Unfinished Music by Pasler Jann; Kramer Richard;

Author:Pasler, Jann; Kramer, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2008-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

EXAMPLE 11.3 Opus 109, first movement, mm. 12–13, in hypothetical rewriting.

EXAMPLE 11.4 Opus 109, first movement, 12–14, showing root motion

At the recapitulation of the Adagio at m. 58, it is precisely the repetition analogous to mm. 12 and 13 that interrogates the moment of slippage. In the transposition of F## to the lower fifth, the anticipated B# is replaced with its enharmonic equivalent: C♮, now not the third degree of a triad, but its root—and all of this enabled because at its repetition, the diminished seventh chord is made to resolve differently (see ex. 11.5).

The challenged relationship between the Vivace and the Adagio espressivo, as two components of a sonata exposition that seem contradictory at their core, where one seems a commentary on the other, recalls once again that remarkable moment in the second movement of the fourth sonata of Emanuel Bach’s Probestücke (studied in chapter 5) where, in the midst of a solemn Largo maestoso in D major, an exaggerated exercise in the French manner, the music settles unexpectedly on C#, a dominant, isolated in three octaves with great flourish, triggering a cadenza, an intimate dialogue a due, deeply felt—and in F# minor, where the movement closes, as though in unabashed contempt of the music that precedes it. The absolute transformation of the piece at a synapse of intense concentration brings to mind Beethoven’s “fällt in cis-moll ein u.—in einer Fantasie—schließt darin,” and the diminished seventh chord that would set it off. “Fällt in fis-moll ein, u.—in einer Cadenz—schließt darin,” Bach may well have been thinking. The sense of interruption in F# minor, the closing there in a cadenza, the harmonic quiver that sets it off—all this is suggestive of what will happen in Opus 109. And if there can be no disputing the deep improvisatory impulse immanent in both cadenza and fantasy in the late eighteenth century, we might wish to remind ourselves that both of these extreme passages are to be found in the midst of sonata movements. In each, the formal constraints, the trappings, of genre are contested, and we are left to wonder whether it is the composer himself who intrudes into the text—a subjectivity in its purest sense—or whether we are witness to the scripting of a masked, figural subjectivity. Perhaps the distinction is itself without merit, the latter merely a disguise for the former.

EXAMPLE 11.5 Opus 109, first movement, mm. 61–61, as if transposed from mm. 12–13.

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