Essay on Die Fledermaus published

In April and May on my blog Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music, I did a series of posts on Die Fledermaus. I have now gathered those posts, added additional information, and published an essay on the Texas Scholar Works platform: Johann Strauss, jr., Die Fledermaus: Ascending Cadence Gestures on Stage. Link.

Here is the abstract:

Die Fledermaus (1874), today the best-known operetta by Johann Strauss, jr., is also a treasure trove of ascending cadence gestures. This article documents and interprets those multiple instances and their effects.

William Drabkin on Schenker and Strauss

In the final paragraph of his survey article on Schenker, William Drabkin notes the following:

Schenker's admiration of the music of Johann Strauss and his efforts to promote it by providing voice-leading graphs of his more famous waltzes in Der freie Satz suggests that, his outright dismissal of jazz and other forms of popular music notwithstanding, he saw the difference between good and bad as greater than that between serious and popular. (838)

For this most capable historian and editor, whose guidance of the Cambridge editions of translations of Der Tonwille and two of the three volumes of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik was masterful, work for which we should all be grateful, a statement like this is, alas, a come-down. Drabkin sets Schenker up above the fray, as impartial arbiter of quality regardless of source. That's nonsense, as Drabkin certainly knows. Strauss squeaked into the pantheon because of his close friendship with Brahms, the Lion of Vienna and Schenker's idol -- and only for that reason.

How else, when Strauss represents better than anyone the post-Rossini generations that marry dance music with Italianate melody, a realm of foreground music (chains of waltzes) and larger works of spectacle (operettas) rather than Beethovenian "substance"? Schenker wrote several negative descriptions of Italian music: in brief, he thought that contemporary Italians could write melodies but couldn't build coherent compositions; that people's contribution had been historical, to find and explore counterpoint, which was then properly understood and developed only by Germans.

PS: "--and only for that reason": there is, of course, another, namely Schenker's loyalty to Vienna, his adopted home, great musical city, and seat of the monarchy.

Reference.

Drabkin, William. "Heinrich Schenker." In Thomas Christensen, ed. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, 812-843. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Mailer's Strauss

I interrupt the hommage series for a book review. Franz Mailer's annotated works-catalogue for Johann Strauss, jr., is a delightful find. It reminds me very much of the dedicated, knowledgeable fan literature that is at least as important to film studies as anything written by academic scholars. There's very little room left for such writing in concert music studies. Granted, as in most fan literature, Strauss can do no wrong, but one knows the attitude going in and, as in the best of the fan literature, Mailer's catalogue wraps a great deal of interesting information around his advocacy.

The foreword is a short pair of paragraphs, then follows a 360-page alphabetized list of Strauss's compositions, each of which receives at least a third to a half page of commentary (and, commendably, without bias toward the well-known pieces: The Blue Danube is given no more space than the Künstler-Quadrille, op. 201). The last 15 pages is another works list, this time by opus number and with place and date of the premiere. The usual stragglers (pieces without opus numbers, etc.) are given a separate spot at the end.

Mailer's writing is very clear, without the Viennese colloquialisms he might have been tempted to bring in, and he consistently offers context (historical, geographical, political, and biographical -- though by no means always in that order). There is little here that cannot be found in other books on Strauss and the Strauss family, but it is particularly appealing to find the focus squarely on the compositions. I can imagine writers of CD liner notes mining this book for many years to come.

Performance of the music is, understandably, given priority over the immediate social contexts of that performance, though one does learn a number of details of venues. And occasionally one gets a hint of dancing, as in the account of Die jungen Wiener, op. 7, a waltz set featured in a Carneval-ball on 22 January 1845. According to Mailer, Strauss used the contrast between a dramatic introduction and the first waltz's "rocking, caressing melody" as a device "to entice [his audience of] young Viennese onto the dance floor of the elegant Dommayer Casino" (170-71). A review of another ball two weeks later notes approvingly the 19-year-old's "playful, piquant, and dance-inviting [tanzauffordernden] melodies" (99) -- this in the commentary on Faschings-Lieder-Walzer, op. 11.

Schubert was 19 barely thirty years earlier. He would have been 48 when Strauss's op. 11 was first performed; his children might have attended the ball in the Sträußelsälen (Theater in der Josefstadt).

Link to a Johann Strauss website, which includes here a charmingly indignant retort to the many writers who have assumed that the composer began with 12-15 players; his first orchestra was 24 players. Because of their contracts, they would also have played at the two balls mentioned above.

Update 6-3-10: Apparently, Mailer is more than a fan: in the traditional philologically oriented manner of the Germanophone musicologist, he has spent 25 years writing a biography of Johann Strauss, jr., a work that has expanded into ten volumes: Grösste Strauss-Biographie aller Zeiten.

Reference.

Mailer, Franz. Johann Strauss: Kommentiertes Werkverzeichnis. Wien: Pichler, 1999.

The Blue Danube

One of the most memorable treatments of ^5 and ^6 is in the first waltz of An der schönen, blauen Donau. Johann Strauss, jr's opus 314 was published in 1867, at the height of his success as a dance composer and conductor and not long before he turned to composing operettas. The design is standard: five waltzes, each of which consists of two strains with both repeated to create a double reprise (waltz-trio-waltz-trio) effect, plus a substantial introduction and a coda that quotes all but the last waltz. The tonal design of the set is also not unusual:

See the piano score for waltz 1, first strain, below. The circles show the expanded treatment of ^5 and ^6, including the "last second" retreat from a tonic with added sixth at the very beginning of the third system. The rectangles sketch my view of the design, which is based on the registral pattern established immediately, then shifted into the upper octave midway through the third system. I would read the strain as derived from a proto-background ^1-^5.

Schenker's desire for a unified, teleological tonal motion leads him to mis-read the first waltz in Free Composition: he maps onto the piece a waltz-trio-waltz design with the expected interruption covering the second strain (which is in A major). In fact, the waltz ends in A major because both strains, not just the first, have their reprise (the alternativo design already common in Mozart's generation [Note 19 June 2017: see my comment on this in the updated blog post for 3 March 2010]).

William Rothstein uses the first strain as a study object for his exploration of the meaning of the term "phrase." Along the way, Rothstein presents a foreground reduction with bar lines and four-bar "phrase" markings, two levels of durational reductions (after Schachter), and a "standard" Schenkerian graph. He describes the figures of this last as follows:

The first sixteen measures are ultimately static, ending where they began, with only minimal motion along the way. The gradual ascent that follows picks up from this same point, without which it would lack a firm beginning. The complete tonal motion therefore comprises the entire excerpt: all of it is to be performed "...figuratively, in a single breath."

The most striking feature of this larger motion -- and what elevates this unpretentious waltz to high artistic rank -- is the broad melodic arpeggiation from the initial ^5...up to the climactic ^3....One can see how this large arpeggiation mirrors and fulfills the smaller arpeggiations of the several upbeat measures. The ascending sixth [A4-F#5] in mm. 27-28 summarizes the entire ascent in a burst of melodic energy....The concluding melodic descent then gradually dissipates the accumulated tension.

Rothstein's reading does a good job of following the broad contours of registral (and dynamic) change through this first strain. It certainly improves on Schenker's reading, which ignores the melody of the inner voice to choose ^3 from the repeated quarter note figures in the upper voices; when these figures cease in m. 24, the voice-leading moves into the arpeggio-based melody. This in itself, although peculiar, is not damning because there is indeed a distinct change of texture (and orchestration) at mm. 24-25, but Schenker flattens out the large registral shape that Rothstein shows so clearly -- Schenker locates the first Urlinie note at the beginning (m. 3-4) and describes the broad figure reaching F#6 (and then dropping back to F#5 for the cadence) as unfolding, although the far more likely label would be coupling, or middleground registral doubling.

Note: establishing the "priority" text for this famous composition is something of a problem, believe it or not. An der schönen, blauen Donau was issued first in May 1867 in an arrangement for solo piano; from August to October of the same year, editions appeared for orchestra, men's chorus and piano, piano four-hands, and violin and piano. In all, between May 1867 and August 1869, fifteen versions were published. The preponderance of early public performances were the version for men's chorus, whose original text is a light inducement to enjoy the Carnival season: it begins "Wiener seid froh," to which the upper-voice ornaments (in the tenors) answer "Oho, wie so?" This banter continues till all the voices join forces for the final phrase and cadence, "Was nutzt des Bedauern, des Trauern? Drum froh und heiter seid!" (Very roughly: What good is sadness? Have fun!")

Reference:

Rothstein, William. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1989.

A proliferation of suspensions

The Strausses destroy the exclusivity of the old suspensions (an idea that lies behind both Zuckerkandl's scale scheme and Schachter's objections to it) by filling their dances with a profusion of accented incomplete neighbors (suspensions, appoggiaturas).

Perhaps one of the most famous examples is the first waltz in Tales of the Vienna Woods (Johann Strauss, jr., op. 325). Note that the direction of diatonic suspensions/appoggiaturas isn't changed (as here, they almost always go down) but they are answered by chromatic neighbor notes, which, as here, almost always rise. Thus, not only are all diatonic degree-pairs engaged at some point or another in Strauss waltzes, but the half-step "power" of the leading tone is represented in the chromatic figures, and this complex balances the diatonic figures.

Note the unusual harmonic link between first and second strain, which continues as below:

Postscript to Dance in Vienna

This is a postscript to Part 1 of the historical series completed yesterday. This was originally a very long footnote to the first sentence: “What Schubert found when he began composing waltzes about 1812 was not a simple, innocent country dance, as it is sometimes portrayed in an attempt to put as much distance between mass art and high art as possible.”

The literature has many examples of the damage done to style studies of nineteenth century and twentieth century music when mass art is ignored, but Leonard Meyer offers a particularly egregious instance that makes the point with unusual clarity. Meyer examines "the fortunes of the cadential 6/4 progression[,] tracing its rise and demise" (250). In the course of this, he points to the familiar notion of Romantic ideology as favoring the anti-conventional, and thus he says, quite plausibly, that Romantic values, which favored endings that are "gradual, continuous, and open," militate against such a clichéd and emphatic ending gesture as the cadential 6/4:

The very sonic salience that made the cadential 6/4 progression such a forceful signal made it seem routine and commonplace–a bit blatant. This is one reason why, as the years passed, the cadential 6/4 progression was less and less frequently chosen by composers (248).

Meyer's statistics come from pieces included in The Norton Scores anthology (a pedagogical collection), and his conclusions, although broadly correct for the repertoires involved (if one ignores Brahms and Bizet), are nevertheless useless as generalizations about all the musics of the period concerned. Meyer claims that, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, "[t]he cadential 6/4 progression . . . continued to be used in popular music and in the music of somewhat conventional composers" (250). It was employed "by composers of a more adventurous kind" only for special purposes.

It is true that Johann Strauss, jr., for one, was quite fond of the cadential 6/4 (and often displayed it prominently, stretched over several bars): my own quick survey shows that the ten strains in five waltzes use this chord 4, 8, and 6 times, respectively, in opuses 314, 325, and 340. Schubert, on the other hand, rarely used it in his dances: for example, in the waltzes of D. 779, nine times in 68 strains; in D. 681, only once in 16 strains; in the ecossaises of D. 421, 511, and 529 combined, ten times in 30 strains; in D. 781, three times in 22 strains. Johann Strauss, sr., was equally disdainful of the cadential 6/4: there are twelve appearances in the forty strains of opuses 201, 213, 218, and 230, combined. Josef Lanner was even more parsimonious: six appearances in sixty strains for the five opuses 19, 20, 40, 42, and 46.

Thus the dance repertoire completely upends Meyer's claim: in fact, the Romantic "extinction" of the 6/4 had already occurred in this popular music by the early 1820s. The chord had to be restored in the music of the mid-century, in the case of the younger Strauss, probably because of the space provided by longer sixteen and thirty-two bar strains, but equally also because of the greater volume and dramatic effect, useful in music for the larger orchestras and venues for which Strauss normally composed.

Reference:

Meyer, Leonard B. The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Dance in Vienna circa 1820, part 4

The waltz's second wave of popularity in Vienna in the first decades of the nineteenth century did not need to cover a trajectory from lower-to-middle class entertainment to middle-to-upper class entertainment–instead, it added the powerful influence of a new middle-class consumer culture to move from the beer garden and dance hall to open-air and promenade concerts by 1830 and also to the musical stage, both comic and serious. As Donald Tovey puts it, "Let us not forget that this dance music is no dream of Utopia, but was a bourgeois reality in Vienna [in the early nineteenth century]" (27). (Tovey is actually referring to German dances by Mozart [K.567 and 601], but he muddles the two generations of the waltz's early popularity by mixing Mozart with Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber.)

Vienna, alone among the major capitols of Europe, in fact, maintained both dancing and listening at promenade concerts and similar events throughout the century (Weber 112-13). Miriam Hanson also observes that "The great demand for new dance music . . . promoted competition and experimentation that contributed to the high quality and unique character of the classical Viennese waltz. Around 1830, . . . the suburban dance halls and restaurants fostered . . . a music which clearly reflected the city's predominantly bourgeois taste" (168). In the following, William Weber is referring to concerts and similar musical performances, but the same was certainly true of dancing:

after the end of the Napoleonic wars a new era began in the history of the concert world, one in which the middle class began taking on dramatic new roles. . . . [By] the early 1830s the concert life of [London, Paris, and Vienna] exhibited similar dramatic growth, and by 1848 a commercial concert world had emerged in each city, over which the middle class exerted powerful, if not dominant, control (6-7).

In the reminiscence below, a contemporary observer, Heinrich Laube, gives a particularly vivid account of the dancing segment of a Strauss concert at the Sperl in 1833. It is important to remember that these were complex events, not merely music played to serve social dancing, and that these "garden concerts" became the model for similar events throughout Europe. Dance music was played at times for listening, at times for dancing, and audiences also heard potpourris, special-effects compositions (such as battle pieces), opera overtures, and what today would be considered "concert music": "Next to the Zauberflöte Overture stood the Annen-Polka, and after the orchestrated Adagio of the Sonata Pathétique a waltz by Lanner, Fahrbach or Ziehrer" (Schönherr, 187).

Now preparations for the actual dance are made. To keep the unrestrained crowd in line, a rope is spanned . . . to separate the dancers from the rest. But this border is constantly fluctuating and yielding; only the rhythmically whirling heads of the girls are noticeable in that dancing stream. In bacchantic abandon the pairs waltz . . . joyful frenzy is on the loose, no god checks it . . . The beginning of each dance is characteristic. Strauss intones his trembling preludes, longing to pour forth fully . . . the Viennese girl snuggles deep in her lad's arm, and in the strangest way they sway to the beat. For a long while one hears only the long-held breast tones of the nightingale with which she begins her song and enchants the listeners, then suddenly the piercing trill bubbles forth, the dance itself begins with whirling rapidity and the couples hurl themselves into the maelstrom of gaiety. (Gartenberg 98)

By 1840, dance masters might still encourage health officers to intervene when "inexperienced youth" danced too quickly (Litschauer, 7-8), but almost all other trace of criticism was gone, and the way was paved for the eminently middle-class couple dancing of the polka, which quickly joined (and for a time nearly replaced) the waltz in the first years of that decade. Addressing himself to young composers, the very respectable Carl Czerny could write matter-of-factly that "the unparalleled favor which Waltzes have obtained throughout the world, has arisen from their cheerful, exhilarating and universally intelligible character." But the compositional pedagogue could not resist locating some plane of disapproval, which he shifts to matters of taste: "the circumstance that only few composers have yet distinguished themselves in this branch, is a proof that, even for this, talent and a just apprehension of all that the public especially prefers are required" (1:101). Czerny's deprecating "even for this" reminds us that the light music/serious music opposition was forged in its modern sense during the early nineteenth century. The waltz–and the venues in which it was played and danced–was very much a part of that process. Friedemann Otterbach examines the social and philosophical contexts of this process in detail (215-257; especially 220 ff.). See also David Gramit's comments on the dance in the context of the early nineteenth century establishment of the "serious concert" as a privileged venue (131-3).

References:

Czerny, Carl. John Bishop, tr. School of Practical Composition, Op. 600. 3 vols. London: Cocks, 1848; repr. ed., NY: Da Capo, 1979.

Gartenberg, Egon. Johann Strauss: The End of an Era. New York: Da Capo Press, 1979. Original edition published in 1974.

Gramit, David. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Hanson, Alice. Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Litschauer, Walburga. "Franz Schuberts Tänze: Zwischen Improvisation und Werk." Musiktheorie 10/1 (1995): 3-9.

Otterbach, Friedemann. Die Geschichte der europäischen Tanzmusik. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichson's, 1980.

Schönherr, Max. "On the Development of Austrian Light Music (1973)." [English summary]. In Lamb, Andrew, ed. Unterhaltungsmusik aus Österreich: Max Schönherr in seinen Erinnerungen und Schriften/Light Music from Austria: Reminiscences and Writings of Max Schönherr, 187-9. New York/Bern: Peter Lang, 1992.

Tovey, Donald. "[Mozart:] Orchestral Dances." In his Essays in Musical Analysis. Vol. 4: Illustrative Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Pp. 26-7.

Weber, William. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna. London: Croom Helm, 1975.

The 8-to-16-to-32 bar narrative

This expands on (corrects, qualifies) a comment I made in a recomposition post:

Note: The pairing of contrasting strains in these small [16-bar] waltzes is very probably the source of the paired 32-bar strains that had become the typical design by the generation of Johann Strauss, jr.

A number of years ago I constructed an informal narrative of formal designs in nineteenth-century dances and related works. In that narrative, the small forms of most dances, including the great majority of Schubert's waltzes, ecossaises, and galops, evolved gradually from 16 bars (8 + 8) to 32 bars by the middle of the century, the work of the second generation Strausses being representative. A parallel history expanded the 8-bar strain (the 8-bar theme of Caplin) to 16 (following the 16-bar period or sentence of Caplin). My history expanded these all still more to "paired 32-bar strains," the paradigm being the first waltz in The Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314 (1867)).

The eight-bar design of the first strain might fit any of Caplin's types, period, sentence, or hybrid. The second eight-bar strain might develop the same material or be strongly contrasting, and the designs thus range from contrasting middle with cadence to a new period or sentence.

As in Caplin's system, the 16-bar theme weakens the final cadence of an eight-bar theme, permitting an expansion through a developmental continuation or through the repetitive consequent. (Note that there is a very close relationship between the 16-bar period and an 8-bar period enclosed in repeat signs.)

The 32-bar theme, then, goes one step further, weakening the final cadence of the 16-bar theme, thus permitting another level of expansion. (As with the 16-bar period, note that there is a very close relationship between the 32-bar period and a 16-bar period enclosed in repeat signs.)

Alas, such neatly reductive histories are almost always too good to be true. The first waltz of The Blue Danube does open with a 32-bar sentence, which is followed by a 16-bar period enclosed in repeat signs. The contrast is strong, including a key change, so that the two strains really sound more like a dance-trio pair -- but Strauss actually repeats the entire pair, so that the overall design is ABAB, and the key sequence D-A-D-A.

None of the other waltzes in The Blue Danube is constructed this way: nos. 2 & 3 are ternary forms whose A & B are both 16-bar themes; no. 4 also has 16-bar strains but both A & B are repeated; and no. 5 is also like no. 1 in that respect but the two strains are "flipped," -- the first is a repeated 16-bar theme, the second a 32-bar period.

If this hints at variety of design in the individual numbers of the Strauss waltzes, that is a much better characterization than my too-clean developmental history. Here a few other examples:

Morgenblätter, Op. 279 (1864): all five waltzes are in dance-trio designs played as ABA. Nos. 1 & 2 are 32 bars in the first strain, 16 in repeat signs in the second. Nos. 3-5 use 16-bar themes in repeat signs for both strains.

Rosen aus dem Süden, Op. 388 (1880): the first waltz is quite close to the first waltz in The Blue Danube, but the first strain is also enclosed in repeat signs; the second waltz relates to the first waltz in The Blue Danube in a different way--again 32 + 16, but the repetition of the second strain is dropped, for an overall ABA design; no. 3 is ABA, with repeat signs for both 16-bar strains; no. 4 (the last in this set) is in effect a 64-bar theme: the final cadence of a 16-bar theme closes normally but the repetition is written out as a reorchestrated tutti whose own final cadence is a PAC in the dominant key, not the tonic, after which what would otherwise have been a second strain rushes in with its own 32-bar sentence (Strauss even tacks on an 8-bar coda extension).

Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald, op. 325 (1868): no. 1 is similar to the last waltz in Op. 388, but the entire 64-bar complex is repeated; no. 2 has two 16 bar strains in repeat signs set out in ABAB format; no. 3 differs only in its ABA format; no. 4 differs in that the repeat of the second strain is written out due to orchestration changes and the format is simply AB; no. 5 is like no. 3.

Final note: these descriptions are based on the piano solo editions (most Strauss waltzes were first published that way). I have not consulted the orchestral scores.

Recomposition after Ravel, Valses nobles et sentimentales

The "recomposition" in Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales is of a different kind and the nostalgia of a different, and far more intense, order. For Ravel never actually quotes a Schubert waltz; he borrows only the title, which in itself suggests nostalgia removed to the point of losing contact with concrete memories. Those memories, in any case, are complex, since they are of the whole era of the waltz, not merely its first flowering in the early nineteenth century. In Ravel's waltzes, one hears more traces of Strauss and Waldteufel than of Schubert.

We are left then to speculate on an appropriate place where the A Major Waltz might have appeared. The eight waltzes are (with form scheme and principal key):

I. Modéré–très franc
ABA; G major

II. Assez lent–avec une expression intense

ABA; G minor

III. Modéré

ABCA; G major

IV. Assez animé

AB; C/Ab major

V. Presque lent–dans un sentiment intime

AA'BA; E major

VI. Vif

AA'A''A; C major

*VII. Moins vif

introABA; A major
* No. VII is the longest piece in the set and approaches the dimensions of a Strauss waltz: unlike the other waltzes, A and B have internal strains here.

VIII. Épilogue–Lent

ABB'coda; G major

Clearly, the keys suggest that the first three waltzes belong together in a symmetrical moderate-slow-moderate design, as do the next three (fast-slow-fast). Number six also begins a gradual winding down of the tempo toward the end of the set: Vif-Moins vif-Lent, the ultimate tonal goal being a return to the G major of the first "set" (this return only happens well into the last waltz–there is a clear tonal transition from the penultimate to the final waltz that we cannot see in the list of key centers).

Rather than extend the duration of the set, I imagine which waltzes might be replaced. The two "trios" seem the obvious candidates (nos. 2 and 5). I rule out number 2, however, because the strong affective contrast in moving from the first waltz, which has the brusque frankness of a deutscher, to the deeply introspective minor-mode trio, would be mostly lost with the A Major Waltz, which if anything strives toward the relaxed elegance one sometimes finds in slow waltzes later in the century (especially in the waltzes of Waldteufel but also in the polka-mazurkas of Strauss). Similarly, replacing number five with the A Major Waltz would provoke an unpleasant contrast between its simple harmonies and the tonal vagaries of the previous waltz, which roll by the ear at a breathtaking pace.

Thus it would seem that the best affective fit would be with number three, a graceful moderate-tempo waltz that is the only movement in the Valses nobles et sentimentales to come anywhere near invoking the ländler:

Since it would be stylistically incompatible as it stands, I have imagined the first few bars of how Ravel might have rewritten the A Major Waltz to fit his vision of the hommage: as he himself put it, "the virtuosity which forms the basis of Gaspard de le nuit gives way to a markedly clearer kind of writing, which crystallizes the harmony and sharpens the profile of the music" (quoted in Nichols and Mawer 260).

Reference:

Nichols, Roger, and Deborah Mawer. "Appendix: Early Reception of Ravel's Music." In Deborah Mawer, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, 100. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

The anticipating 6-4: background for metrical readings

The foreground in Carl Schachter’s set of durational reduction graphs (cited in an earlier post but not shown, for copyright reasons) shows with particular clarity the two-against-three pattern that is basic to the interaction of right and left hands in D779n13: "the right-hand sets up a secondary meter of 3/2 against the 3/4 pattern of the left-hand part" (70). Such two-against-three patterns are by no means unknown in the waltz repertoire (they are favorites of Johann Strauss, jr., for example), but they are rare in early sets -- the first instance I have found after D779n13 is in Joseph Lanner’s opus 26, published in the early 1830s (still another reminder -– as if we needed one -- of how out-of-place the A Major Waltz seems in the Valses sentimentales).

Schachter uses the demonstration of the larger meter or hypermeter to make an observation about style. The cadences in this waltz hold an "anticipating 6/4," or a cadential 6/4 that is "in a weaker metrical position than the V7 to which it resolves." "Not frequent," these anticipating 6/4s do "occur from time to time, especially in music of the nineteenth century. Schubert and Chopin probably use them more than any other great composers, though examples can also be found in music by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and others" (73).

That cadential 6/4s might appear in both basic metric positions, strong and weak, is by no means surprising in the waltz repertoire, since, as we know, the figures of the common form of the valse à trois temps are displaced by a bar, so that one dancer's "bar 1" is the other's "bar 2."

Statistics for Schubert's dance music show that these hypermetrically weak 6/4s actually appear rather more often than "from time to time." In seventy two strains of the thirty six waltzes of D. 365, the most frequent progressions for the final three bars of a strain are I-V-I and V-V-I: these appear thirty six times. Next most frequent is the "anticipating 6/4" or "I6/4"-V-I; its sixteen appearances are nearly double those of an accented 6/4 placed in the penultimate bar (nine times). As rough statistics, these numbers hold up in his later dance sets, as well.

Among other composers, the anticipating 6/4 is a strong motif in Chopin's first waltz, op. 18, where it is used in all but two strains (see the first one below). After that, Chopin uses the device rarely, but in prominent positions (the cadence of the first strain or the first waltz) and especially–but not exclusively–in the waltzes in Ab major.

Lanner hardly uses the 6/4 chord at all; isolated instances of the anticipating 6/4 appear in later sets, such as Alpen-Rosen, op. 162 (twice). In the reduction of the first waltz below, note the ending of the second strain.

On the other hand, Strauss, sr., deploys the 6/4 at about the same rate as Schubert, and he prefers the anticipating type.

Strauss, jr., uses the 6/4 far more freely than any of the earlier composers, Tales from the Vienna Woods, op. 325, being perhaps a highpoint, as all of its waltzes use the 6/4 in at least one of their strains. Although he did occasionally use the anticipating type, most of Strauss's 6/4s appear in accented bars (fourth-to-last or penultimate). The graphic below shows the piano reduction of no. 5. The first strain uses the anticipating 6/4 (twice, actually, in its second phrase), but the second strain gives a prominent metric position to the 6/4.

Recomposition of the second strain

Another recomposition to show that the first strain can be combined comfortably with a new 8-measure theme. In Schubert's generation it was not common to pair two unrelated strains, but it did occasionally happen, the contrast seeming to be the point. Often these pairings are loud and soft (or the reverse) or even deutscher-Ländler styles. Examples: D365n7, 12, 16, 17, 26; D366n9; D779n4.

In this case I chose the second strain not to contrast so much as to complement: its musical material is different, but both have a "subdominant" emphasis at the beginning, the affect is quite similar, and so is the final cadence. The new strain is taken from the first of 2 German Dances, D. 769, and therefore contemporaneous with the numbers in D. 779. (The two pieces in D. 769, both 16-bar forms, are obviously meant to be a dance-trio pair.)

Note: The pairing of contrasting strains in these small waltzes is very probably the source of the paired 32-bar strains that had become the typical design by the generation of Johann Strauss, jr.

Note 2 (14 November 2009): Here is a better version of the piece, using the 8 bar version of the first strain and adding transitions.