Cesare Pugni — “Gazelda”. Quadrille (Nos. 1–6 & Finale): hearing the dance in the form

Quadrille. A descendant of the French contredanse: four couples in a square perform figures—Pantalon, Été, Poule, Trenise, Finale (sometimes six parts). It was also the era’s playlist: composers stitched popular tunes into one number, an early medley. On stage the quadrille is social theater—figure changes are cinematic cuts you can hear in eight-bar blocks.

Take the quadrille as one dance made of short figures. Meter, texture, and cadence do most of the talking; if you read only the piano score and listen inwardly, the character of each section emerges.

With No. 1 everything clicks at once: 6/8 organizes the step not as a waltz circle but as an elastic 3+3. Below, broken triads run through the bar with a clear weight on the first eighth and even filling after it. Above, a cantabile line uses brief approaches to its pillars and small arpeggio touches. The opening eight bars form a clean period: mid-phrase you hear a half-cadential “suspension,” the close lands on a concise authentic cadence. Just before it, a fleeting trill-like gesture sharpens the point—more a stroke than an ornament.

No. 2 keeps 6/8 yet changes the inflection: the treble takes on a dotted profile; chordal thickenings give the line spring; the bass ostinato feels wider in register. Inside the eight-bar cell, p and f behave like question and answer. Harmony stays transparent (I–V–I), with occasional secondary dominants that nudge the phrase toward its peak. The Fine and D.C.marks matter: the return underscores the “figure” nature—show, repeat, confirm.

In No. 3 the texture sets the character. The right hand lays a chordal “comb”: short verticals tied under slurs over the steady left-hand ostinato. The surface becomes quilted and rhythmically embossed. Cadential points arrive as full verticals on the strong beat; there is a tiny intake and release around them, which makes the closure feel especially gathered.

No. 4 is the cantabile figure. The top line stretches into long slurs and often releases on the weak part of the bar. Below, the same 6/8 spring persists, but the bass climbs by steps, creating an internal rise without external pressure. Returning D.C. al Fine lets the ear hear the same inflection first as introduction, then as recognition.

In No. 5 the texture thickens: more full chords and energetic gestures above, wider supports below. The graphic relief of the period is easy to hear—local lift toward the middle (mf → f) and a small dip before the cadence. Cadences are short and without after-speech: the vertical lands and is withdrawn at once.

No. 6 — Finale changes the sense of time: the pulse compacts into 2/4. The bass becomes a chain of short anchors with little lifts; the treble runs fast three-note cells and compact chordal folds. The page is terraced in eight-bar steps: each terrace builds, then stabilizes. Near the coda appears schluss—the point where the material locks; after it, a final authentic cadence and the composer’s prescribed cycle of returns (D.S./D.C.) to Fine, then a dry, exact full stop.

Heard this way, the quadrille is not a handful of miniatures but a single drawing. Its basis is the metric elasticity of 6/8 (and the springy 2/4 of the Finale), the clear texture (ostinato below; speech and gesture above), brief cadences, and purposeful repeats. The moves between numbers read as changes of mask: cantabile line to dotted profile, chordal comb to long slur, 6/8 to compact 2/4. That clarity of construction is what makes Pugni’s handwriting persuasive: the dance is audible in the fabric itself.