Arrival at the black swans

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Arrival at the Black Swans - Album sheet in A flat major for piano ( WWV 95) is a composition by Richard Wagner . The work was composed in Paris in 1861 and is Countess Anna von Pourtalès (1827–1892). dedicated. The performance lasts approx. 5 minutes.

history

After Wagner had closed his household in Paris in the early summer of 1861, he found temporary accommodation in the Prussian embassy hotel. There one day he let his gaze wander out of the window onto the Tuileries , where he saw two black swans bathing in a pool , "to whom [he] felt drawn with a dreamy tendency". He took up this idea later when he wrote the album sheet Arrival at the Black Swans . Wagner dedicated it to his former Parisian landlady, Countess Anna von Pourtalès.

music

It starts with a two-bar motif that does not yet reveal the basic key of A flat major . Three inversions of a Dm Ø appear , which due to their detached position do not yet make any double-dominant effect audible; this only arises during the third repetition through the transition to a reserved E- flat 7 , which only comes to a half resolution, since the fifth octave in the bass remains consistently. In harmony , however, the first prelude remains mainly on the dominant seventh chord, with which the section is ended, but is also kept unstable by the half-close achieved by E- flat 9-8 . The starting motif follows again, which is transferred back to the dominant seventh chord after the third sound . A modulation chain then appears , which again ends on an E-flat 7 held in front of it .

After this second prelude, the theme is heard, which now mainly consists of alternating triad and scale melodies and is embellished with numerous dots , syncopations and suggestions . Above the simple triad accompaniment, every eighth note , which initially has no major harmonic peculiarities - the tonic - dominant change is only rarely interrupted by other, mostly scale-specific chords - seems capricious and free. At the end, a double dominant chord is brought back to the tonic before a dominant seventh and a tonic chord conclude the thematic part.

In the final part, the starting motif is heard again, but this time it is varied harmoniously and slightly melodically in the two repetitions. Another subsequent modulation chain ends on a G flat minor chord. After a D-DD-D transition, the piece is concluded by a coda , which is based on the tonic chords on every eighth note that have already occurred in the theme and which uses tonic arpeggios as a motif . The final chords are a reference to the opening motif.

literature

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