essay reassessment with reference to the score, illustrate how wagners opera tristan und isolde...

8/11/2019 Essay Reassessment With Reference to the Score, Illustrate How Wagners Opera Tristan Und Isolde Exemplifies Hi

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With reference to the score, illustrate how Wagners opera Tristan und Isolde

(1854-9) exemplifies his revolutionary approach to the theatre

40082480

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of

Edinburgh Napier University for

MUS08104

Language and Structures of Music 2.2

Essay Reassessment

The Ian Tomlin

Academy of Music

July 2014


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With reference to the score, illustrate how Wagners opera Tristan und Isolde

(1854-9) exemplifies his revolutionary approach to the theatre?

Richard Wagner believed the function of music was to serve the ends of dramatic

expression.1[Hanning, 2002, pg. 439]. The majority of his works were operatic, thus

Wagner succeeded in influencing much of the theatrical world. The compositional

techniques he used to communicate with his audiences, as well as many of his

philosophical ideas infiltrated composers mindsetsfor generations to come.

Although Wagner was influenced by German romantic opera and Italian and Frenchopera early on in his career, he made some significant changes to the entire

approach to composition. He looked at his operas as total works, where every

aspect of the opera would work toward the aspired final product to increase the

dramatic effect. He composed a collection of essays during the 1840s that clearly

demarcated his views that art must be set apart from profit-making to keep

accessible the expression of free spirit of humanity; how opera must be a complete

art form, comprising fine art, dance, music, drama, and poetry; and how drama will

be reached through specific musical techniques, such as leitmotif2[Millington, 2004].

The opening chord to the Prelude to Act I of Wagners Tristan und Isolde, often

labelled the Tristan Chord is one of the most famous cho rds in the history of music,

its resolution changing traditional music analysis indefinitely. In the opera, the

chords lack of predictable tonal resolution serves to prolong the yearning and

longing suffered by the eponymous doomed lovers. Written as an enharmonically

diminished seventh chord, the Tristan Chord does not function or resolve in

concurrence with part-writing rules of Western tradition. This chord was in fact the

chord that pushed other composers to test the tonal idiom to its extreme limits and

abandon tonality completely for experimentation with serialism and the musical

avant-garde.


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3[www.utexas.edu/courses/Tristan/index.html Tristan and Isolde Motive 1]

The idea for the opera came in 1854 from Wagners readings of philosopher Arthur

Schopenhauer. Wagner wished to mirror Schopenhauers philosophy of natural

tragedy and ecstasy as one in his works, and described Tristan and Isolde as being

about inner-self and self-discovery. It was being composed at the same time as the

Ring cycle, which was later abandoned because of his being consumed by the

forming of Tristan und Isolde.Richard Strauss said that the opera was closing the

door on romanticism but it was more simultaneously both a culminating and a

forward-looking work4[Chafe, 2005, pg. 14]. Ultimately, It pioneered the

development of opera to the musical ideology of the twentieth century, but without

discarding the principles of romanticism. Rather, I would argue, he bracketed them

within a perspective that was no longer exclusively the romantic one.

A compound of tonality and atonality, as is its famous signal harmony, the Tristan

chord, the works tonality relates to the romantic view, while the atonality is nearer to

the Schopenhauerian pessimistic insight. Both interact throughout as icons of the

illusion or vision of adoration and life versus the awful truth that lies beneath5[Chafe,

2005, pg. 21] an excellent example of Wagners revolutionary philosophy that drama

should be created through musical techniques.

The harmony of Tristan to a great extent, if taken out of context, would not display a

firm tonal foundation. Combinations of harmony often come from the melodic leaning

of the threads of polyphony, directed by semitone, while the enharmonic avoidance

of conventional diatonic progressions and the extensive use of the augmented triad

and diminished seventh threaten tonal stability further.

In the Prelude to the opera, for example, the overall tonal progression is from A

minor to C minor, and the music strongly suggests C as a secondary area of


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harmonic emphasis within the prevailing A minor tonality. The initial A minor

progression is immediately followed by a dominant preparation of C major, though

this is part of a much larger structural motion which culminates with the cadence at

bar 17[shown in fig. 1]; there are similar preparations of C towards the end of the

prelude. More dramatically, the dominant preparation of A minor at bar 63[shown infig. 2] shifts abruptly to a dominant preparation of C major (bar 71)[shown in fig. 3]

before returning to an interrupted cadence in A minor. Wagner frequently used

deceptive cadences throughout the prelude and the opera: the tonality is often

established by the dominant rather than the tonic harmony. These basic structural

considerations are neatly linked in the prelude by the Tristan chord.

[fig. 1b.16-17] [fig. 2b.62-63] [fig. 3b.70-71]


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The expressive quality of both chromatic and dissonant elements has been

immeasurably heightened6[Samson, 1977, pg. 4-6] through accenting and

prolonging unessential harmony notes. There is still, however, a close relationship

with traditional and conventional harmony. Hereafter, music was composed withincreasing chromaticism, more interesting chords, extraordinary harmonies and

remarkable cadences- largely due to Wagner and the influence of Tristan und Isolde.

The huge impact of Wagner on the music of his successors is one of the axioms of

the history of music. If books have been written about his revolution of music for the

theatre; about his dramatic visual; the leitmotif principle and the symphonic

conception of dramatic narration, hardly less has been written about his individualrevolution of chromatic harmony and its influence on the expressions of composers

as dissimilar as Verdi, Debussy, or many different nationalists from Eastern Europe

to the United States. The most essential parts of Wagners chromaticism and the

projection of continuous modulation through different points of tonal stability

indefinitely in time, could be the most clearly perceived and understood when

correlated with dramatic narration and development, whether in Strausss operas or

in Bruckners symphonies.

We can identify the Tristan chord generally as a nonspecific half-diminished seventh

chord, or be as specific as identifying its characteristic spacing, register or pitch-

classes. However, in whatever context, for over a century the Tristan chord, and the

Wagnerian ideas premiered in the rest of Tristan and Isolde, have been emblematic:

they never fall short of proclaiming to the listener that Wagner and Tristan und Isolde

has been there before.


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Reference List

Hanning, Barbara. Concise History of Western Music, 2ndEdition. W. W. Norton &

Co. New York: 2002, pg. 439

2 Millington, Barry: Wagner, Richard. Grove Music Onlineed. L. Macy (Accessed

[May 2, 2004]),

3

[www.utexas.edu/courses/Tristan/index.html Tristan and Isolde Motive 1]

4Chafe, Eric. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagners

Tristan and Isolde, Oxford University Press, 2005, p1-28

5Chafe, Eric. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagners

Tristan and Isolde, Oxford University Press, 2005, p1-28

6Samson, Jim, Music in Transistion: A study of expansion and atonality, 1900-1920,

Ch. 1 The Nineteenth Century Background, pg. 4-6, 1977


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Bibliography

Chafe, Eric. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagners Tristan

and Isolde, Oxford University Press, 2005, p1-28

Hanning, Barbara. Concise History of Western Music, 2ndEdition. W. W. Norton &

Co. New York: 2002, pg. 439

Millington, Barry: Wagner, Richard.Grove Music Online

ed. L. Macy (Accessed[May 2, 2004]),

Samson, Jim, Music in Transistion: A study of expansion and atonality, 1900-1920,

Ch. 1 The Nineteenth Century Background, pg. 4-6, 1977

[www.utexas.edu/courses/Tristan/index.html Tristan and Isolde Motive 1]

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