Showing posts with label can-can. Show all posts
Showing posts with label can-can. Show all posts
Saturday, April 28, 2018
Strauss, Die Fledermaus n4, Trio
Rosalinde bids farewell to Eisenstein, still believing he is going to jail. She sings a sad complaint about being left alone (her maid, Adele, has managed to secure time off to go to the same party Eisenstein will attend). There are three iterations of this, each of them followed by a brief passage in a can-can rhythm; the three singers are whispering an aside "Oh, how this moves me!" [O je, wie rührt mich dies!].
The cadences for the first and second instances are cut off, but the third finishes its emphatic ascent to ^8.
Friday, June 3, 2016
Offenbach's "catalogue" of melodic figures
In correspondence, Jeremy Day-O'Connell asked what I thought of the V9 chord in the theme of the famous can-can (Galop infernale) from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld (Orphée aux enfers [first production 1858]). I took a look and found that, within a few seconds, that great genius of satirical operetta (opéra bouffe) packed in hints or realizations of many of the century's characteristic melodic treatments of scale degrees ^2 and ^6. Here they are:
At (a), a hint of what became the V13 chord (more on that below). At (b1), ^2 colors the tonic with a major second (as 9 in 9-8). At (b2), ^6 colors the tonic triad, a hint of what shortly would become the Iadd6 chord. At (c), ^6 in its classical position as third of the subdominant triad. At (d), a true dominant ninth chord. At (e1) and (e2), the alternation of 9-8 and 6-5 over tonic and dominant, a figure that is a cliché in the early waltz repertoire, as we saw in previous posts on Schubert.
As a postscript, here are bars 1-2 rewritten as an "evolution of the 13th chord." At (a), bars 1-2 showing the ancient escape tone figure I have mentioned in previous posts. The more common version creates a ninth as the escape tone, but this one can be found often in eighteenth-century music as well. At (b), the melody is simplified, the longer note values giving more attention to the dissonance, raising the question (note the ?) of whether this might be a harmony rather than a coincidental dissonance. At (c), then, the V13 has fully arrived as the 13th displaces the 12th altogether.
At (a), a hint of what became the V13 chord (more on that below). At (b1), ^2 colors the tonic with a major second (as 9 in 9-8). At (b2), ^6 colors the tonic triad, a hint of what shortly would become the Iadd6 chord. At (c), ^6 in its classical position as third of the subdominant triad. At (d), a true dominant ninth chord. At (e1) and (e2), the alternation of 9-8 and 6-5 over tonic and dominant, a figure that is a cliché in the early waltz repertoire, as we saw in previous posts on Schubert.
As a postscript, here are bars 1-2 rewritten as an "evolution of the 13th chord." At (a), bars 1-2 showing the ancient escape tone figure I have mentioned in previous posts. The more common version creates a ninth as the escape tone, but this one can be found often in eighteenth-century music as well. At (b), the melody is simplified, the longer note values giving more attention to the dissonance, raising the question (note the ?) of whether this might be a harmony rather than a coincidental dissonance. At (c), then, the V13 has fully arrived as the 13th displaces the 12th altogether.
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