Form

Minuet and Trio

Minuet (D minor)

Trio (D major)

Notes

A brilliant juxtaposition: down and up. Most motives, lines, phrases and periods in the minuet move downward, sinking, dropping, lowering, tinged with the severe minor mode, the intensity of the 1st movement in D-minor returned. The trio moves upward, dramatically, impishly, sarcastically, but so delicately. Leaps and lines, again, motives and larger structures all float upward. Bouyant, upturing like a smile, beaming in the relative major key of F. Everything in the music, on multiple dimensions, seems to support this simple dicotomy, the ternary form providing sectional time for complete binary essays on the zen-ish sparcity of down, up, and down again.

The lightened and polarized texture of the trio is a delight typical of quartet writing for minuets or scherzos. (It is essentially a violin solo with a delicate pizzacato obbligato from the other three (with some thickening and reinforcement of the melodic line in the return of the 2nd reprise.) This trio in particular inspires the image of figure within the music box, the glistening, minute complexity of the constructed yoke within the fabrige egg, the box within the box.