Picardy Third - History

History

The origins of the term are obscure. An idea that was repeated as fact for some time, but which turns out to have no provable basis, was that expounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de Musique (1767): that this form of ending survived longest in church music, and due to the great number of cathedrals in the historical French province of Picardy. More plausible is the idea that the North of France, and Flanders, were influential in the development of contrapuntal music in the fifteenth century.

Robert Hall hypothesizes that, instead of deriving from the Picardy region of France, it comes from the Old French word "picart," meaning "pointed" or "sharp" in northern dialects, and thus refers to the musical sharp that transforms the minor third of the chord into a major third. In medieval music, such as that of Machaut, neither major nor minor thirds were considered stable intervals, and so cadences were typically on open fifths. Examples of the Picardy third can be found throughout the works of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries, as well as earlier composers such as Thoinot Arbeau and John Blow.

This practice began to decline in the late sixteenth century and by the Classical era had been more or less discarded, although examples can be found in works by Haydn and Mozart. In the Romantic era, those of Chopin's nocturnes that are in a minor key almost always end with a Picardy third. A notable structural employment of this device occurs with the Finale of the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, where the motto theme makes its first appearance in the major mode.

It is notable that in the first book of J. S. Bach's The well-tempered clavier composed in 1722, only one of the twenty-four minor movements fails to end in a Picardy third, whereas in the second book, composed in 1744, fourteen end without it. (Manuscripts vary in some of these cases. This is the case with the single exception in the first book, the G♯-minor fugue, which, according to the present Bach Gesellschaft edition, is thought to have been originally composed in G minor, accounting for the natural sign rather than sharp on the third of the final chord.)