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.

Weber, Allemandes, Op. 4

In 1801, a young Carl Maria von Weber composed his Opus 4, a set of 10 allemandes with trios. He turned fifteen that year—and the set was published fifteen years later. "Allemande" here means Deutscher-Tanz or German dance, the foil to the Laendler in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and closely related to late-period menuets (after about 1790). For more on the distinction between Deutscher and Laendler, see these posts on my Schubert blog: link 1; link 2.

None of the allemandes or their trios has a simple rising line from ^5, but several are interesting nonetheless for their open cadences or figures focused on ^8.

The trio of n1 does have the ^6 down to ^7-^8 cliché common to the early waltz, but ^3 (as F5) is defined so clearly at the beginning, and ^2 at the beginning of each continuation phrase, that there is really no plausible way to hear a rising line. The cadence is open, but the implication of C6 in the final bar of each strain is fairly weak by comparison with many others we've seen in previous posts.

 N5 does have an emphatic rising cadence in the second strain, at (d), but here again it's very difficult to sort any of the previous material in a way that points toward a prolonged ^5 to precede the ^6-^7-^8 in the final two bars.

N6 runs neighbor notes about ^8 in the first strain -- not, I would guess, an uncommon feature of (the relatively rare) dance strains that begin in minor and end in major.

The trio of n9 uses another familiar cliché—the long scalar form of the "fall from the dominant"—but in the first strain the easiest figure to hear is ^8 (across the first phrase), then ^6-^7-^8 (all circled) in the second phrase. In the second strain the line begins plainly from C6 (bar 13) and continues by step down ("up") to ^8 (as F4), a reasonably convincing cadence figure despite the lack of definition of ^5 in the first phrase of strain 2.