The Predominant Six-Four in the Late Music of Richard Strauss

This article examines a unique family of six-four sonorities in the works of Richard Strauss. These six-fours typically sound with 6^, 4^, or 2^ (or modal variants thereof) in the bass but occur immediately prior to a cadential dominant, and thus impart a sense of predominant function despite their unstable inversion. In examining how the sixth and fourth behave, I suggest that rather than hearing these chords as consonant inversions of a triad, they can instead be interpreted as accented six-fours; in other words, reading the sixth and fourth as dissonances, whose resolution to a fifth and third is deferred to occur over a subsequent harmony. I suggest that the sense of fragmentation that coalesces through the process of suspension creates a conflict between phenomenological and analytic hearings of this music, which reflects a type of modernism typically overlooked in Strauss’s late music.