Recomposition and nostalgia (Liszt)

This post picks up the thread of recomposition, now with concrete evidence rather than my speculative rewriting of D365 or my partitionings of D. 779 into small cycles or dance-trio groups. Relatively early during his tenure in Weimar, in the midst of an enormously fruitful period of composition, but already past the years of avid concertizing, Franz Liszt composed a set of nine pieces titled Soirées de Vienne: Valses-Caprices d'après Franz Schubert (S. 427), a still-popular set of piano compositions Humphrey Searle has praised as "among the most successful things of this kind which Liszt ever did" (62). Liszt himself remained fond of the collection to the end: he played numbers from them in concerts in 1873 and 1886; number six (of interest here) was on the program of his final concert, given days before his death in July 1886 (Williams, 480, 671, 680).

These pieces, which meander about the genres of concert waltz, virtuoso vehicle, and character piece, mine two veins of nostalgia–the concert display piece and Liszt's preoccupation with memories of musical life in Vienna and Paris during the 1830s and early 1840s (a preliminary version of one of them was actually written in 1834, only six years after Schubert's death and only three years after Schumann's Papillons exploited Schubert's dances in a slightly different way).

The sixth valse-caprice is the only one of the set to appear in two versions (the second is close to the first but with more virtuosic elaboration). It is essentially a concert transcription of three waltzes, two from Valses nobles and our A Major Waltz. The logic of the choices may be a matter of good affective contrast, but key center could also have been a factor. The majority–but by now means all–of the waltzes that Liszt cites in Soirées de Vienne are in the original key. It is not difficult to imagine the ninth waltz from Valses nobles attracting Liszt's attention:

A deutscher, it is written in A minor, the minor mode being rare in Viennese waltzes, and it clearly invokes "gypsy" rhythms. Furthermore, this A Minor Deutscher opens like a dramatic scherzo–it is barely a waltz at all–and ends with an eight-bar phrase on a Dudelsack (bagpipe) figure.

To this Mephisto-like apparition, Liszt attaches two lyrical trios. The first is the Deutscher's plausible trio–No. 10 in F major–but for the second trio Liszt ignores the two remaining waltzes in A major from the Valses nobles (nos. 2 and 8) and inserts instead D779n13 (this is the only waltz Liszt takes from D. 779 for the Soirées). Thus, the design of the sixth valse-caprice is A (=nobles 9) B (=nobles 10) A C (=sentimentales 13) coda (consisting of cadenza and a reminiscence of B). According to Edward Waters, the holograph manuscript shows that the piece originally ended with the reminiscence and "a simple chordal cadence," the final flourish of triplet eighths being added later (16).

The A Major Waltz is labelled "dolce teneramente" (the two words have been separated in the published edition), and Liszt was insistent that printers observe his articulation symbols in the right hand–a tenuto with staccato dot for the half notes, but tenuto alone for the following quarters; the effect is to create a slight separation between suspension and resolution, thereby giving a slight accent to the latter and emphasizing the two-against-three "polymeter" (Waters, 16). The "dolce teneramente" is visible in the facsimile of Liszt's holograph (Waters, opposite 17).

In this context, it should not surprise us if strange things happen to the A Major Waltz. The large-scale design, if read in a traditional Schenkerian manner, should prolong ^5 (which is unmistakable in the Deutscher) with mixture in the alto as we pass from minor to major; thus, a natural connection is made to the ^5 that will motivate the rising urlinie at the end of the A Major Waltz. Liszt, however, adds a chromatically charged third strain that drags the line down in the most determined way, through a whole-tone scale no less, to C#5, but ends peaceably with a most direct ^3-^2-^1 figure. The entire "newly composed" A Major Waltz is repeated, with elaborating figuration, and a coda follows. Using Schenkerian models, the whole looks as in the graphic below.

What I have just done is to reinterpret one of the earlier readings (the Schenkerian rising line from ^5) in light of the changes of context that Liszt creates. We might do the same for any and all of the readings already offered; for example, we might compare the shapes that arise throughout this more extended composition under the reading that gives priority to melodic shape and multiple structures; and it would be interesting to rethink the metric/rhythmic readings in light of the fact that the introduction never appears as it did in Schubert's waltz (Liszt expands the two-bar introduction to four bars the first time; when the waltz is repeated, he erases the metric problem by starting the triplet figuration on the first beat of the bar, not the second).

Liszt's recomposition of the A Major Waltz, in other words, sets in motion another series of readings, which I will not take the time to follow through here. Yet it also conjures up (even announces in its title) contexts we could follow, as well, if we chose: the waltz as a cultural category, nostalgia for a musical "golden era" of the 1820s and 1830s, the waltz series as concert or salon piece, Vienna, Paris, the early Romantic genius, the sense of historical distance from that genius, changes in Schubert reception in the fourteen years between Schumann's review and the composition of Liszt's piece, etc.

References:

Searle, Humphrey. The Music of Liszt. 2d ed. New York: Dover, 1966.

Waters, Edward N. "Liszt's Soirées de Vienne." The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 6/2 [1949]: 16-20.

Williams, Adrian. Portrait of Liszt: By Himself and his Contemporaries. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Imaginary continuo (after Rothstein)

Is it possible to retain a sense of Schubert's risky improvisations (see posts (1), (2)) in a Schenkerian graph? Only if the graph can be made to reflect the human and fallible, not just the unerring creative instinct of an idealized notion of genius. To attempt this shift, I will start with the continuo grid. William Rothstein (296) uses the construct of the "chordal scale" (derived from Lerdahl) as the repository of tones for the imaginary continuo, his term for what I will call the continuo grid.

The beginning of the first graphic below shows the chordal scale for D779n13 with respect to its tonic triad: all members of the A major triad between the lowest and highest notes struck. Out of this scale emerge the four voices of a standard part-writing progression representing measures 1-10, or the introduction and the first eight measure phrase. The analogy to a continuo keyboard part would be better if the right hand held three voices and the left just one, but I resist that because I want to preserve the textures of this waltz as much as I can.

Resisting the idealization of textures is in fact the basic strategy of this rewriting. Note that one result is the prominent set of parallel fifths. A respect for textures suggests that the pedagogically simplified, chorale-style texture of (a) is not the best solution for this passage, which after all contains several additional voices in the left hand: these are inserted in (b), the end result looking more like the textures in orchestral settings of dances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Note the octave doublings that have now been added to the parallel fifths. The fullness of this texture contrasts with the three-part reduction that keeps only the two imitative upper voices and the bass (c). It is this latter that Carl Schachter uses in his durational reduction of the Waltz, but Schachter corrects the parallels by texture inversion of the two melodic voices.

Instead of collapsing the texture as Schachter does, I have removed the "non-harmonic" I 6/4 chord in (a) of the next graphic below, leaving a simple ii6-V7-I harmonic progression. Level (b) expands (a) with the closing cadence.

The contents of (b) are reproduced in the lower system of the final graphic (below) and renotated to correspond more closely to my preferred Schenkerian reading, the rising line from ^5 to ^8. The alignment is not meant to suggest an equivalence, but a replacement: if maintaining textures is thematic here, then the lower system takes the place of the upper one.

The continuo grid has a quality of concreteness about it, as if the improviser is looking at the piano keyboard and making choices about register (A major, melody in the fifth octave, accompanying voices in "standard" positions for a waltz in this key). Once the fateful decision is made (at bar 3) to model this waltz on D365n6, the parallel fifths emerge very quickly, and Schubert's decision to maintain the register despite the parallels opens the door for the sublime counter-move to the downward pull of the ancient suspension figures: the sudden lift over V in the final cadence. The graphic suggests further that, having transmuted an error into the sublime, so to speak (the parallel fifths into the rising cadence gesture), Schubert adopts the rising itself as a design in the second strain: tonicizing C# major (rather than treating it as V of vi to start a cycle of fifths sequence), then the peculiar chord progression it leads to, which facilitates another expressive moment associated with upward shifts of register (in measures 31-32--not included in the example).

References:

Rothstein, William. "On Implied Tones." Music Analysis 10/3 (1991): 289-328.

Schachter, Carl. "Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction." Music Forum 5 (1980): 197-232.

Parody (after Wheeldon)

Timothy Jackson's diachronic transformation (see earlier post) bears some similarities to Marianne Wheeldon's "parody." Wheeldon examines methodological problems for linear analysis in Debussy, whose music is well-suited to studies of ambiguity and discontinuity. She identifies several features of his late works that can be interpreted in terms of discontinuities. Of those, “parody” might be applicable to D779n13.

Wheeldon finds parody in the Cello Sonata, first movement, to lie in a contradiction of the developmental expectations of sonata form: "Despite . . . motivic correspondences that pervade the movement, the motivic material fails to develop or grow, since wholesale repetition does not constitute development. The high degree of motivic repetition creates an ultra-unified movement, yet it literally inverts the central metaphor of organicism, that of growth" (163). In this kind of context, unity does not evolve–it is imposed: "The statistical climax [in the movement's prologue] is not the point where unity is first achieved, but rather where it is overwhelmingly reinforced."

In the case of D779n13, we seem to have a reverse process. When Margaret Notley says of dances including this waltz that they "unequivocally are works" (141), she points to an attempt to break free of the constraining frame of the 16-bar social dance, to "evolve" rather than simply to repeat. Paradoxically, drawing the dancers' establishment of the beat into the piece itself (measures 1-2) begins this process. On the other hand, the echoing figures in the right hand tightly constrain the first phrase and its repetition up to the moment of the cadence, at which point the line not only ascends but for the first time fails to repeat the four eighth notes of the principal motive.

In this context, the opening of the second strain is unexpected–its insistent literal repetitions take the place of the contrasting middle of a small ternary form, where we would expect to hear motivic fragmentation and rearrangement. The parody, then, would seem to be of temporal or design expectations as much as pitch. At both beginning and end, the C# major section draws attention crudely to the awkwardness of the waltz's metric design, the point that we emphasized in the earlier post, under the diachronic transformation, in our attempts to construct a suitable contrasting middle as a simple expansion (using D365n6 as the model).

References:

Wheeldon, Marianne. "Interpreting discontinuity in the late works of Claude Debussy." PhD. diss., Yale University, 1997.

Notley, Margaret. "Schubert's Social Music: The 'Forgotten Genres'." In Christopher H. Gibbs, The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, 138-54. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Trouble with thumbnails

Apologies for the fact that thumbnails in most recent postings have apparently lost their links to the (much larger size) original files. I am working on it. DN

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.

Meter-as-rhythm (after Hasty)

Where London's theory respects a traditional distinction between rhythm and meter, Christopher Hasty actively seeks to break that distinction down by arguing that meter must be continually reinvented in listening: for example, he asserts that "meter, even when viewed from the perspective of metrical type, is fully particular and never 'the same'" (131). (London, on the other hand, cites cognition studies to argue that meter is internalized and therefore becomes a set of expectations that are maintained until strongly contradicted.)

Hasty's theory is based on projection: an attack and a duration project the possibility of another attack and duration, the simplest of which would be a repetition of the first (the solid arrow in (a) of the graphic shows a realized projection, the dotted slur that follows the potential of the same kind, the longer arrow marked Q a longer potential projection).

The simplest pattern in a 3/4 meter is shown in (b). As Hasty observes, triple meter is decidedly more complex than duple meter because

The third beat cannot function exactly like the second beat simply to continue the duration begun "before" there were any beats, for now that there is a second beat there is also a real potential for projecting a half-note duration (the potential Q in [the] example). In order to function as a continuation, the beginning of the third beat must deny this potential. In contrast, the beginning of the second beat denied no potential--rather, it created one projection and the potential for another. (132)

Given the consistency of temporal figuration in D779n13, a complete analysis on Hasty's terms would quickly become tedious, but his method may allow us a more nuanced view of the establishment of the hemiola pattern that is shown so plainly in Schachter's durational reduction. The familiar accompaniment pattern of bass and two afterbeats works out in a direct way through the first four beats the projection of triple meter we would expect from (b). In the next graphic, see P for quarter beats, R for the bar measure (the example is simplified as it shows only completed projections, not projective potential).

The repetition of R through bar 2 is sullied by some uncertainty as the entrance of the right hand figure creates an unusual two-beat anacrusis that sets up the possibility of an independent projection (Q). The completed projection of the left-hand figure through bar 2 eventually secures a two-bar hypermetric level (S), but the duple projections continue. Thus, the metric properties of the first three bars are all different: a simple development of 3/4 meter through quarter-note and bar-level projections (P, R); complicating the meter through a "superimposed" duple projection (Q); and establishment of a two-bar hypermeter (S) that includes both duple and triple projections.

References:
Justin London. Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Christopher Hasty. Meter as Rhythm. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.