Two hymns from an 18th century service manual

"Das Grab ist leer, der Held erwacht" is an Easter hymn published in the Landshuter Gesangbuch in 1777. The editors of the volume were presumably responsible for the unsigned music and text: Norbert Hauner and Franz Seraph von Kohlbrenner. This hymn became quite popular and remained so through the nineteenth century. The version below is a duple meter variant published in 1874. The opening of the original triple-meter version is reproduced at the bottom of this post.

The design of the opening holds for the entire verse, in melodic shape a proto-background ^3-^8, as shown below (though possibly ^3-^5-^8, as suggested by the ^5 in parentheses), the line being a neighbor ^8-^7-^8, which might possibly be heard as a double neighbor figure depending on the details of a particular harmonization.

Below: The opening of the 1777 version, which clearly combines the heroic and pastoral topics. The F#5 in bar 6 is a hint of what follows (not shown), where I would find ^3 to be plausible focal tone.

Reference: Wikipedia page for "Das Grab ist leer": link.

Lehar, The Merry Widow, Act 1 Ball-music

Franz Lehar, Die lustige Witwe / The Merry Widow (1905), Act 1 Ball-music. This single waltz strain is to be played offscreen under conversation, but also ad libitum, meaning it can be left out (the same music appears later in the score -- a recording I listened to recently included the first statement but dropped the second one). The design is a 32-bar period (common in waltzes after about 1860, but also found regularly later on in marches, one-steps, and rags). The first 16-bar phase is one of those awkward units where period or sentence might apply equally well, depending on how you take the identical rhythms but different melodic shapes.

A triadic interval frame is established quite clearly -- circled at the beginning below -- and is returned to at the end of the first 16-bar phase -- circled at the beginning of the second system. In the second 16-bar unit, the triad is shifted upward -- circled across the second and third systems -- and overlaps with a simple scalar progress through the octave, with a registral drop on ^3. See the next example.

Here is a schematic of the triad frame (as proto-background) and a parsing of the octave line in the final six bars.

Brahms, Liebeslieder-Walzer, op. 52, n3

The third number in Brahms's opus 52 is brief, a duo for tenor and bass, for whom the slightly obnoxious text offers that a fellow would have become a monk if it were not for the charms of women.

Here is the piece in a piano reduction (not by Brahms but obviously based very closely on his piano four-hands version). All in all, a simple rising line from ^5 in the first strain, repeated to end the second.

Here is the texted version with solo piano accompaniment. The tenor might be said to trace a line from ^3 downward, so long as one is willing to understand ^7 in the penultimate bar as a substitution for ^2--not unreasonable. It is, however, telling that Brahms—far from emphasizing the voice parts in his own piano versions of the piece—dropped them.

Hummel, German Dance, op. 45n4

Hummel's Opus 45 (1812) is a set of dances meant for performance in the Apollo Saal, one of the largest of such entertainment centers in Vienna, with multiple rooms in which one could dance, talk, eat, or gamble (link to German Wikipedia). As a published collection in piano arrangement, Op. 45 consists of a march introduction, six menuets with trios, six German dances with trios, and a lengthy coda.

The fourth German dance is easily heard with a simple rising line in the first strain and an extended ^8 with double neighbors in the second strain. Performance practice would dictate the likelihood that the first strain would be repeated after the second. An interesting point about the first strain is that the first phrase gives us half-note length Urlinie notes on the strong beat—D5 in bar 2, E5 in bar 4—where the second phrase does the reverse, giving us F#5 immediately in bar 5 and G5 in bar 7. The symmetry makes for an elegant theme.

Alternatively, one might decide to take the initial ^8—which I have called a cover tone above—and regard that as the focal tone, a reading that makes sense given the figures of the second strain, as described above. If so, the result is an ^8-^7-^8 Urlinie with a middleground ascent connecting to ^7 in the second phrase (see ^5 and ^6 in parentheses in the first phrase).

Still another alternative would be to wait till the middle of the second strain to reach ^3, as B5. An initial ascent is easy enough to hear, as is a descent in the cadence. Whether such an expressive toppling of the formal design is justified, whether it makes much musical or artistic sense, is a matter of opinion. Such late placements of the initial focal tone are not uncommon in traditional Schenkerian analysis but are rarely very convincing. Here, of course, if we take performance practice for dance music into account, this reading could only be sustained in the case of AB or ABAB, not if the first strain is repeated to end, ABA or ABABA.

E. F. Richter, "Frühlingsglaube"

Ernst Friedrich Richter is known mainly as a very successful theory and composition textbook author. In the mid-nineteenth century, he taught at the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory.  He was also a composer. "Frühlingsglaube," the first of two choral pieces for soprano voices on poems by Ludwig Uhland, is striking in its treatment of an ascending cadence gesture, a parallelism with a descending cadence formula, and the artistically sensitive expression of text achieved through the cadence parallelism.

The poem is in two verses of nearly equal length (7 lines in the first, 8 in the second), its parallelisms made clear by repetition of the final line, "Nun muss sich alles, alles wenden" ("Now everything, everything must change"). In the usual mode of Romantic irony, the poem lauds the pleasures and new life of spring—but as an escape from pain and suffering. (It's easy to make light of that now, but in an era when death was likely by the age of 50, and not uncommon by 40, and where the worst urban diseases, small pox, tuberculosis, and syphilis, were still largely not understood, such oppositions were serious and had considerable immediacy.)

The music for the two verses is very similar, the first half (with a cadence to the dominant) being essentially identical, the second half altered in the second verse as it approaches the cadence. The first phrase of this second half emphasizes ^4 over a progression that extends the dominant, and then resolves to ^3, but over C# minor harmony. After that, repeatedly rising figures considerably expand the setting of "Nun muss sich alles, alles wenden" but a cadence does finally arrive in the lower register, not the upper.

The parallel place in the second verse expands the setting even further, reaching E5 a third time (circled in the second system below).

The original cadence phrase then starts up but its rise to ^5 is continued onward to ^8 this time. Note the common substitution of ^2 (or ^9) through a voice exchange with the alto.

The expansions of the two verse endings develop the material nicely as a way to express "everything must change" but their insistence also throws off the symmetry of the verse halves and the pairing of pleasant spring imagery against what amounts to a half-despairing cry, not "Everything is changing" but "Everything must change."

New publication: operettas by Offenbach

I have published a new essay on the Texas Scholar Works platform: Offenbach, two one-act operettas: Les deux aveugles (1855) and Pomme d’Api (1873). Link.

Here is the abstract:

Ascending cadence gestures are common in the repertoire of the operetta and in some early opéras comiques. Composers altered traditional dramatic cadence figures beginning in the mid-1830s, but it was multiple instances in Jacques Offenbach’s one- act stage pieces in the mid-1850s that popularized them and turned them into clichés of the musical theater. Les deux aveugles (1855) was the composer’s first undisputed success. Offenbach returned to the one-act format much later in his career with Pomme d’Api (1873). An afterword provides a table of theatrical cadences that bring attention to the upper register.

New Publication: Rounds, Canons, and Catches

I have published a new essay on the Texas Scholar Works platform: Rounds, Catches and Canons: Interval Frames and Ascending Figures. Link.

Here is the abstract:

The play of register in the compact designs of vocal rounds sets up a structure that is quite amenable to rising cadence figures. Repertoire presented here comes from two general groups of sources: (1) nineteenth-century amateur and school collections, which include both traditional and contemporary rounds; (2) seventeenth-century publications by Thomas Ravenscroft, John Hilton, and Henry Purcell.