Beethoven, German Dances, WoO8, 6 and 7, orchestral score

In yesterday's post, I wrote about Beethoven, German Dances, WoO8, numbers 6 and 7: link. My comments were based on the keyboard scores, which were published at the same time as the original orchestral versions in 1795.

In n6, I found a proto-background of the triad D5-G5-B5, with a descending line from ^3 in the A section, and a rising line from ^5 in the B section.

The orchestral score complicates that reading. At A1, Beethoven tops the violin melody with ^7-^8 in the oboes. At A2, the oboes repeat the figure but now they are overtopped by the flutes giving the violins' tune an octave higher. The net result, though, is that the descending third-line of my reading remains intact.

In the B section, the violins' accented restatement of triad tones in bars 9-11 (B5 in bar 9, G5 in bar 10, and D6 in bar 11) is undermined by the oboes' definite stepwise ascent from F#5 to B5, which suggests the latter as a goal for the phrase. In the final phrase, however, at C1, C2, C3, the winds' doubling of the violin figure clearly reinforces the sense of the rising line (D5-E5-F#5-G5) as primary.

In WoO8n7, the winds move predominantly stepwise and may be said emphatically to "choose" their candidate for primary voice from among the scales, arpeggiations, and unfoldings. When their input is accepted, there is no other choice but to hear ^3 as the focal tone and a descent to ^1 in both sections.

Beethoven, German Dances, WoO8, numbers 6 and 7

I have used the first number in Beethoven's orchestral dances, WoO8 (1795), multiple times as an exemplar of that turning point—in Viennese dance music, anyway—when the heavily clichéd strictures we associate now with 17th and 18th century figured bass practice and pedagogy begin to be undermined by a richer set of expressive possibilities. Here is the post on this blog: link.

While working on a new, Schenker-related essay project, I realized that two other dances in WoO8 can be heard with ascending background lines. The more direct of the two—and certainly plausible with the usual Schenkerian focal tones—is n7, despite its maze of unfoldings in the beginning. The unfoldings do suggest a role for ^3 as structural alto; through them one can hear an alto-level third-line in bars 1-8 (E5 at the beginning, D4 in bar 7, C4 in bar 8). From that point on, unmistakable lines lead back to ^5 (G5) and then onward to ^8 in the cadence.

Here is standard Schenkerian notation of a reading from ^3. This seems to me to be one case where the "default" reading from ^3 is heavily at odds with the music.

I hear pitch design in n6 as more complex, another case where tonal frames (or proto-backgrounds) help considerably. The boxed triad at the beginning is regained "as is" in bar 12. Note at the beginning that each of the three notes has its moment: ^8 as the first metrically accented note, exaggerated by the sforzando; ^5 with the first linear motion (a neighbor note that receives the second metrical accent); and ^3, whose own neighbor figure is the theme's contrasting idea. In bars 5-8, ^3 is clearly the focus. In bars 9-11, each of the three triad notes appears on the beat (see flagged notes), and the original triad frame is restated in position in the fifth octave. This time ^3 receives the phrase's first metrical accent, ^8 the next one, and ^5 develops and extends its neighbor figure to create a rising line, where its ^6, ^7, and ^8 are all metrically accented. A Schenkerian version of all this is shown below the score.

It would certainly be easy enough to read from ^3 throughout—and far more plausible than it was in n7—but the effect is still musically distant, something that maps an ideal voice-leading that struggles to be expressive or otherwise musically revelatory.

New essay published

My essay Rising Gestures, Text Expression, and the Background as Theme has been published on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link. Here is the abstract:

Walter Everett's categories for tonal design features in nineteenth-century songs fit the framework of the Classic/Romantic dichotomy: eighteenth-century practice is the benchmark for progressive but conflicted alternatives. These categories are analogous to themes in literary interpretation; so understood, they suggest a broader range of options for the content of the background than the three Schenkerian Urlinien regarded as essentialized universals. The analysis of a Brahms song, "Über die See," Op. 69/7, provides a case study in one type, the rising line, and also the entry point for a critique of Everett's reliance on a self- contradictory attitude toward the Schenkerian historical narrative.

Counterpoint and the rising cadence gesture

As we saw in yesterday's post, 16th century cadences with interval pairs 3-1 or 6-8, could be the ground or motivation for a rising melodic gesture, but the odds were against it, mainly because of suspension figures that provided additional downward momentum into the cadence.

In the abstract counterpoint exercises that were derived from 16th century music, the potential for rising cadential figures was, ironically perhaps, much greater than it had been in the actual repertoires those exercises were trying to model. There were two reasons for this: (1) the separation of figures into "species" served to isolate suspensions into a single type of exercise; (2) in two-voice instruction, it was routine to write one exercise with the ground or cantus above, then another with the ground below, a situation that guaranteed trading off the 3-1 and 6-8 cadences.

Beethoven studied strict counterpoint with Johann Albrechtsberger while Haydn was away in London. And it is here that the potential of a rising melodic gesture in counterpoint exercises came to fruition in music. Beethoven was apparently one of the first dance composers to make direct use of a rising cadence (but see below for a precedent from Mozart). Beethoven's 12 Deutsche Tänze, WoO8, were composed only three months after he finished his counterpoint studies with Albrechtsberger, but the first dance in the set follows an unexpected trajectory. It begins with a stepwise ascent from ^1 to ^3, elaborated and harmonized with an 8-10-10 voice-leading figure with the bass—this is one of the conventional figures of the partimento tradition. The second strain leads the melody in a determined way upward to ^8. The first dance in a set such as this one—like the menuets in WoO7, these waltzes were for a public ball—was often used as a refrain, so that Beethoven would have had incentive to make it memorable.

As it happens, Mozart had anticipated Beethoven by twenty years. His set of 12 menuets, K 176, opens with a similar promenade/refrain, and it uses virtually the same opening and closing figures.