Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature

Richard Cohn

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199772698.001.0001
Published: 2012 Online ISBN: 9780199932238 Print ISBN: 9780199772698

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CHAPTER

Three Reciprocity 
Richard Cohn

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199772698.003.0003 Pages 42–58

Published: January 2012

Abstract
Chapter 3 provides support for a chapter 2 premise that inverts a cardinal tenet of classical theory: that
consonant triads are generated from (dissonant) augmented ones. It develops Fétis’s view that tonality
and repetition (“uniformity”) stand in reciprocal relation. When repetition takes precedence over
tonality, equal divisions of the octave, of which augmented triads are a species, come to the fore. The
point is illustrated through passages from piano sonatas of Beethoven (Appassionata) and Schubert’s
(D. 959 in A major), where consecutive transposition by major third causes an evident large-scale
arpeggiation of the augmented triad rather than the consonant arpeggiation identi ed by Schenker as
fundamental to diatonic tonality. After 1850, augmented triads sound more frequently as surface
harmonies, where they can be made to sound more stable than the consonant triads with which they
come into contact; examples from Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar Symphony, and
Fauré’s Requiem illustrate. The chapter closes with a consideration of an 1853 treatise of Weitzmann
which implies that the twenty-four consonant triads are organized by their voice-leading proximity to
the four augmented triads.

Keywords: augmented triad, fétis, faust Symphony, antar Symphony, fauré Requiem, schubert D. 959,
appassionata, weitzmann
Subject: Music Theory and Analysis, Romantic Music, Baroque Music
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
 The Historical Emergence of Augmented Triads

Chapter 2 proposed that pan-triadic progressions, exempli ed by hexatonic cycles, arise from the status of
consonant triads as minimal perturbations of the perfectly even augmented triad. Some readers might
worry that too much weight is being placed on a relatively slender shoot. When an augmented triad appears
in music before 1830, its behavior is normally well regulated and unobtrusive, tucked into the middle of a
phrase rather than exposed at its boundaries, passed through quickly and lacking metric accent. In an 1853
monograph titled The Augmented Triad, Carl Friedrich Weitzmann portrayed his protagonist as a serf,
scurrying in and out the rear entrance, occasionally showing his face but never intruding on the

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conversation in the salon. After agitating on behalf of “granting [the augmented triad] an abiding place in
the kingdom of tones,” Weitzmann “gave its further fate over to our enlightened composers” (Weitzmann
2004 [1853], 144, 224; my translations). As if in response, some late-nineteenth-century composers
featured augmented triads as motivic emblems in individual compositions: Brahms in his Alto Rhapsody
(Forte 1983) and Wagner in Siegfried Idyll (Anson-Cartwright 1996) and his musical portraits of the
Valkyries and of Amfortas. Liszt and Wolf acted more boldly, incorporating augmented triads into their
1
normative sonic core. It is nonetheless di cult to make a case that augmented triads ever achieved a
normative, unmarked status.

Charles Moomaw’s 1985 dissertation is the most comprehensive English-language source concerning the
augmented triad’s origins and early history. Moomaw locates the chord in France as early as 1636, typically
when the fth of a dominant triad is displaced up a diatonic semitone (Moomaw 1985, 251). He also reports
p. 44 that gured bass treatises consistently instruct that the +5 gure be rendered with a seventh or ninth
above the bass even when the latter is not explicitly ciphered (128).

Georg Andreas Sorge was evidently the rst to recognize the augmented triad as a primary harmony,
although initially in 1745 he did so with great reluctance: “The best thing about this harsh harmony, if one
may speak of it as one, is that it seldom appears” (Sorge 1980 [1745], 440). In 1760, Sorge upgraded its
status incrementally, observing that the augmented triad is tolerable when it results from a chromatic
passing tone that connects fth-related major triads (Moomaw 1985, 323). It is in such passing contexts,
bisecting a whole step, that the augmented triad most characteristically and frequently occurs in music of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

During the 1770s, French theorists began to accept the augmented triad as a fundamental sonority, bearing
a distinctive character, and even a capacity to support accretions (Gessele 1994, 84–86). This acceptance
2
becomes evident in a remarkable D major Minuet that has been attributed to Mozart. The short
composition contains seven augmented triads, of which only the rst behaves in the manner sanctioned by
contemporaneous treatises. The remaining six dissonances are anomalously accented in three independent
ways: each initiates a phrase, occurs on a metric downbeat, and is marked sforzando. Howard Boatwright
astutely observed that “each augmented chord has a di erent melodic origin and a di erent harmonic
function” (1966, 30) and concluded that the sonority has motivic value, in and of itself, rather than as a
diminutional accretion to some other formation (also see Sobaskie 1987).

Abbé Georg Vogler’s 1802 Handbuch zur Harmonielehre was the rst treatise to explore the augmented
triad’s potential for enharmonic reinterpretation. Writing that the augmented triad “appears to consist of
three similar major thirds,” Vogler claimed that its proper roost was the third scale degree of harmonic
minor and that “each III chord in minor…can be multiply interpreted as a III chord in three di erent keys”
(1802, 103, 109; my translations). Vogler illustrated this potential for Mehrdeutigkeit (multiple meaning)
through the progression given here as gure 3.1, whose anacrusis/downbeat combinations form a hexatonic
cycle. The third beat of each measure hosts some spelling of the CEG♯ augmented triad, acting successively
p. 45 as dominant of each triad on the following beat.
 Figure 3.1.

From Georg Voglerʼs Handbuch zur Harmonie (1802).

Vogler’s progression serves as a template for the passage presented in linear reduction at gure 3.2, from
3
the nale of Schubert’s Second Symphony in B♭ major (1812). The core of the development consists of three

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transpositionally identical phrases that divide the octave by major thirds, beginning and ending with the F
major that terminates the exposition. Immediately preceding each tonic is a locally appropriate spelling of
the CEG♯ augmented triad. Prolongation does not capture the relation of these chords to one another,
because the chord functions as a local dominant to a series of well-articulated tonics. Nor is motivic
association quite adequate; it is too static to capture the phenomenology of the passage. More than waving
their hands and crying, “Remember me, here I am again,” these augmented triads are also saying, “You
thought I was this; well think again, ’cause I can be that too.”

Figure 3.2.

Schubert, Symphony no. 2, 4th mvt., mm. 300–12.

If prolongation is at work in this passage in any form, then its more plausible object is the FAC♯ triad that
unites the three tonics. In graphs of similar passages by Beethoven and Wolf, Heinrich Schenker implied
that he understood the arpeggiated augmented triad as the prolonged displacement, by chromatic neighbor,
4
of a major triad. In gure 3.2, that triad would be F major, which appears as a tonic at the end of the
exposition, returns at m. 352, and ultimately acquires a retransitional seventh (m. 392). When D♭ major is
tonicized at m. 312, C is displaced by a D♭ neighbor, which continues to be locally supported (qua C♯) when A
major is tonicized at m. 332, and only returns to C at m. 352, when F major is retonicized. If, as Schenker
implies in analogous passages, FAD♭ is the prolonged harmony from m. 312 to m. 347, then it follows that
both D♭ major and A major are subordinated to a controlling dissonance. Yet the score contains no vertical
slice or contiguous patch, even an egregiously gerrymandered one, to be circled and labeled as a
p. 46 “controlling harmony.” In passages such as these, then, the augmented triad is not directly available to
perception. Its status, as a collocation of bass pitches or triadic roots or local tonics, is virtual and liminal.

This analysis suggests that the relationship between consonant and dissonant harmonies is not diodic.
Consonant harmonies provide the context in which dissonant harmonies can operate, as a rule. But, as
Robert P. Morgan showed in “Dissonant Prolongation” (1976), there are situations where these priorities
are reversed, and consonant triads subordinate to dissonant ones, not only locally but across spans of
signi cant duration. The relation between consonance and dissonance, then, is uid in principle. The
potential for this uidity opens up a compositional dynamic, where a terrain of xed relations is
transformed into a site for negotiation. Consonant and augmented triads gain the potential, in principle, for
reciprocity.
 Consonance/Dissonance Reciprocity

The nineteenth century was familiar with reciprocity as a general cultural condition. Kant developed it in his
in uential Critique of Pure Reason (1982 [1787]) as his third analogy of experience. The term was imported
into music theory by Simon Sechter (1853–54), who noted (following Kirnberger 75 years earlier) that,
5
lacking further context, two fth-related triads are tonally indeterminate. C serves as dominant to F, which
serves as subdominant to C, triggering a recursive circle whose resolution requires external intervention
(see Lewin 2006, 64). A similar situation arises in the case of diatonic third relations, whether relative
major/minor (C major/a minor) or Leittonwechsel (C major/e minor). Both of these species focus their tonal

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indeterminacy at a single melodic fulcrum, a whole step in the rst case and a semitone in the second. The
potential indeterminacy of the former case is well documented, particularly with respect to Schumann (e.g.,
Rosen 1995, 674). That of the latter case is encoded into its German name. The modern conception of
leading tone is restricted to the relationship between a tonic and its semitonal lower neighbor. For German
theorists of the middle of the nineteenth century, this relationship captured only one half of a duality:
6
Leitton applies equally to the relationship of dominant and its semitonal upper neighbor. Accordingly, when
C major and e minor are juxtaposed, the attraction of C to B (as ^6–^5 in e minor) is as strong as that of B to
C (as ^7–^8 in C major). The semitonal relation thus projects an unstable force eld that pulls
simultaneously in both directions.

Carl Friedrich Weitzmann identi ed a third type of reciprocity that shared aspects of those identi ed above:
the relationship between a minor triad and its major dominant, which he regarded as equivalent to that of a
p. 47 major triad and its minor subdominant. The reciprocal leading tone energies are divided between the
thirds, which Daniel Harrison (1994) calls the agents: the upward-pressing E, borrowed from f minor’s
7
parallel major, and the downward-pressing A♭, borrowed from C major’s parallel minor. Although this
triadic relation plays a central role in the writings of many theorists after 1850, it never achieved a stable
name. I shall refer it to using Weitzmann’s term, nebenverwandt, which Janna Saslaw translates as
“adjacency relation” (Weitzmann 2004 [1853]). Of particular relevance for present purposes is Arthur von
Oettingen’s name for the same triadic pairing: reciprocal, a German/English cognate (Mooney 1996, 56).

The situations examined so far involve a relation between two consonant triads. Such relations are bilateral
in principle, since no consonant triad is more stable than any other absent a particular context. The
reciprocity that we identi ed with regard to gure 3.2, however, is of a di erent kind, as it involves the
relationship between a consonant and dissonant triad. The scale is inherently out of balance and can only be
leveled through the application of external forces. In the crudest cases, such as Schubert’s “Die Stadt”, a
dissonant harmony achieves a quasi stability by squatting like a brute and appropriating the rhetorical
garments normally reserved for consonances ( rst, last, loudest, longest; see Harrison 1994, 75 .).

In contrast to such ad hoc solutions, François-Joseph Fétis recognized a way to override the forces of
tonality by cultivating more systematic resources, which he referred to under the terms uniformity and
symmetry. In a passage quoted in chapter 1, Fétis described the experience of a diatonic sequence in
phenomenological terms: “the succession and…movement x the attention of the mind, which holds on to
the form so strongly that any irregularity of tonality is not noticed.…The mind, absorbed in the
contemplation of the progressive series, momentarily loses the feeling of tonality.…The attention of the
musical sense is diverted from the feeling of tonality by symmetry of movement and succession” (2008
[1844], 27, 30). Fétis writes that a sequence levels the distinction between consonance and dissonance. A
diminished fth no longer requires resolution; in this context, its behavior is indistinguishable from that of
the perfect fth.

In a diatonic sequence, the law of uniformity is kept in check by the prior commitment to the diatonic scale.
Although each pattern iteration replicates the generic intervals of its predecessor, its speci c intervals are
 channeled within the banks of the diatonic scale. The forces that Fétis identi es become more fully
unleashed in chromatic sequences, such as the hexatonic cycles explored in chapter 2 or the Schubertian
third-divisions represented by gure 3.2. In these cases, the law of uniformity has a monolithic force, and
the rapid turnover of chromatic pitch classes ruptures any ability of the diatonic collection to hold a focus on
a particular global tonic.

The binary distinction between diatonic and chromatic sequences is a particular manifestation of a more
general dynamic that arises in many passages that we would not consider to be sequential per se. Whenever
p. 48 a motivic fragment migrates across a series of transpositional levels, or a fugal point of imitation is
replicated on a di erent degree of the scale, the absolute sizes of the intervals may conform to the locally

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governing scale, or they may be preserved at the expense of subverting or even rupturing that government.
The pressures toward uniformity may be con ned within the diatonic channel or may jump those banks and
lay down their own channels. Later theorists formulate this same duality in terms of diatony versus
repetition (Schenker 1954 [1906]) and magnetism versus inertia (Larson 1994).

To see how this duality manifests in the relation between consonant and augmented triads, consider the
following classroom situation. Two students are presented with a melodic gesture from C up to E and asked
to replicate that gesture beginning on E. One responds with E up to G♯, projecting an augmented triad; the
second with E up to G♮, projecting a consonant one. Both responses are correct, but one interprets
replication as raw uniformity; the other, as tempered to the diatonic collection. G♮ and G♯ displace each
other across the melodic fulcrum upon which the diatonality/uniformity tension is balanced, in the same
way that the same two tones constitute the modal fulcrum in the case of an E tonic, or the melodic fulcrum
in a Leittonwechsel relation between c minor and A♭ major, or one of two such fulcrums in the nebenverwandt
relation between C major and f minor.

Two Early-Century Examples: Beethoven and Schubert

Composers of the early nineteenth century sometimes treated this melodic fulcrum as a site for motivic
8
play. Consider the initial movement of Beethoven’s f minor Piano Sonata (Op. 57, “Appassionata”). A
secondary theme in A♭ major (m. 35) has a consequent phrase that mutates to a♭ minor (m. 42) and remains
in that key until the end of the exposition at m. 65, featuring E♭/F♭ motivic play throughout those
9
measures. The motive is raised to a higher power in the development, which begins in a♭ minor, renotated
as g♯ minor, and progresses to E major at m. 67, saliently featuring the motion from D♯ to E on successive
downbeats. Motion continues around the hexatonic cycle, to e minor (m. 79); skipping over C major, whose
status as global dominant requires it be reserved for a later moment; and proceeding directly to c minor (m.
83) and A♭ major (m. 87). The entire passage prolongs A♭ major by displacing its fth E♭ to its augmented
fth E and then restoring it.

Similar motivic play of the dominant and its upper neighbor is evident in the rst movement of Schubert’s A
major Piano Sonata, D. 959. A score of the exposition and development is available at Web score 3.3 . The
dominant reached at m. 28 of the exposition is prolonged for more than one hundred measures through two
p. 49 extended expansions, each initiated by a chromatic sequence that arpeggiates downward through the
stations of an E augmented triad. Both arpeggiations involve B → C displacements that, upon resolution,
trigger signi cant motivic reverberations. The initial major-third cycle, sketched at gure 3.3(a),
culminates at m. 39 when C is displaced back to B in the bass. The bass then isolates and works over the B →
C displacement throughout the subsequent extension of the B major local dominant ( gure 3.3(b)). Similar
bass motivic play occurs locally at the G major fantasy drift (mm. 65–68, gure 3.3(c)), more structurally at
the reanimation of the major-third division (mm. 82–91, gure 3.3(d)), and prior to the nal stabilization
of E major, where a C major sforzando (m. 103) is not recuperated until a medial caesura eight measures
later.

Figure 3.3.

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Excerpts from Schubert, Sonata in A major, D. 959, 1st mvt.

The apotheosis of this motive occurs in the development section, whose opening measures ( gure 3.3(e))
have been the subject of much marvel by performer/critics. Charles Fisk describes it in the following
evocative terms:

The new theme articulates itself as a fantastical ten-measure period: its rst phrase [mm. 131–35]
slips away from C major into B major, while its second [mm. 136–40] slips just as magically back
up to C. An even more ethereal variant of the same phrase pair immediately follows [mm. 141–50],
its sixteenths now spun out into gossamer webs. For these two periods, the music simply oscillates
between C and B, achieving what [Charles] Rosen characterizes as a stasis with a “physical e ect…
like nothing in music before.” (2001, 216, quoting Rosen 1980, 287)
 The oscillation identi ed by Fisk persists, indeed, through the remainder of the developmental core, even
after escaping the “poised, trans xed stasis” (Brendel 1991, 126) of its opening musette. The subsequent
ten-measure period (mm. 151–60) modulates from C major to b minor and back. The C → B melodic arc is
then carried by the phrases of the nal extended period (mm. 161–80), which approach a retransitional E
major rst from c minor, its hexatonic pole, and then from a minor, its minor subdominant.

The phrase pairings throughout the developmental core suggest that B acts as lower neighbor to structural C
(Jonas 1982 [1934], 92). The key that jointly provides a context for both harmonies is e minor (see Schenker
1954 [1906], p. 226; Hauptmann 1888 [1853], 159–60), whose shadow control is indicated by the phrygian
approach to its dominant (mm. 134, 144) and the deceptive return to its submediant (mm. 139, 149). E minor

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4
in turn substitutes for the E major that frames the development, which opens with a melodic motion from B
5
to C (m. 129 bis) and concludes with its reversal (m. 179). B thus performs the role of lower neighbor to its
own upper neighbor, magnifying the melodic fulcrum introduced with the equal divisions of the exposition.

Three Late-Century Examples: Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Fauré

The give and take between consonant and augmented triads becomes foregrounded in a number of
p. 50 compositions from the second half of the nineteenth century.

p. 51
The opening of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, completed in 1854, famously and explicitly inverts the values
classically accorded these sonorities ( gure 3.4). The passage consists of two slow rotations through three
segments of material (marked A, B, and C in the example), each of which extends approximately four
measures. Augmented triads dominate the surface. Moreover, with the exception of mm. 1 and 13, the pitch-
class pool for the entire passage draws exclusively on the CEG♯ and FAC♯ augmented triads, which combine
to form a hexatonic collection. Of particular interest are the four boxed gures, whose staggered downward
motion tropes a suspension gure, but with consonance and dissonance inverted with respect to formal
function (but not metric location): the position of preparation and resolution is occupied by dissonant
augmented triads; that of the suspension, by consonant minor triads (Morgan 1976, 60).
 Figure 3.4.

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Liszt, A Faust Symphony, 1st mvt., mm. 1–22.

It seems likely that Rimsky-Korsakov had the opening of Faust in his ear when he wrote the opening
measures of his Symphony no. 2 (1868), subtitled Antar ( gure 3.5). Antar, like Faust, begins with two slow
rotations through a series of three texturally di erentiated segments, each approximately four measures
long. The second rotation transposes the rst segment by a minor sixth (down in Antar, up in Faust); the
nal two segments are then transposed upward by major third. As both compositions combine two
augmented triads into a hexatonic collection, their second rotations recirculate the same tones as their
p. 52 respective antecedents.
 Figure 3.5.

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Rimsky-Korsakov, Symphony no. 2 (Antar), 1st mvt., mm. 1–24.

Looking back two decades later at the kuchist movement of which he had been principal in the 1860s, Rimsky
wrote that “Liszt was extreme, so was Berlioz, so was Wagner. And so were we” (Taruskin 1996, I: 70). The
opening of Antar suggests that Rimsky was understating his capacity to nuance that extremism to artistic
ends. Whereas Faust’s opening overturns the asymmetric consonance/dissonance binary with one swipe of
the hand, Antar’s balances an exquisitely ne point between its terms. Although Antar is stricter than Faust
in its hexatonicism—the passage contains not a single pitch foreign to the collection—its augmented triads
are less apparent. The segment labeled A presents three minor triads, and the segment labeled C selects one
of them for prolongation. The segment labeled B, by contrast, prolongs the FAC♯ augmented triad,
embellishing two of its components with an escape tone that very tentatively suggests a reconstitution of
one of the minor triads.

Whereas gure 3.5 symmetrically segments the opening of Antar into six units, based on thematic and
textural rotation, gure 3.6 asymmetrically partitions the same music on the basis of harmonic content,
splitting the A material into two segments and fusing the B and C material into a single one. In the rst
p. 53 rotation, the A material consists of a box and an oval that respectively enclose f♯ minor → d minor and b♭
minor → f♯ minor. The remaining material echoes and expands the initial f♯ minor → d minor progression,
interpolating an augmented triad between them. The role of the augmented triad, on this interpretation, is
to connect the two more stable consonant triads that ank it, grossly distending a progression that would
have otherwise been at home in the eighteenth century. In e ect, the augmented triad staggers the
simultaneous semitonal motions of the opening progression: rst F♯ → F in the bassus and then, four
10
measures later, C♯ → D in the cantus. In transposing its predecessor downward by minor sixth, the second
rotation inverts the function of the two triadic pairings. The b♭ minor → f♯ minor at the interior of the
previous rotation is now positioned at the head, and it is this unit that is subsequently expanded through the
same passing augmented triad. Conversely, the f♯ minor → d minor that dominates the rst rotation is
tucked into the interior of the second one. As a result, the series of four minor triads that opens the
composition, f♯ minor → d minor → b♭ minor → f♯ minor, is expanded in the progression from one rotation
 head to the next (f♯ minor → d minor, m. 1; b♭ minor → f♯ minor, m. 13) and also in the progression from one
aug aug
expansion (f♯ minor → F → d minor, mm. 4–12) to the next (b♭ minor → A → f♯ minor, mm. 16–24).

Figure 3.6.

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Analysis of the opening of Antar.

Where gure 3.6 presents the augmented triad as prolonging a motion between its anking consonant
triads, gure 3.7 inverts those roles. The opening gesture in the rst bassoon (= cantus) is a hexatonic spiral
that, on the basis of parallelism, suggests three semitonal pairs: C♯ → D, A → B♭, F → F♯. Assuming that we
are inclined to hear parallel passages in parallel ways, we are encouraged to hear the melodic gesture as
11
unfolding an augmented triad. But which one? As the metric grid does not lock in until m. 4, it is unclear
whether the rst or second component of each pair is the accented one, and hence whether it is the FAC♯ or
p. 54 B♭DF♯ augmented triad that is unfolded. The second bassoon (= bass) presents a similar but
complementary problem. It also unfolds the hexatonic collection in semitonal pairs: F♯ → F, D → C♯, B♭ → A.
Here, too, the oating metrics defeat any assignment of priority to a component of each pair, and hence to
one of the two augmented triads. Moreover, simultaneous tones in the cantus and bassus belong to di erent
augmented triads. Even if our ears locked into a particular metric orientation, they would be receiving
con icting information from the outer voices. Only the inner voice of the opening segment, sounded by the
timbrally distinct horn, has a clear commitment to one of the augmented triads: it sounds A → F → D♭ → A.
This ever-so-slight tipping of the balance, in an otherwise austere equilibrium, is subtly con rmed by the
pitches that are held invariant in the rst three measures as their respective triads are registrally
redistributed.

Figure 3.7.

Alternative analysis of the opening of Antar.

The segment labeled B in gure 3.5 provides clarity, rst to the bassus and then the cantus. In the bass, the
2
arrival of pedal F at m. 4 stakes down the metric grid clearly for the rst time, conferring the accent of the
F♯ → F onto its second term. Applying this information in retrospect to the opening gesture causes us to
hear the second bassoon line in terms of F♯ → F, D → C ♯, B♭ → A, emphasizing the same augmented triad
sounded in the horn. The subsequent escape-tone gures in the cantus similarly disambiguate the
hexatonic spiral of the previous measures, by tracing the same melodic course an octave lower. What was
metrically at and amorphous in the rst segment becomes shaped in the second gesture, clearly thrusting
the accentual weight onto the rst term of each pair: C ♯ → D, A → B♭. The timbral continuity of the bassoon
 helps to forge this connection and to project this weighting retrospectively onto the cantus of mm. 1–3,
which now is interpreted in terms of C ♯ → D, A → B♭, F → F♯. This analysis of the second segment leads us to
hear the opening segment, in each of its three melodic parts, as projecting FAC♯, even though its constituent
tones are not sounded simultaneously before their prolongation at mm. 4–8. Through this lens, each of the
minor triads sounded in the opening segment results from displacement of a component of the augmented
triad. This same hearing then extends naturally to the third segment of each rotation, which alternates
between two minor triads, in 63 and 64 inversion, respectively, neither of which projects convincingly as an
object of prolongation.

The passage excerpted as gure 3.8, from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem Mass of 1877, provides an instructive

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p. 55 comparison. Like much of the d minor Introit/Kyrie movement from which it is drawn, this passage is
animated by the tonic’s relationship to an F major triad that consistently functions as dominant. The
melodic fulcrum of this relationship is the C♯ that mediates between C and D, and hence the harmonic
fulcrum is the FAC♯ augmented triad that appears at m. 60, just prior to the cadence. This same augmented
triad, spelled variously, also appears three times in the interior of the phrase, each time as the second
component of a two-chord unit whose rst component is a consonant triad: F major at m. 52, f♯ minor at m.
54, and b♭ minor at m. 56. Other features con rm the two-bar groupings throughout the passage: with the
exception of the nal cadential pairing, the rst measure of each pair descends a melodic fourth on its nal
4
beat, and the second measure of each pair supports an A reciting tone.

Figure 3.8.

Fauré, Requiem Mass, Introit, mm. 50–61.

Our preference for analyzing parallel passages in parallel ways presents us with a choice similar to the one
that we faced in our analysis of Antar: the Exaudi’s harmony is structured either by the connections between
the initial, consonant measure of each pair or by those of its terminal, dissonant ones. The rst of these
options does not present a very coherent species of diatonic tonality: F major is embellished by f♯ minor and
b♭ minor before resolving as dominant of d minor. b♭ minor is easily reconciled as the minor subdominant of
F major. What remains intractable is the f♯ minor triad. Perhaps it functions as iii of a D major that
otherwise has no presence in the passage (or elsewhere in the movement)? This feels a little desperate and,
moreover, does not address the enharmonic metamorphosis of C♯ into D♭ as f♯ minor is displaced by b♭
minor at m. 56. The second option understands this bouquet of harmonies in terms of the augmented triad
to which each one leads. This alternative places FAC♯ at the conceptual center of the passage, assigning it
the role of a switching station through which the various consonant triads are threaded. We are aware that
the augmented triad plays this role because Fauré shows us, by leading each chord in and out of the
switching station, thereby isolating each semitonal displacement. There is no consistent diatonic
explanation that accounts for the simultaneous presence of this particular group of triads in a single phrase.
What draws them together is their shared status as single semitonal displacements of FAC♯.
p. 56 The same can be said of the opening measures of Antar, where the same collection of minor triads is no more
tonicizing than in Fauré (van den Toorn 1995, 127–28). This is so even though their mutual relationship to
the FAC♯ augmented triad only unfolds slowly, across the entire introduction. The augmented triad can
function as a switching station whether it has the presence of chronological mediator, as in the Exaudi, or
chronological consequent, as in Antar, or no role at all, as in many of the pieces examined in chapter 4. The
center of a circle is equally orienting to a set of dancers, whether marked by a pole, a hole, or the
12
imagination of the dancers.

Reciprocity in Weitzmannʼs Der übermässige Dreiklang

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Carl Friedrich Weitzmann was the rst theorist to recognize the compositional dynamic documented here.
Weitzmann’s 1853 monograph on The Augmented Triad tells three genesis stories about its protagonist, each
of which involve the verb entstehen or its nominal equivalent, Entstehung. Saslaw translates the verb as
“arise,” and the noun as “origin.” An alternative translation, generate/generation, emphasizes organicist
implications that may or may not be nested within Weitzmann’s conception. Because such an implication is
not guaranteed, Saslaw has done well to avoid them; but nor is it precluded, and it will serve my interest to
pursue it.

The rst story occurs in his chapter 2, “Preparation, Origin [Entstehung], and Introduction of the
Augmented Triad,” which o ers “a primer as to how this strange chord could come to life [in Leben treten
könne], prepared through major and minor triads and their inversions” (Weitzmann 2004 [1853], 166; my
translation). The primer presents sixteen ways to connect a consonant triad to an augmented one via
semitonal voice leading. The second story occurs in chapter 6, “Natural Origin [Entstehung] of the
Augmented Triad Most Important to Each Key.” Weitzmann combines f minor and C major triads into a
pentachord, FA♭CEG, from whose interior he extracts the augmented triad: F[A ♭ CE]G. “From the
connection of these two nebenverwandt chords arises [entsteht] the augmented triad most important to the
two keys represented by them” (184–85). Weitzmann explains that even though E is foreign to the key of f
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minor, and A♭ to the key of C major, each arises as that key’s most important neighbor tone. These two
tales relate to each other as speci c to general. The rst account concerns how an augmented triad comes
into being at a particular moment in a particular composition. The second deals with the augmented triad’s
p. 57 position in a musical system, apart from its particular instantiations. The rst is in the sense of “Isaac
was born of Abraham”; the second, in the sense of “invention is born of necessity.”

In chapter 7, Weitzmann explores the augmented triad’s Mehrdeutigkeit, in the sense that interested Vogler
fty years earlier. He notes that once enharmonic variants are taken into account, the A♭CE triad also arises
in four other keys, besides the f minor and C major already explored: “So we nd the augmented triad A♭CE
and its enharmonic equivalents in the nebenverwandt keys F minor and C major, further in the relative keys
of each, in A♭ major and A minor, nally in the nebenverwandt keys of the latter, in D♭ minor and E major”
(186–87). Although Weitzmann’s ordering has transformational implications that we will consider in
chapter 4, for him that ordering evidently held no value except as an aid to memory. On a subsequent page,
he lists the same six keys in the format reproduced here as the rst block of table 3.1, writing that CEG♯ and
its enharmonic equivalents “can appear as the most important [augmented triad] of the following keys
listed under them” (188–89). The remaining eighteen triads are grouped into three analogous clusters, each
headed by an augmented triad and listing the keys in which it is “the most important.”
 Table 3.1. Weitzmannʼs grouping of the consonant triads as displacements of augmented triads

I. {C, E, G♯} (and its enharmonic transformations)

1. C major 2. E major 3. A♭ major

4. a minor 5. c♯ minor 6. f minor

II. {D♭, F, A} (and its enharmonic transformations)

1. D♭ major 2. F major 3. A major

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4. b♭ minor 5. d minor 6. f♯ minor

III. {D, F♯, A♯} (and its enharmonic transformations)

1. D major 2. G♭ major 3. B♭ major

4. b minor 3. e♭ minor 4. g minor

IV. {E♭, G, B} (and its enharmonic transformations)

1. E♭ major 2. G major 3. B major

4. c minor 5. e minor 6. g♯ minor

Having created this list, Weitzmann’s discourse begins to project a subtle inversion. Until now, he has
viewed the augmented triad as a serf in the employ of the particular consonant triad from which it arises.
But now, having observed that each augmented triad has multiple patrons, he begins to wonder what life is
like from its point of view. “The closest relatives of an augmented triad,” he writes, “are thus the major
triads on its bass tone, third, and fth, [plus] the minor triads to whose roots each of [the augmented
triad’s] three voices forms the leading tone.…Its more distant relatives are the minor versions of the just-
p. 58 designated major chords and vice versa” (188–89). Several chapters later, Weitzmann graphically
portrays these relationships in a diagram that is reproduced here in translation as gure 3.9.

Figure 3.9.

From Weitzmannʼs Der übermässige Dreiklang. Upper- and lower-case letters are the roots of major and minor triads
respectively.

Each augmented triad is presented at the center of a cluster of consonant triads; major and minor triads are
indicated by large- and small-case roots, respectively. And here is where Weitzmann’s third genesis tale
involving the augmented triad can be found:

From the following augmented triads…arise [entstehe] the [consonant] triads indicated by the
letters next to them.…The chords placed immediately next to the augmented triad are attained
through the half-step progression of one of their voices; the [chords] further away [are attained]
through the half-step progression of two of their voices. (202–5)

With this, Weitzmann turns back the ow of his second genesis narrative. At the systematic level, it is the
augmented triads that are the sources, and the consonant triads the products.
The rst genesis narrative nonetheless remains intact. Immediately following the passage just quoted,
Weitzmann presents seven full pages of examples, comprehensively enumerating the ways that an
augmented triad can resolve. It is always the dissonance that is resolving to the consonance, never the other
way around. In a moment-to-moment sense, the relation of consonant triad to dissonant augmented triad
continues to be diodic. But in a systematic sense, Weitzmann is able to entertain the possibility that the
relation is reciprocal.

These passages from Weitzmann’s treatise are so rich in implication that they guide the work presented in
the next three chapters of this book. Chapter 4 considers the internal structure of the six-triad pools that
are clustered in table 3.1, from the standpoint of the Tonnetz graphics and triadic transformations

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introduced in chapter 2. Chapter 5 uses gure 3.9 as a stage from which to extend the Tonnetz, and its
attendant transformations, so that it breaks out of the augmented triad boundaries that con ned them in
chapter 2. Chapter 6 uses that extended universe as a playing board, or map, upon which to present pan-
triadic analyses of extended passages from the Romantic repertoires, and to assess and categorize those
passages on the basis of the voice-leading strategies that they execute.

Notes
1.
On augmented triads in Liszt, see Forte 1987, Todd 1988, and Satyendra 1992. Hantz 1982 analyzes the augmented triads in
Lisztʼs “Blume und Du ” in a way that particularly relates to the approach developed here. On augmented triads in Wolf, see
McKinney 1993.
2.
The Köchel number is K. 355/576b. The attribution, from an 1801 publication, is suspicious on internal grounds (Oster 1966)
and has never been corroborated. In any case, no evidence exists as to date of composition (Cli Eisen, e-mail correspondence
with the author, 2007).
3.
Seidel (1963) draws attention to this passage. Wason (1985, 19) speculates on a possible lineage from Vogler to Schubert.
Vogler was a peripatetic, ambitious, and charismatic personality who lived in Vienna from 1802 to 1805 and later taught
composition to such prominent figures as Carl Maria von Weber, Gottfried Weber, and Meyerbeer (Grave and Grave 1987).
4.
See Schenkerʼs analyses of passages from Beethovenʼs “Appassionata” and “Spring” Sonatas and Wolfʼs “Ständchen” (2005
[1924], 41–64; 1979 [1935]: fig. 100.6). Many scholars (e.g., Slatin 1967; Morgan 1976; Proctor 1978; Stein 1985) have observed
that his treatment of middleground equal divisions cannot be reconciled to his pronouncements elsewhere that only consonant
harmonies are susceptible to composing out. What is of primary interest here is that Schenker found dissonant prolongations
aurally and conceptually plausible, even if they “prolong” an idea that dissonates with the fundaments of tonality.
5.
Kirnberger (1982 [1771–76], 44–45). See also Hauptmann 1888 [1853]. Such bilateralism is also characteristic of the sixteenth-
century view (Dahlhaus 1990 [1967], 241).
6.
The conception originates in dualist thinking but was sensible enough that it was taken up by theorists with no commitment to
dualism, such as Louis and Thuille 1982 [1913], Kurth 1923, and Lorenz 1933. Harrison 1994 provides an excellent elaboration on
these matters.
7.
Smith 2006 identifies several Brahms compositions that thematize this reciprocity as an ambiguity.
8.
The analysis o ered here is based on Proctor 1978, 173–74. See also Bribitzer-Stull 2006, 179–80.
9.
These echo the F♭/E♭ play at m. 23 (bass) and mm. 26 and 29 (treble), which are in turn echoes of the D♭/C emanations that
conclude the initial f minor theme at mm. 10–15.
10.
On staggered semitones in Liszt, see Satyendra 1992, 102–3. A more complete interpretation would acknowledge the
tentativeness of d minor at m. 8. D falls back to C♯ throughout the segment labeled C, at the same time as A escapes to B♭,
suggesting a b♭ minor triad and delaying the ultimate consolidation of d minor until m. 11, when the sustained B♭ finally
resolves to A.
11.
The “parallel passages in parallel ways” dictum was stated by Gottfried Weber (1846 [1817–21], 365) as “What the ear has once
heard in a certain passage, it will not only expect again, on the recurrence of the same passage, but will sometimes even perceive
beforehand,” and reappears prominently in Lerdahl and Jackendo 1983.
12.
The absence of the perfectly even chord about which the nearly even ones circulate is a theme of Tymoczko 2011b, which
shows that it is productive to think of pentatonic and diatonic collections as circulating about perfectly even, and thus
microtonal, collections. See also Douthett 2008.
13.
Saslaw translates Nebenton as “secondary tone,” emphasizing that these neighbor tones are chromatic to the respective keys.