On the Laendler in D734

Here is another passage from Litschauer and Deutsch (39; trans.):

Among Schubert's dances in triple meter are about 130 Ländler, composed between 1815 and 1826 and by and large preserved in manuscript sources. In contrast to the schottisches, german dances, and waltzes, however, the Ländler do not appear among Schubert's albumleaves or dedication compositions, and thus it is not suprising that these dances are rarely mentioned by the composer's friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, as two journal entries by Franz von Hartmann indicate, Ländler were commonly confused with German dances. (In both instances, the reference is to Schubert's "16 Ländler, opus 67" D734, which were published by Diabelli in December 1826 under the title "Hommage aux belles Viennoises: Wiener-Damen-Ländler.")

17 December 1826 (Sunday): By Spauns, where Gahy played brand-new Schubert German dances (with the title "homage to the belles of Vienna," which made Schubert quite angry).

6 January 1827: We went to Spauns, where we were invited, along with Gahy, to breakfast. . . . then Gahy played two superb sonatas by Schubert and the German dances that had enchanted us so at M on the 17th.

Hartmann probably should have known better, as few collections outside the first dozen or so numbers in D365 and D779 represent the Ländler style more consistently, but in his defense we should remember that Deutscher was not only the genre title for a particular group of dances and their musics, but also the family name for all "waltzing" dances.

Several points can be made about D734, many of them reminders of earlier posts:

(1) the boundary between Ländler and Deutscher was always fuzzy with respect to musical style in the urban dance cultures, being reduced by the 1820s to sweeter/quieter/slower (Ländler) versus formal/louder/faster (Deutscher).

(2) in dancing, the types were often intermingled to fit alternations between couple and group dancing. In D734, for instance, n2 comes as close as any Schubert dance to realizing the type of the rural Ländler in the late 18th century: D major, I and V only, violinistic melody with many third doublings. But n16 is clearly a Deutscher that would accompany the obligatory processional that ended an extended dance/cotillion.

(3) the "sweeter/quieter/slower" criterion is muddied by imitations of the Schnadahüpfl episodes in rural dancing. This alternation is clearly at work in D734n1: the first eight bars of Ländler are interrupted by the same music abruptly transformed into a loud, drone-accompanied Schnadahüpfl, then the Ländler returns. Remember that this is also what happens -- down to the direct mediant key shifts -- in D779n13 and D145n7.

Reference.

Litschauer, Walburga, and Walter Deutsch. Schubert und das Tanzvergnügen. Vienna: Holzhausen, 1997.

Proto-background 9: the fourth ^5-^8

Also see the proto-background introduction.

The last of the proto-backgrounds implausibly demotes the alto voice and gives all the attention to the overall shape of the uppermost voice. Although some interesting insights emerge from this focus on the fourth, still the reading overall seems forced, a deliberate misreading.

Schubert uses the ^5-^6-^7 Leerlauf most blatantly to end the first waltz of the Valses nobles. It can also be found in the first strain cadence of D783n16, and, in more elaborate form, in D734n1, in D924n7, and in the last of theValses sentimentales.

In the graphic below, the second level shows other figures in addition to the basic opposed neighbors, E-E#-E, A-G#-A; these could, alternatively, be described as a WEDGE.

In this version, the second staff shows simple registral shifts generating later-level INV transformations, plus the transposition of E5-A5 to generate the C# major section. The third staff elaborates all of these intervals by means of lines.

This conception of the piece traces the interval/line relationship more abstractly, as a series of Transpositions in the first staff, to which the countermanding (and insinuating) line is added. This latter, nevertheless, traces the same fourth down (A-G#-Gnat-F#-E), and in the end notes also reaches a vertical interval of that fourth again.