Toward the androgynous ^5 and ^6

Here are several more examples of characteristic uses of ^6, this time adumbrations of Schubert's later, "androgynous" treatment of ^5 and ^6 in the Ländler repertoire. To give some sense of how characteristic an emphasis on ^6 was in Ländler, six of the first seven in D145 (all improvised/composed no later than 1821) feature it.

In n1, which shifts the typical Ländler key of D major up expressively to Eb, the subdominant embellishment in bar 1 is reinforced in the left hand, and in the second strain a very characteristic use of ^6 appears, as the harmony flirts with an outright V9. (Recall that you can click on the thumbnail to see the original size image.)

In n2, probably meant as the trio for n1, ^6 is offered very directly as a rising melodic embellishment in the first strain.

In n3, the play of ^5 and ^6 generates a simple motif -- the pairing of ^3 and ^5, the latter figured with ^6, should seem familiar from D779n13. In the second strain, the subdominant harmony suggested in n1 comes into full bloom, and we also hear the simple ^6 embellishment above I.

In n4, ^6 is an emphatic leap that announces the significance of the upper octave -- the strain closes on Db6, not Db5.

In n5, the alternate harmonization, with vi, is prominent, again followed by a characteristic embellishment, the V9. In the second strain, the V9 with its ^6 is given a very direct violinistic treatment, and the ending might well have gone differently -- see the alternate cadence below the score.

In n7, ^6 is buried in a trill on ^5, but in the second strain ^6 is again harmonized. The strong pairing of ^5 over ^3 with descending cadence motions (^4 over ^2, and finally (^3 over?) ^1) strongly implies ^3 as the alternate ending shows. I have written about this formation in the essay Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal music published on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link to essay.

Ländler and deutscher, part I

The Ländler can be specifically located as a folk or common dance at least as early as 1700. Its music was strongly violinistic, very simple in its harmonic construction, and relatively slow in tempo (Litschauer, XI). Sometimes used as a wedding dance for couples, it featured figures with intertwining arms (the more sophisticated urban salon version in the "Strassburger" of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is shown in this blog's logo graphic). [added 5-19-10: Walter Deutsch notes that the "Strassburger" was a favorite dance in French cities in the first decades of the 19th century [56].] These figures were so characteristic that they gave the name to the contredanse allemande in the 1760s, not any specific style of music. In the dance manual of Bacquoy-Guidon (1785), for example, two pieces of music are labeled "contredanse allemande": one is in 2/4 meter, the other in 3/8. The meters and tempi are described on p. 47 of the manual.

And the Ländler figures have a deep history--the Ländler number in the film version of Sound of Music shows elegant and romantic uses (though the tempo is a bit fast). As little as five years ago Laura and I learned many of the figures in connection with the Texas two-step, the Cajun jig, and even the slower versions of six-beat swing.

In general, one finds stereotypical early 19th century Ländler styles more often in Schubert's early dances. Here is D365n23:

In the graphic below I have rewritten D779n13 as a Ländler.


The manner of dancing during this time period was flexible, but according to Walburga Litschauer, the most common format was for couples to dance for a while in Ländler-style, then close the dance with a waltz (that is, going about the room along line of dance doing the repetitive turning figures, or walzen, that we associate with the later waltz) (XI). (By this time, practices varied in different cities, but in Vienna the familiar waltz developed by "breaking off" (Litschauer) from its role as ending promenade to become an independent dance.) Among variants: couples might dance for a certain period, then join a larger group for a square or round-dance figure, then break apart again into couples, often with a different partner. Some versions of the dance involved the traditional hopping figures of rustic or pastoral dances, or -- in the cruder versions -- stamping of the feet.

"The Ländler was already taken seriously by Viennese society [in the early 1790s]. By 1818 one can trace several variants of this middle-class dance in the repertoire of upper-class house balls, where it was often danced in rural costumes. Because of the decorative character of the arm figures, the 'Steierische' enjoyed great popularity at these festivities." (Litschauer & Deutsch, 50; my translation).

Here are links to two pages with the scores for characteristic (old-fashioned) Ländler by Beethoven: WoO11; WoO15.

References:

Litschauer, Walburga. Introduction to Franz Schubert. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Series 7, part 2: Werke für Klavier zu zwei Händen, Band 6: Tänze I. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1989.

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

Deutsch, Walter. "Dörfliche Tanzmusik im Biedermeier am Beispiel der Steiermark." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann. Tanz im Biedermeier: Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls einer Epoche, 51-72. Proceedings from the Symposium Musizierpraxis im Biedermeier: Tanzmusik im ländlichen und städtischen Bereich, Graz, Austria, 26.-27. März 2004. Series: Neue Beiträge zur Aufführungspraxis, vol. 6. Vienna : Mille Tre Verlag Robert Schächter, 2006.

Schenkerian readings with the space ^5-^8

If the readings from ^8 (presented in yesterday's post) are problematic, still it is certainly true that Schubert puts plainly before our ears the tonal space of the upper fourth, ^5 to ^8, and we might reasonably engage that as a priority in the large-scale design. The first reading built on this basis is a simple rising Urlinie ^5-^6-^7-^8 that trumps Schachter's line from ^3 in simplicity and elegance: not only is the line short but the reading also rests on what we hear readily: "the right hand plays two melodic lines written in free imitation"; furthermore, the upper voice is the lead melody, even if that voice is "generally [less] active" than the alto (Schachter, 70).

We can also appeal to style statistics: although complex compound melodies exist in abundance in the violinistic Ländler repertoire, and certainly find their way into Schubert's waltzes (D145n1 (Ländler), D146n2, D779n26, D779n29, D924n3, and D969n10 are particularly nice examples), a middle-voice main melody is rare in the early waltz repertoire (although we could, I suppose, just declare this to be yet another of the anomalies in the A Major Waltz). In D734n14, for example, "soprano" and "alto" start an octave apart; the role of principal voice is initially contested, but the soprano wins out by bar 3. D779n1 (score reproduced at the bottom of this post) and D779n19 are the only other Schubert waltzes I know in which a really convincing argument can be made for alto-priority.

The alto replicates Schachter's main melodic voice throughout. The soprano also traces a middleground form of the line from ^5 to ^8 in the first strain (not shown). The ^5 is reinstated in the upper voice in the second strain, allowing the final upward-pushing figure ^5-^6-^7 over V, in a replication of the cadence of the first strain.

Although the specific figure Schubert uses here (both ^6 and ^7 over V) seems to have been an innovation of his, play with scale degree ^6 above both I and V was a cliché of the Ländler almost from the beginning and passed into the waltz once its subgenres began to merge in the 1820s.

The other reading focused on the space ^5 to ^8 is decidedly less successful. The symmetrical treatment of the space from ^5 to ^8 takes the strongest elements of the first 8-line reading and replaces its weak ending with the rising line of the first reading above. This version puts before the eye the aurally salient parallel patterns of rising in the first and second strains-the first time through the long initial arpeggiation, the second time through the ascent of the Urlinie to ^8 -- but it suppresses the same figures in the opening of the second strain (once again, however, that could be ascribed to differences of function -- or, here, function in different structural levels). I find the parallelism appealing, but finally prefer the previous reading (^5 rising to ^8) because it puts such emphasis on an unusual stylistic feature of this waltz: its play of counterpoint.

Reference:

Schachter, Carl. "Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction." Music Forum 5 (1980): 197-232. Reprinted as "Durational Reduction" in Schachter 1999a, 54-78. (Schachter, Carl. Joseph Straus, ed. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1999).

(Score of D779n1 (click the thumbnail for the original image))