16-bar sentences; more to D810

Yesterday's post dealt with the expansion of D790n6 into the scherzo of the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. For the trio, I'll do the reverse: pull out of the existing piece a plausible dance source. Actually, it's quite easy to do because the trio is set up as strain + varied repetition, and the contrasting middle is cleanly segregated out.

The 16-bar strain is by no means common in the waltzes, and most of those are periods (which, it must be said, are just as easily understood as written-out repetition with a varied cadence). Of 16-bar sentences, there are only seven, and all but one is early. The list is D128n10; D145ns 1, 3 12; D146ns 5, 6; and D969n5; they appear in a gallery below, with the articulation at eight bars marked in red. (D145n3 is an exception: the red line marks the "proper" end of the 16 strain, before the second 8 are repeated.)

Dance table

This is in part an addendum to the post on dances published during Schubert's lifetime. I have compiled a table that can be accessed here: link. [link updated 7-02-16] The table collates three publications: the old Universal edition that was republished by Kalmus and is available on IMSLP, the Henle Urtext edition, and the relevant volumes in the Neue Schubert Ausgabe.

From the latter's admirable division of the dances into those that exist in Schubert's hand (Bd. 6) and all those published in his lifetime (and those published posthumously but which can be traced back to Schubert) (Bd. 7), one can find support for my rough division of the dances into three groups (before 1821, 1821-23, and 1823-28). In the main, the earlier dances were collected for publication from a number of ms. sources, where the later publications may have been newly composed pieces planned as sets. The first of these "planned sets" seems to be D 734, but D 779 is an anomaly as the ten existing in Schubert's hand were chosen from two different ms. collections, the majority of whose dances went into other publications or remained unpublished till after Schubert's death.

The two graphics below (1) give a view of the relationship between D146, D779, D783, and D973; (2) chart the positions and keys of the ten dances in D779 in their sources (the 9 German dances and 17 German dances). Both graphics are thumbnails; click on them for the original, larger versions.

Closed-position textures

Although the "trio" texture associated with the oom-pah left hand figures is by far the most common in Schubert's dances, occasionally (and beginning quite early in his career), he uses a closed voicing in the left hand. In these cases, the stabilizing role comes very much to the fore. Here are a few examples, to be discussed in more detail at another time. The first two appear in a manuscript from 1815, D146n15 in a manuscript from 1823.

D146n3, trio, contrasting middle (the reprise begins in the final two bars of the example):

D146n4, trio. A similar example, D820n2, could not be reproduced here for copyright reasons.

D146n15. This and the next example combine closed position and oom-pah texture:

D365n16: