Hugo Wolf songs, Part 4

"Cophtisches Lied II" (Goethe Lieder no. 15) is written in the style of accompanied recitative (by Wolf's day largely indistinguishable from the music of vocal melodramas intended for recital or salon performance: see References for more information). The poem is in ten lines, two units of five lines each. The overall expressive trajectory is from the shifting figures, fragments of phrases, and chromaticism of the traditional (18th century) accompanied recitative to a steady march (in the piano coda marcato, fortissimo).

Emphasized pitches in the voice part at the beginning trace a line from ^5 to ^#7 in D minor, though the underlying harmony wanders far afield:

For the remaining lines of the first verse, the line sinks back through C-nat5 to the piano's pianissimo B3 (bar 13). I have not marked it but also notice an ancillary line bringing G4 (bar 8) through F4 (bars 9-11 in the piano, bar 11 in the voice) to E4 in the voice (bar 12; then repeated by the piano in the following bars). This register persists as an inner voice during the second verse.

For the second verse, the voice puts D: ^6 in the fifth octave (bar 17), then on a somewhat tortured path eventually finds it way to the structural cadence and D5 (bar 27). Given the shifting movements of the harmony, even in this march section, I hesitate to ascribe any particular figure to the voice's background shape, other than it rises overall.

References: The most important source is Sarah Hibberd, ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). The scholar who has written most extensively about melodrama is Jacqueline Waeber. See her Musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris,  2005). Some examples of melodramas of the type I mention written by contemporaries of Wolf include Franz Liszt, Lenore, S.346 (1857–58); Carl Haslinger, Der Bettler vom Rialto, Op.124 (1868?); and Siegfried Ochs, Der Handschuh (1883).

Strauss, Die Fledermaus n12, Act III, Entre'act & n13, Melodrama

The scene for Act III is the jail. The Entre'act--which functions as the introduction to Act III--helps switch locations for the audience in that it is a reprise of all of the Vogelhaus march, both the 2/4 and 6/8 sections. In the course of that, the powerful (con forza) cadence is repeated:

In n13, Frank has returned to the jail and settles down, all the while recalling pleasant memories (and, of course, several musical fragments) of the evening's party, including the Prince's toast, with its ascending cadence gesture. At the end of the melodrama (that is, a scene of action--or in this case rather less and less action) he falls asleep.

Postscript to the post on 5-6 figures

One of the examples in yesterday's post was from David Damschroder's article: the opening of Schubert's Minona, D.152 (1815). A curiosity in this melodrama's ending is worth a look here. When the protagonist finds her lover, killed by an arrow, she says/intones/sings the following:

Circled notes E5 and F5 are the focal pitches (note they are doubled in the piano in the second system).

She then quickly (plötzlich = suddenly or abruptly) pulls out the arrow and stabs herself ("stösst ihn . . . mit Hast in den Busen") -- boxed notes E5-F#5-Fnat5 -- and sinks down to die (Eb5-D5-C5 and a strongly implied B5). A closing A5 is in the piano coda. It is a bit absurd to be charting focal notes and lines across the ever-changing surface of a melodrama, but on this last page I think it is possible to hear a descent from E5 by step down to A4. a "five-line."

The piano follows the voice -- well, actually, precedes it to F#5 (circled note marked ^#6) -- and then to Fnat5, after which it holds F5, then drops to G#4 -- continued series of circled notes), also closing on A4 in the piano's coda. The simplest voice leading wouldn't follow this sequence in the uppermost notes of the right hand -- at sehr langsam Bb4 would go down to G#4 (the voice does this in the lower half of its register) and F5 would drop the octave to F4, but I think that is misleading here as the F5 is already doubled by F4 on the first beat of the bar (at "Schnee").

On 5-6 figures and sequences

In 2006, David Damschroder published an article on 5-6 sequences in the music of Schubert. These (though not necessarily in Schubert) would seem to be good candidates for participation in rising cadence gestures, since, in the clichéd progressions of the Italian pedagogical (partimenti) tradition, 5-6 patterns rise -- see (a) below --, whereas the complement, 6-5, falls. Here are links to some examples from partimenti rules and exercises: link; link; link.

Example (a) below is reproduced from the article, where it is example 3d. The author takes this as the prototype for a number of diatonic and—his main topic in the article—chromatic figures, including one in which the second chord is in root position rather than first inversion (see Example b, first item below; his 3e). This "thirds and fourths" pattern (or "thirds and fifths,"  if you drop the last bass note an octave) is ubiquitous in historical European musics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so of course one can locate two other foundational voiceleading figures -- see the second and third examples under (b) below. The majority of Damschroder's examples from Schubert actually use these latter between upper voice and bass, and at least two of those that do maintain 5-6 between upper voice and bass have 6/4 chords (!) in the second position of the figure.

 One striking example of the stricter chromatic 5-6 sequence is Damschroder's Example 9, the opening of  Schubert's "Minona," D.152 (see below). This early work (1815) is by no means a Lied; it is a melodrama in the manner of those by Benda and others from the 1790s. Its stylistic foundation is the accompanied recitative, and therefore we might well expect to find a somewhat strange progression at the beginning (and elsewhere, for that matter). The introduction is a music of foreboding and strangeness -- what we hear when the singer enters is an image of darkness, storm, and fear. (Eventually, the young woman is drawn out into the night to find her lover dead at the hands of her father; she decides to take the arrow that killed him and die alongside -- more on that below. If all this seems pretty dismal, in the manner of the early Romantics, recall that early death among all urban social classes had become a serious societal problem by the end of the eighteenth century, especially from syphilis and tuberculosis. The revolution of the Romantics was to draw this sort of tragedy into the present, not keep it more emotionally distant by using ancient stories and characters.)

I have added asterisks to show the striking augmented sixth chords that are responsible for continually shifting the direction of the harmony. At ** and the arrow, Schubert breaks the pattern in order to stay on the dominant of the initial key, A minor.

Returning to the diatonic 5-6 sequence, for my purposes here, example (c) below is the one of interest. I have rewritten and extended example (a) to create an ascending cadence beginning from ^5 over I. This is an extraordinarily easy progression to generate, yet, as I have written on numerous occasions previously, the pressure of musical fashion and practice rooted in Italian models seems to have prevented its common usage. In the eighteenth century (as in the seventeenth), ascending cadence gestures -- though rarely with this progression, it must be said -- are found most often in northern dance musics and the French court music derived originally from those musics. Only near the end of the century, probably under the influence of other dance musics--the waltzing dances of Germanophone countries--did the rising line cadence gesture find its way into symphonic music (in the menuets of the late symphonies of Haydn, notably) and eventually into opera (in the 1830s and again through the importation of the by-then universally fashionable waltz and related social dances).

What is missing, most often is the second chord, vi, which of course undermines the entire notion of a repeated 5-6 pattern. Süssmayr's trio to the tenth of his 12 Menuets is typical. (I wrote about pieces in this set here: link.)

In Hummel's Six German Dances with trios, op. 16, vi is present, but any vestige of a 5-6 figure is really impossible to pull from this. I am, indeed, doubtful even about the rising line I've charted. (On the other hand, the descending 8-line in the first strain is as clear as it could possibly be.)

Reference: David Damschroder, "Schubert, Chromaticism, and the Ascending 5--6 Sequence," Journal of Music Theory 50n2 (2006): 253-275.