: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Eb major, II, score, page 1: link.

Haydn, Sonata in Eb major, II, score, page 2: link.

Minor key progressions (table): link.

Neumeyer, handout for 2010 Society of Music Theory presentation: link.

Neumeyer research vita: link.

Schubert dance table: link.

On the "March" Prelude in Chopin's Opus 28, part 2

In part 1, I cited Carl Schachter's recent analysis of this Prelude, with its Urlinie from ^3, where ^2 had to be "supplied by the imagination of the listener" (61). I also indicated my priority in this reading of the background, having written about it twice in 1987.

In February, Emily Ahrens Yates presented a paper titled "Surface Motives in Tonal Music and Their Influence on Our Readings of Background Structures" at the TSMT conference in Belton, TX. In the well-established tradition of motive-driven Schenkerian readings, she "show[s] how ascending surface motives of 5̂ to 8̂ are composed out, are evident in the middleground and foreground levels, and are replications of an ascending Urlinie background structure resolving the conflict in readings between motivic parallelisms of rising motives and 'Ursatz parallelisms'" (from the abstract).

Emily shared her analysis with me beforehand. It was entirely convincing, and I now wonder why anyone (including me, you understand) would ever have proposed a background descent from ^3 at all: each of the march's three phrases is wholly occupied with rising stepwise gestures (and the subsequent relaxation from them), the "one-leap-too-far" quality of the Ab 6/4 chord in bar 8 is certainly accentuated/confirmed by its unstable status as a harmony, and the one truly remarkable thing in this musical context is the ending, which is the only one of the three phrases that refuses to drop away from its rising line from ^5 to ^8 (awkwardly chromatic though it is).

Additional comment: "each of the march's three phrases is wholly occupied with rising stepwise gestures (and the subsequent relaxation from them)": note that each rising phase is longer and each relaxation phase is shorter than the last. In the first phrase, ten rising beats are followed by six falling ones (numbers depend on where you place the three beats of E4). In the second phrase, twelve rising beats are countered by four falling beats. And of course in the third phrase, sixteen rising beats are not countered at all. What surely emerges as thematic in this march, then, is the withering away of descent, regardless of the dramatic surge into bar 8.

More than that is the Sisyphian struggle against a chromatic weight that bears down the already heavy diatonic chords in the second and third phrases. I have boxed those passages in the score below:

It is not difficult to "reconstruct" the diatonic version of all this, the state of the march "before" its chromatic deformation, its suppression by a half-step. (The notion of lowering to flat keys as expressive is something we've seen in Schubert, who dropped the "violin keys" of D and A to Db and Ab in his waltzes.) Here is the diatonic bass for the two chromatic passages.

What is truly remarkable -- and dramatic -- then is not the "one-leap-too-far" Ab6/4 chord, but the sudden emergence of the diatonic from the chromatic depths. The staircase down to those depths is also the way back up:

An entire slow movement of a heroic sonata is sketched in this miniature—an invitation perhaps to a skilful improvising pianist to fill it out.

On the "March" Prelude in Chopin's Opus 28

The steadily rising scale figures in each of the three phrases of Chopin's E-major Prelude are emphatic and obvious (so is the sudden drop at the end of the second phrase). In a recently published book The Art of Tonal Analysis: Twelve Lessons in Schenkerian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016; edited as a labor of love, I suspect, by Joseph Straus), Carl Schachter says that "some people analyze this piece with an Urlinie that rises a fourth: B-C#-D#-E. I think, however, that it is quite possible to hear instead a very subtle and wonderful descending Urlinie, but to do so one has to be quite un-literal in one's use of the theory" (56). [You can read the chapter on two preludes in the Google Books preview window.]

Here is his Example 3.10, which shows the middleground and background shapes of the upper voice:

For the record, I was the first to assert the abstract pitch design by which a primary line descends from ^3 (while a secondary line rises from the lower ^5). I did this in a footnote to a well-known article, "The Ascending Urlinie" (Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987); in fn28: "Pieces which appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9; [instead it is] a three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above; ^2 implied in the cadence."

In another article published the same year, I provided a graph: from "The Three-Part Ursatz," In Theory Only 10/1-2: 28.

This gives less emphasis to the arpeggios, but my point was to place attention on the inversion of the third G#-B to the sixth B-G#, in line with middleground transformations that I identify in the article. Here is a schematic version of the example below showing this:

Finally, here is a link to a facsimile of my sketch from 1982: holograph sketch of Op28n9.