The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy; Brian Magee, 2000, Macmillan
A book review by Peter McKenzie-Brown
More in this blog on opera:
More in this blog on opera:
Tristan und Isolde is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner to a libretto he wrote himself. I’m not sure how well you know Wagner. A lot of opera lovers, including my wife, find his operas difficult and only listen to them under duress. Personally, I love his work. Today, I want to talk about the evolution of a revolutionary chord in this opera. I’m not going to push your musical skills too far; my own are not up to the task, in any case.
Wagner’s compositions stress
musical themes, and his operas are quite long. Our version of Tristan is more
than four hours in length. In effect, Wagner made the orchestra the prima donna in his opera, and this
innovation affected other German composers.
According to Bryan Magee, “because
of the weight and seriousness of his work [Wagner] is widely supposed to have
been someone of a ponderous and humourless disposition, but this is not so at
all. For instance, we have this account of his behaviour during rehearsals for
the first performance of Tristan: ‘if a difficult passage when particularly
well he would spring up, embrace or kiss the singer warmly, or out of pure
choice stand on his head on the sofa, creep under the piano, on to it, run into
the garden and scramble joyously up the tree…’ Standing on his head was
something he did quite often, usually as an expression of delight. So was
climbing. Once, arriving at a friend’s house, the first thing he did was climb
up the front of the house. On another occasion, visiting a friend for lunch, he
immediately clambered to the top of the tallest tree in the garden – and this
at the age of fifty-seven. He was always much given to sliding down the banisters –
again well into middle age. It would be considered extraordinary if someone
behaved in this way now, but it was a great deal more extraordinary in the
middle of the 19th century. There was something not only of the
theatre about Wagner but of the circus, something of the acrobat or clown….” (McGee,
236-237)
Wagner wrote the opera (including
its libretto) in the late 1850s; its first performance was in 1865. It is one
of the great works of opera, and broke new ground in its use of chromaticism,
tonal ambiguity, orchestral colour and harmonic suspension. In a letter to his
lover – the wife of a businessman who had befriended the composer, and funded
his work – Wagner wrote the following:
“There is no
country, no town, no village that I can call my own. Everything is alien to me
and I often gaze around, yearning for a glimpse of the land of Nirvana. But
Nirvana quickly turns back into ‘Tristan’; you know the Buddhist theory of the
origin of the world. A breath clouds the clear expanse of heaven: it swells and
grows denser, and finally the whole world stands before me again in all its
impenetrable solidity.”
Elsewhere in that letter, Wagner
cited a musical passage a young composer named Hans von Bülow had written, and
offered a bit of constructive criticism. He did not criticize von Bülow for
writing dissonances but for emphasizing them. Rather, he said, composers should
conceal their dissonances.
Wagner did not take his own advice,
for soon he would be emphasizing a dissonance himself, using a chord that he
possibly discovered first in the score of von Bülow’s opera Nirwana. Although it could with
justification be called “the Nirwana chord,” it has become known as “the
Tristan chord.”
First, let’s get the story out of
the way. Tristan is a nobleman from Breton, and the adopted heir of Marke, the
king of Cornwall. Tristan’s job is to accompany Isolde, an Irish princess, to
Cornwall to marry King Marke. With the aid of a love potion, Tristan and Isolde
fall in love aboard ship. This causes a great deal of commotion in the story.
By the end of Act III King Marke has shown himself to be an honourable man, but
Tristan is dead.
The Tristan chord includes the
notes F, B, D♯, and G♯. It is the opening phrase of
the opera, and is a leitmotif – a theme – relating to Tristan. I read somewhere that it “contains
within itself not one but two dissonances, creating in the listener a double
desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then
moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution-but-not-resolution.
It is not until we reach the opera’s closing notes that the chord finds
resolution.
When it came to promoting his work,
Wagner was an almost hyperkinetic genius. For example, he promoted and
personally supervised the design and construction of a theatre in Bayreuth,
which contained many architectural innovations to accommodate the huge
orchestras for which Wagner wrote as well as the composer’s particular vision
about the staging of his works.
It was there, in fact, that American
humourist Mark Twain heard Tristan. “I know of some, and have heard of many,
who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away,” he wrote after the
production. “I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one
sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind
man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned,
and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.”
Some years ago the Calgary
Philharmonic Opera dealt with the Tristan chord in an extraordinary way. The
philharmonic didn’t play the opera, obviously. Rather, it played a composition
that began with the opera’s overture and travelled through its orchestral
finale. This was an extraordinary way to hear the Tristan Chord, which
gradually went from unresolved to full resolution.
Note: I used many sources for this book besides Bryan Magee’s
extraordinary book. A useful online source is available here.
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