ilv,
Thank you for listening, and for commenting - I appreciate it. The parallel octaves and all the other notes in there are, in my view of my own piece, the correct notes, not to be replaced by any other notes. It may be that the theory states that octaves are to be avoided, but of course theory is derived from music (not the other way around) so I write the music I want the way that makes sense to me. I am interested in writing melodic music that follows what to me sounds like a logical and meaningful musical discourse. This, of course, does not mean that other composers -- some better composers than myself -- will hear it as either logical or meaningful. It is often said that music is a universal language, but actually it can perceived very differently by different people.
Perhaps the pause is awkward. But if you play the passage without a pause, then it sounds even more awkward to me. When something big happens in front of you, you don't just "move along", you slow down at least. Not slowing down would be unnatural and truly awkward. The music here had to pause because something major had happened; namely, it had reached a sort of logical dead end -- it tried to keep going with the baroque style, but the melody itself of the second half of the piece had encoded within a formula that would lead to a dead end, and the only way to carry on with it was to move towards a more outwardly romantic (Chopinesque) feeling. So the realization that it had reached a dead end was a noteworthy occurrence, a major occurrence, that required pause before resuming, now in a Romantic style. The only way (in my opinion) to not have that pause is to not have that phrase, and to not have that phrase we can't have that opening theme for the second movement. We'd need to start that second movement differently. The theme we have now blossoms naturally onto that phrase, that dead end, which cannot be experienced without pause. It all goes together, at least in my mind. But not universally felt that way.
Mariza