Sunday, June 12, 2016

Mozart's menuets and Caplin's theme types, part 3

Ironically, perhaps, the presentation-consequent theme class shares an important characteristic with the sentence. The presentation-consequent theme shows a dogged adherence to one idea, which is heard three times, then followed by a cadence. Here is an example from K. 164, n5:


One might even decide that bars 5-6 are "varied" enough that the second phrase could be called a continuation and the whole a sentence. In my view, however, that would be a failure to recognize obvious things in the music that tell us "bar 5 is like bar 1--hear that?"

In K. 164, the trio to n6 is one of the periods that might have been read as a presentation-consequent theme:

Here the issue is clearly not bars 5-6, where bars 1-2 are literally repeated, in entirety. The issue is in bars 3-4, where the opening of the figure (bar 3) suggests "basic idea varied" and the end (bar 4) says "contrast." In general, I favor the effect of the opening, but in this case the strong contrast effected by a different direction for the parallel thirds in the accompaniment parts renders bar 5 a clear "return to the beginning" by contrast.

Here is a similar problem with a different result: K164n3, the trio:


Does bar 5 act like the opening of a consequent, rather than, as I have it, a continuation phrase? The "dogged adherence" to a figure would certainly suggest it, but what's lacking here is a sense of returning to the beginning, which a consequent must have. Here the sequence, going down by thirds (D-B-G in the melody), erases any sense of "starting over." If anything, this theme sounds like a six-measure phrase + a cadence.