Performing Expressive Closure in Structurally Open Contexts: Chopin’s Prelude in A minor and the Last Two Dances of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze

[1] To perform a work's closure involves more than providing suitable dynamic or temporal emphasis for a final cadence, especially in works where conventions of tonal closure are undermined and finality is problematized. When Chopin or Schumann simulate-or dissimulate-a series of potential closures before the actual end of a work, how might a performer project the expressive significance of these pre-closures as feints, or parts of a larger dramatic trajectory? In effect, how might a performer lead a listener to experience the appropriate significance of each presumed closure in a dramatically satisfying way? I begin with a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of the variety of musical elements and strategies that contribute to expressive meaning, to help explain expressive dramas of closure that go beyond tonal resolution. In reaching a more complete understanding of the expressive and dramatic issues involved, I briefly consider aspects of performance practice, as well as clues from the autograph and subsequent editions of the work. By offering my own performance of the Chopin and Schumann examples, I illustrate some of the pianistic options that can contribute to a coherent expressive interpretation of these two closural dramas.[2] To situate my interpretive stance, I offer the following definitions of tonal and expressive closure. Tonal closure in Western art music is defined primarily by the return and cadential confirmation of the tonic. For the later Schenker, this includes completion of the Urlinie (the fundamental stepwise descent to tonic in the structural upper voice) in tandem with completion of the Ursatz (the structural I-V-I progression underlying a work). Although Schenker's reductive tonal analyses may also imply a tonal drama of thematized pitch conflict, my approach to expressive closure considers the contribution of still other thematized elements, such as rhythm, dynamics, articulation, pacing, texture, gestures, topics, tropes, and even formal genres and styles (see Hatten 1994 and 2004). The unique strategies required to solve problems of dramatic resolution (or to "sum up" the conflict, in cases where resolution is not possible) often necessitate more music beyond the point of Ursatz completion. Indeed, the unusual strategies required to achieve thematic closure may elude a reductionist's attempt to hear the musical "surface" solely in terms of diminutions elaborating an underlying tonal paradigm. To introduce this broader concept of expressive closure, I begin with a brief example of thematic closure in Beethoven, a case in which intensification of dramatic conflict after the point of tonal closure leads to a more emphatic, but ultimately tragic outcome.(1)Example 1. Beethoven, Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 2, no. 1, first movement, coda[3] Beethoven's codas often dramatize expressive closure by foregrounding a fundamental premise of conflict that underlies the sonata-form movement, just before its definitive resolution. This may lead, paradoxically, to the greatest dissonances heard thus far; their ultimate resolution is correspondingly more forceful. The first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 2, no. 1, achieves its dramatically expressive closure in a coda of a scant few bars (Example 1), not only by summing up the rhythmic dissonance premised by the movement, but also by destabilizing the potential structural descent itself. What Schenker (2004) graphs as part of the early Urlinie for this movement is the structural upper-line descent from to (C-B-A-G-F). But the reprise of that descent in the coda is dissonantly harmonized with applied dominants and diatonic seventh chords, and what is foregrounded is actually the fully thematized descent from C to E-natural. First presented (as unresolved) in the opening theme (measures 7-8), the descent is also used at a deeper level to structure the development section's retransitional drive to the dominant, and it returns to the foreground in the brief coda, resolving to tonic only in the last measure of the movement. …