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Re: Hindemith Clarinet Sonata note question

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-02-12 22:29

It's an interesting question. Th accompaniment is different because it's going in a different direction in each case. I would need more time to think about the exact voice leading involved, but here's my initial impression:

The harmony under the first instance at 34 is essentially static. pedal (or ostinato) voices are in the bottom voice of each hand, forming an open 12th, while the two upper voices of each hand move upward to form a chord of stacked fifths (C#-G#-D#-A#), then the two moving voices continue in opposite directions back toward the relatively stable harmony of C#-G#-B at 34+3. It's here that I'd need to think some more - at the end of 34 + 3 he continues the contrary motion in the moving voices to anticipate the piano's playing of the clarinet's theme (from 34) offset by two beats and a major third higher (spelled as a diminished fourth - E -something (major/minor is deliberately ambiguous) for the clarinet to Ab in the piano). But it all comes back to E where it started for the repetition by the clarinet at 4 before 34.

When the clarinet plays it the second time, the piano is doing a different chordal structure with a different destination. The outside voices in each hand stay on a pedal-tone C# while the inner two voices move upward together in parallel 4ths (who says they're illegal???) and reach Ab major at 36 for a transposition (again offset by 2 beats) of the original Rondo tune in Ab.

Unless, as you hinted, there is historical scholarship that says some earlier edition actually had these two passages given as identical and the change was made in a later edition (or from MS to first edition), I would think the two passages are different enough in harmonic implication that I'd have to accept the difference in the two sixteenths as having been intentional. The raised notes in the second appearance (E#-D#) certainly add a level of instability and new tendency to the line's color.

Of course, it confuses things a little more that all the other appearances of the fragment from 34 (as far as I have found) in either the clarinet or the piano part are the same interval structure in the sixteenths as the initial appearance. But lacking any other reason to make a correction, on the musical evidence alone I'd have to accept the print as correct and assume that Hindemith himself sometime between 1939 and 1963 (his death) would have become aware of a misprint and gotten Schott to correct it.

Karl

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