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the first entrance of the new Weihegruf3 motive, as Titurel's coffin is opened and all break into a woeful cry. There follow, with some tonal substitutions we shall presently explore, two Stollen in D minor and an Abgesang in D major. The Abgesang turns back to D minor as it approaches the final cadence of the section, at m. 993. The cadential formula in the vocal part is especially conventional; the spectacularly deceptive cadence at "Ruh!" is all the more wrenching. The musical Bar Form sets an equally formulaic prayer in the text: Stollen: My father, ... most blessed among heroes ... thou purest one,... I gave thee death! Stollen: O, as thou now... beholdest the Redeemer, entreat Him . . . to bestow death finally upon me. Abgesang: Only this mercy! ... I cry to thee; cry thou to Him: "Redeemer, grant rest to my son!"

There is a traditional view that parallel voiceleading was for Debussy a method of elaborating monophonic ideas, the extra voices being added for acoustic coloration or for poetic effect of some sort, archaic, primitivistic, "Oriental," or whatever else the tone painting might suggest. In this view, the piano part for mm. 1-9 of Debussy's Violin Sonata is an essentially monophonic conception. The music, with its continuation through the opening phrase (mm. 1-14), is shown in ex. 1. Exposed to the traditional view when I was young, I tried to hear the essential pitch structure for the piano part over the first nine measures in some melody projected by one of the voices within the parallel triads, either in the melody D-G-D-G-Bb that appears on top of the triads, or in the melody G-C-G-C-E6 that appears in the bass. But I found this attitude uncomfort ble when I listened to the music, or when I played it. The succession of G-minor, Cmajor, and E6-minor triads seemed arbitrary if not perverse. Beyond that, I could not fathom a continuous musical impulse connecting mm. 1-9 to mm. 10-14 in the piano. True, the G-minor and C-major triads did return in mm. 12-14; still, their return seemed no less arbitrary or perverse for being harmonically consistent with mm. 1-4. The traditional dominant harmony of mm. 10-11 confused me all the more in this context. I found the major rather than the minor ninth in that harmony especially perplexing, since the point of the preceding Eb-minor triad had seemed to be precisely to deny the harmonic power of E?.