Climbing Monte Romanesca: Eighteenth-Century Composers in Search of the Sublime JOHN A. RICE An expanded version of a lecture given at the Musicology Colloquium at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University, on 1 December 2016 and at the Theory Group, Princeton University Department of Music, on 3 April 2017. I thank Vasili Byros at Northwestern and Nathaniel Mitchell at Princeton for their invitations. To Vasili and to Robert O. Gjerdingen, as well as to their colleagues and students in Evanston, I am most grateful for many suggestions, queries, and corrections. At Princeton, Nate, Kofi Agawu, and the whole Theory Group were equally helpful and encouraging. I would also like to thank Dexter Edge, Don Franklin, Edward Klorman, Kurt Markstrom, Stefano Mengozzi, Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Vanessa Tonelli, and Steven Whiting for their advice and insights. In his analysis of the exposition of the Andante of Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, K. 550, Robert O. Gjerdingen shows how the melodic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal content of the opening measures returns several times, each time in the guise of a different schema or combination of schemata. 1 In Table 1 is a summary of the schematic content of measures 1–36. We hear the opening idea, with its imitative entries, each higher than the last, and its repeated eighth notes, three times: first with the Jupiter, the Le-Sol-Fi-Sol, and the Prinner. 2 Then the Jupiter, the Lully, and the Prinner. 3 Later, after an unexpected modulation to the distant key of D flat major, we hear a third version of the opening passage, this time as an elaboration of a pattern that Gjerdingen has named the Monte Romanesca (Example 1). Gjerdingen writes of the passage in D flat: “In the late 1780s the Monte Romanesca was an archaism, and the overlay of the descending scales [in the winds] gives this remarkable passage a Handelian grandeur.” Mozart seems to have incorporated elements of variation technique into this sonata-form movement. But these variations—transformations, as Gjerdingen calls them—contradict the basic principles of variation form. What we expect to change from variation to variation (melody, rhythm, counterpoint) stays much the same; what we expect to stay the same (the theme’s key and its underlying schematic framework) changes. Mozart made similar transformations in another late movement in sonata form: 1 Robert O. Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (New York, 2007), 122–28. 2 Except where otherwise noted, all names for voice-leading schemata are introduced and explained in Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style. On the Le-Sol-Fi-Sol see Vasili Byros, Foundations of Tonality as Situated Cognition, 1730–1830: An Enquiry into the Culture and Cognition of Eighteenth-Century Tonality with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony as a Case Study (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2009) and several subsequently published articles. 3 On the Lully schema see John A. Rice, “Adding to the Galant Schematicon: The Lully,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 2014 (Kassel, 2015), 205–225.