Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 5

If the rising line is not a good candidate in the Eb Major Prelude (see previous posts), it is inescapable in the G Major Prelude. The same kind of dramatic emphasis that Carl Schachter notes and uses in part to situate his reading of the several voice leading strands in the Eb Major Prelude occurs also in the G Major Prelude, and specifically in connection with a cadence that rises to and through the leading tone: here are the final bars. [For reference, a copy of the score appears at the end of this post]

The opening bars (shown below) establish a three-part texture with great clarity; the topmost voice charts a neighbor-note figure across mm. 1-4 and even embellishes itself with little neighbor note figures along the way. The bass is a pedal point G2, and the middle voice walks sturdily on a path from ^5 to ^1 (^8): D3-E3-F#3-G3. As we shall see, the relationship of the upper two voices is simply reversed in the final cadence, the pedal point bass there being V or D3. That the topmost voice is the principal one is confirmed a few measures later, when a stereotypical (^2)-^2 brings ^3 over I down to ^2 over V (see the rectangle frame in the example). Along with this, the role of D4 is plainly identified as a cover tone, or focus of an auxiliary (secondary) voice above the principal voice.

Disruptive cadenzas like those in the Eb Major Prelude are lacking in the G Major Prelude, but there some dramatic moments before the final flourish. In the first system below, a registrally expansive gesture runs quickly across the strings from the open C2 to our cover tone D4. The latter is pushed one half tone higher to Eb4 two measures later -- that's the highest note before the run up to G4 at the end. The effect is immediately vitiated, however, by a move downward and resolution to B3 as ^3 (end of the rectangular frame), and D4 is heard again it's obviously a cover tone once more (circled in the last system).

At the end, the formation of A3 (^2) above V could hardly be clearer, and the sudden chromatic rush up to G4 is a surprise -- although the chromaticism itself is a marker of the cadenza, and that is apparently how the figure is meant to function here. The diagonal line marked in the score suggests that the figure outlines (unfolds) a sixth from A3 to F#4.

In the final bars, the circled note pairs mark the parallels to the beginning of the Prelude, but now with the voices inverted: what was the uppermost voice is in the middle, and the middle voice, having attained its tonic goal-tone, is shifted an octave higher, above the original "soprano." Thus, the opening gesture at the left of the example below turns into the closing gesture at the right.

I suppose one could argue that the stretched-out chromatic scale changes the relations of the voice leading strands to the point that the middle voice replaces the upper voice as primary, and therefore one gets a rising Urlinie from the cover tone D -- picked up in the middle of the chromatic scale -- up to G4. I am wary of these sudden reversals, however, just as I am of Urlinie ^3s that show up just a few bars away from the end of a piece. The cover tone D4 never has the kind of significance earlier that would predict such a change of role -- the rising line, then, seems an arbitrary choice. Thus, I would go with Schachter's "equals" here, the inner voice being "first among" them, and would probably notate using Channan Willner's "polyphonic Ursatz" (see yesterday's post). But there is a caveat: a descent to ^1 is plainly as forced and arbritary as a rising Urlinie would have been. The Prelude, then, ends as it began: with ^3 in the principal voice (and probably then a background shape involving neighbor notes -- see my comment on Arthur Komar's reading of the WTC, C Major Prelude in the MTS article, 291).

Postscript: Should D779n13 not be read in a similar way? Have I not said that the rising cadence gesture is a surprise? And does not the set of parallel sixths force B4 (^2) back up to C#5 (^3) rather than down to A4 (^1)? I could settle for the latter reading, but as to the rising gesture, it is only a surprise in terms of the clichéd formulas of the cadence (and, in the waltz repertoire, therefore, rather less of a surprise than it would be in most other genres). Unlike the cover tone D4 in the G Major Prelude, in D779n13 the F#5 (^6) that appears almost immediately and is touched on repeatedly thereafter forces constant attention to the "space above ^5" and sets all the conditions needed for a move further up at the end.