Cécile Chaminade songs, Part 3

"Bonne Humeur" was published in 1903. The poem is by Amélie de Wailly (Mesureur). An English translation is available here: link. About firm companionship despite obstacles (those are represented by the adverse weather), the song expresses this sense immediately through "Nous marchions," from which the composer takes her cue.

The poem has four verses, using the rhyme scheme 1 1 2 3 3 2. The music for each verse varies, with verse 4 being a varied version of verse 1, thus musically the setting is ABCA'. The point of interest for this blog is in a wedge figure at the end of verse 3. More on that below. Otherwise, Chaminade works with the same ^5-^8 interval as she does in "La fiancée du soldat." Notice at the beginning that the lower element shifts up a step to end the first idea (E4-F#4)—see the arrow—and the upper element moves down a half-step to end the varied repetition (A4-G#4; see the second arrow).

A register change takes the interval to an upper fourth, B4-E5, which turns to a fifth, B4-E4, and then contracts to its original fourth E4-A4.

The wedge is a very prominent and dramatic passage that might have been played for humor (the line in the third bar of the example below has the companion Ninon stamping through mud puddles) but instead is transfigured with octave leaps and long held notes for "elle sourit": "she smiles."

Here are two versions of the voice leading: at (a), a simplification of the piano's chords; at (b), a reduced, registrally compressed four-voice version.

The end of the song could be said to be framed by a descending line—see the scale degree numbers—but the F# substitution for ^2 in the antepenultimate bar (boxed) leaves open an easily imagined E5 and a possible proto-background ^1/^5 as A4-E5 (boxed) in the penultimate bar.

Cécile Chaminade songs, Part 1

"L'Idéal" was written by the Parnassian poet Sully Prudhomme. Chaminade follows the poem's design in the musical form A1 A2 ( = transposition, varied) B1 B2 A1 A2'. Her mode of expression is both dramatic and emphatic.

In the opening, a chromatic line rises to G4, then moves beyond it to G#4 (over an augmented triad) and A4 as the voice takes up its stolid recitation over ^8 (C4 if tenor, C5 if soprano), ending its phrase on ^9/^2 (D, circled).

The voice in the second phrase transposes its first phrase up a step, changing the ending to close firmly indeed with a ^3-^-2-^1 in C major, while—in an even more determined way (note the marcato accents)—the piano ascends to ^8. Overall then, a wedge figure is created.

In the reprise of the A section, the chromatic keyboard line flows directly out of the PAC that closes B2—see the circled notes below.

In the final phrase A2', both voice and piano reach fortissimo, and the piano overtops the voice (whether soprano or tenor), demanding equal attention to its rising line.

Galops by Johann Strauss, sr.

The galop (galopp, gallopade), a simple dance in duple meter and rapid tempo, undoubtedly had 18th century predecessors, but it was in the 1820s that it quickly became popular in urban ballrooms. Johann Strauss, sr., wrote a large number of them. Here are five.

Erinnerungs-Galopp, Op.27 (1830?)
Sperl-Galopp, Op.42 (1831)
Reise-Galopp, Op.85 (1836)
Cachucha-Galopp, Op.97 (1837)
Furioso-Galopp, Op.114 (1840)

The Erinnerungs-Galopp, Op.27 (1830?), is a musical instantiation of both the simplicity and the speed of the dance. The tendency toward 16-bar themes/strains is clear in the galop; this opening strain is unusual in its twenty bars. The ascent through the octave is one of the most direct I have found anywhere in the repertoire of European traditional tonal music.

The second strain of the Sperl-Galopp, Op.42 (1831) shows the typical violinistic distinction of registers (^5 and ^3 in bars 1-2), but the upper register is definitely the focus. The point of interest for us is the cadence (boxed), in which the wedge figure brings a secondary line up from ^5 (B4). Note that the codetta brings the total number of bars to twenty again and contradicts the preceding by its emphasis on ^7-^8.

The second strain in the trio to the Reise-Galopp, Op.85 (1836), "flips" the wedge as an obvious fifth-line descends but is then suddenly overtaken by a rising line in the cadence.

The second strain of the Cachucha-Galopp, Op.97 (1837) attempts an imitation in 2/4 time of the Spanish cachucha, a mainly theatrical dance from the 1830s that was in 3/4 meter. Another wedge figure.

The opening of the Furioso-Galopp, Op.114 (1840), offers an ascending line as direct as the one in the Erinnerungs-Galopp of a decade earlier, but now running through two-plus octaves (B3 to B4 to B5-C#6-D#6-E6) and with persistent chromatic inflection.

Kirnberger, Lob des Weins (1761)

This little vocal gavotte by Kirnberger, "Lob des Weins," is in the 4th installment of the Musikalisches Allerley von verschiedenen Tonkünstlern (Berlin, 1761). The text, which had been set by Telemann twenty years earlier, runs to six verses praising the wine god (Rebengott--see bar 5). (Marpurg, like Kirnberger a frequent contributor to the Allerley, also set the text (1763).) The gavotte was already long associated not only with the pastoral (see "Bacchus" in bar 6) but also with the contredanse, so that a certain "party atmosphere" is undoubtedly meant here. The only oddity is that the gavotte, when meant to be danced, was never written in 6-bar strains.

A clear focal tone (^5) in the first strain is displaced by an equally clear ^3 in the second strain.* The closing cadence is a wedge, where ^3 descends by line, and ^5 ascends from below, also by line.

*A Schenkerian might well bring a line down from ^5 through ^4 in bar 7, but doing so would obviously be forced and unmusical.

Strauss, Die Fledermaus n11, Act II finale

The setting of Act II is the ball to which Eisenstein and Falke have stolen away. Thanks to Falke's plan for revenge on Eisenstein, however, pretty much everyone shows up, although in disguise; the only person who isn't in disguise is the host, Prince Orlofsky. Unlike the first act, the second has no rising cadence figures outside of the finale.

The Prince opens with a toast to champagne. The music is mapped out as three eight-bar strains (A, B, C below; C is repeated as C') with a twelve-bar insert. Strain B, in the dominant, functions as Caplin's contrasting middle, a "B-section" in traditional form terms, to which the insert adds a retransition. Strains A and C are distinct, but both use ascending lines in their cadences.

The two phrases of A are essentially the same, and they would form a simple wedge figure except that ^2 in the descent has to be imagined. The ^3 (as F#5) is clear enough as a focal tone, but all the attention after the first bar goes to ^5 and then its tra-la-la-ing ascent in the cadence. The voice is accompanied by lower orchestral voices in this segment, and one can find the requisite ^2, though as E4 not E5 and in the third horn and viola, which placement doesn't inspire confidence about the musically revelatory.

Strain C has the toast itself, and its tune is built much like the one in A, but with the lower line stretched out to a sixth and the force of the upper ^3 as focal tone much diminished. In the cadence it's more plausible, to my ears anyway, to hear F# moving up to its similarly expressed neighbor G than it is to pull out the sixteenth-note E4 for a descent. The priorities I am hinting at here become obvious in C', where the cadence brings more attention to ^6 and an over-reaching ascent in the Flute 1 part (marked and notes circled below).

An upper-voice wedge in a contredanse gigue (1781)

One of the clearest examples of a wedge figure in a three-voice texture can be seen below. The handwritten title is "Les Caprices de Galatée," which may or may not refer to a Parisian dance-pantomime of that title. This is the 17th page in volume 3 of the collection The celebrated Dances performed by Messrs. Vestris &c. at the King's Theatre in the Hay Market, 1781, composed by G. B. Noferi. Link. Giovanni Battista Noferi was an Italian violinist (he also played guitar) who apparently came to England early and stayed, working mostly in London. He died in 1782, the year after this collection was published. The Vestris were a large French family of professional dancers.

Very plainly a contredanse gigue, this piece is cast in the very common design of three strains (ABC) and five sections en rondeau (ABACA). All three strains are simple period themes. Indeed, the design is so familiar that amateur dancers would have no trouble dancing to it, either in the four-couple quadrille formation or as a long dance.

The principal strain has a stationary voice on E5, which the surrounding voices approach in a wedge, the "alto" voice reaching the tonic note, the upper voice making it part-way to G#5 (^3) but losing even that in the consequent. As readers of this blog will know, this strong implication of a pitch not actually sounded in the cadence is a common device, especially in violin music, and one can readily imagine it as an inducement to particular figures in ornamented repetitions (see below the score for one obvious such figure here).  For more on complex upper voices, see this essay of mine: link.

A likely (actually, almost inevitable) cadence figure improvised in performance: