How one chord changed the world: "Tristan" at 150

WFMT ^ | 6/10/2015

[Borges]

If you’re a music lover, you may have heard of the so-called “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Audiences were stunned to hear this infamous harmony when the opera premiered on June 10, 1865 in Munich, Germany. As Tristan turns 150, let’s take a look at what makes the Tristan chord so unique.

The “Vorspiel,” or Prelude, to Tristan begins with with a “dissonant” chord. The terms “consonance” and “dissonance,” “music” and “noise” are largely subjective. Now, in an era where our ears can enjoy everything from Chopin to Chick Corea, what our modern ears hear as “consonant” or musical may have been considered radically dissonant to the ears of people generals past. To hear the chord, click here.

[Norm Lenhart]

I like classical. A lot really. But It’s intimidating as hell for me to grasp it without feeling like a newb idiot. I could probably recite the lyrics of every Iron Maiden song from memory if given a couple min to think about them but just the post you made and the title of the work alone freezes me.

Which makes no since as I fancy myself a hobbyist musician. But there it is.

[BenLurkin]

Oh, I love opera. Speaking of Mozart....

Voi Che Sapete
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEqAXXD98hQ

or

“Ach, ich fühl’s”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aFZ8xz-3gg

und so weiter....

[chajin]

For that matter, what about the chords in the first movement of Mendelssohn's Organ Sonata #2 in c minor (here)? They are just as dissonant, even if the overall effect is tonal. The usual schtick is that Wagner was a dissonance-loving pagan and Mendelssohn was a stick-in-the-mid Christian, but Mendelssohn's Christianity didn't block him from hearing and producing tension in the midst of a world that was meant to be ordered.

[jocon307]

you should listen to the morning guy on WQXR, it’s in NY but you could listen on your computer www.wqxr.org

He’s very good, very upbeat and enthusiastic and he’ll usually tell some interesting thing about whatever piece he’s playing. He doesn’t talk down to the audience at all and I’m not saying you’ll become an expert but you’ll pick up a little info here and there and maybe just feel more comfortable.

This morning he did a funny bit, told the whole story of Tristan and Isolde in 3 1/2 minutes. At one point he said: you say this plot point makes no sense, well neither does Game of Thrones and nobody’s complaining about that!

I don’t even watch game of thrones or listen to opera but I got a chuckle.

[Borges]

Ever try Mozart operas or stuff like Donizetti? Very different from what you’re probably thinking of as opera.

[Disambiguator]

This is the correct link. Your link goes to some Hillary thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWLp7lBomW8

[Borges]

Webern seemed to sense that from the start. His stuff is very short...sometimes only 7 seconds or so. Schoenberg was still stuck in the Great Works of the Masters mode and tried writing atonal operas and such.

[chajin]

Tonality lived on in popular music. The problem is that high classical music at the end of the 19th century had become so heavily saturated with chromaticism that it had almost nowhere to go but away from tonality.

But we had already had one bout with chromaticism in the late 1500s with Vincentino, Gesualdo, and early Monteverdi, and the reaction of the Camerata was instead to go back to the basics, and experiment, not with ever-more-dissonant harmonies, but with other aspects of music, such as new instruments (e.g., the violin and the reinvented oboe) and new genres, particularly opera. There was a sense, I think, of producing music-as-it-is, which came from the combined Reformation and Counter-Reformation view of the world as being ordered by God in a way that was discernable by humanity--it's no accident, e.g., that one of the Camerata was Galileo's father.

The difference between the 1600 shift and the 1900 shift was the difference in underlying ideology: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had instilled a sense of God's plan for the world in 1600, while Romanticism and Hegelian dialectic had instilled a sense of the by-chance meaningless nature of the world in 1900. Except for the Emperor-has-to-be-wearing-clothes crowd, however, audiences weren't interested in dissonance for the sake of dissonance, and instead wanted music that sounded like music, meaning it had some sense of modality that emulated the mathematical ratios of music, even if they didn't know anything about the mathematical ratios of music.

[Borges]

Tonality is a natural phenomenon. It was not invented but discovered. It comes from the series of overtones that emit when any note is sounded. In 1973, Leonard Bernstein gave a great lecture series at Harvard where he claimed that tonality was natural. It was a a signal of the shift taking place.

[chajin]

Webern seemed to sense that from the start. His stuff is very short...sometimes only 7 seconds or so.

Good point.

When I teach about Webern in my classes, I tell the story, well-known among Japanese tea ceremony people, about Rikyu and the morning glories. Rikyu, in his garden, had a hedge of morning glories. One time, when they were in full bloom, Hideyoshi, the ruler of Japan at the time, invited himself to a morning tea ceremony, so that he could see the morning glories in full bloom. When he got to the garden, however, all the flowers had been clipped, and were no longer there. Hideyoshi was furious--but when he entered the tea room, in the alcove display was a vase with one morning glory.

The moral of the story is that beauty is not found in the abundance of things--that the beauty of everything can be experienced in the beauty of one thing. There is even a proverb for this in tea ceremony, 一期一会 ichigo ichie, "one time, one encounter"--meaning that all of one's life can be experienced in one moment of time, in one encounter. (期 go is more akin to the Greek kairos, a specific moment of time, as opposed to 時 ji, which is more akin to the Greek khronos, or the chrono(s)-logical passing of time.)

I think that Webern's pieces are a bit like the morning glory in the alcove. Instead of overwhelming the listener with all the timbres of the orchestra coming into the ear at once, like the grove of morning glories, Webern forces the listener to hear the timbre of each individual note, to hear the beauty in each tone of each instrument, knowing that all the beauty of all the tones of all the instruments is wrapped up in each tone of each instrument.

[FroggyTheGremlim]

"And I love all kinds of music. Except opera...when the singing starts."

Well, you might go here for an explanation of some Wagner works ...

Anna Russell - the Ring

[Ronaldus Magnus]

Thank you for posting this article. I've generally disliked classically themed music written since the late 19th century, but until reading this article I never knew when precisely this transition occurred or why. After this point composers started using "dramatic" dissonant chords like tired cliches and the music of this period started sounding like fingernails on slate chalkboards. Here it is, the exact moment in history classical music turned ugly!

I think that music changed at this time in history the same way that art changed. Up to this point the aesthetics of art and music had both been oriented toward encapsulating beauty. Beauty being defined by St. Aquinas as the properties of integrity, due proportion, and clarity as God intended. A simpler definition was offered by St. Pope John Paul the Great as "the good made visible". Some people may like to go to museums to see portraits of rotting corpses painted with real feces or go to concerts to hear violins scraped to sound like dying rabbits, but not me.

After the mid-nineteenth century the working definition of art finally fell victim to the godless rationalism of the Atheistic Enlightenment. Art was reduced to a mere vehicle for emotion and ultimately power. As illustrated by the use of Wagner's works as the soundtrack to the Third Reich, this perversion of art eventually leads to its use for evil.

[Borges]

The association of Wagner with the Nazis is tenuous. The theme running through his operas was redemption through self negation and love - which does not gibe with the Nazi ideal at all. And ugly is subjective. Listen to late Beethoven for music that still stings ears. Chopin’s music sounded ugly early on.

[Borges]

Here are some contemporary reviews of Tristan...

“Not to mince words, it is the glorification of sensual pleasure, tricked out with every titillating device, it is unremitting materialism, according to which human beings have no higher destiny than, after living the life of turtle doves, ‘to vanish in sweet odours, like a breath’. In the service of this end, music has been enslaved to the word; the most ideal of the Muses has been made to grind the colours for indecent paintings... (Wagner) makes sensuality itself the true subject of his drama.... We think that the stage presentation of the poem Tristan und Isolde amounts to an act of indecency. Wagner does not show us the life of heroes of Nordic sagas which would edify and strengthen the spirit of his German audiences. What he does present is the ruination of the life of heroes through sensuality”

And another from England...

“We cannot refrain from making a protest against the worship of animal passion which is so striking a feature in the late works of Wagner. We grant there is nothing so repulsive in Tristan as in Die Walküre, but the system is the same. The passion is unholy in itself and its representation is impure, and for those reasons we rejoice in believing that such works will not become popular. If they did we are certain their tendency would be mischievous, and there is, therefore, some cause for congratulation in the fact that Wagner’s music, in spite of all its wondrous skill and power, repels a greater number than it fascinates”

[JmyBryan]

Ping

[semaj]

A deliberate utilization of a dis-chord. It works in evoking a certain reaction in the listener, which is what the artist intended.

[chajin]

After the mid-nineteenth century the working definition of art finally fell victim to the godless rationalism of the Atheistic Enlightenment.

There was another aspect relating to the visual arts of painting and sculpture, though, which if anything had more of an effect on this: photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painters and sculptors had a monopoly on visual reproduction: if you wanted to see some thing, place, or person and you weren't there to see it/him/her, your only recourse was to hire a painter or sculptor. So there was a quid pro quo between artists and the society--artists would get to paint, and society would get the visuals it wanted--and most of the time the bargain was kept on both sides.

When photography was invented, however, everything changed. Suddenly there was competition, and the competition was faster and cheaper than anything a painter or sculptor could produce. In the 1850s, painters discern the two value-added elements in paintings that weren't in photographs, color and motion, and began painting scenes in realistic color with people and objects in motion, because it was the only way they could overcome the competition. By the 1870s, photographers were able to take snapshots and capture objects in motion, so the only element left for painters was color--and voila, painters started emphasizing color at the expense of realism, in Impressionism. Then photographers start shooting motion pictures, and colorizing their photographs, and that was the end of painters being able to compete with photographers on a level playing field. The only options they had left was to quit painting and become photographers or motion picture directors, or paint paintings that didn't look like anything realistic--or paint scenes that photographers could not capture, such as how the Surrealists painted the subconscious mind.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I learned by listening to a local classical radio station in my college years. They announced the piece before playing...and after. I then went to a record store (Yes! Vinyl!) and bought some Bach string quartets and some Mozart string quartets. Then I listened, found what I liked and listened some more. Eventually I bought a collection of CDs at a yard sale that had the complete symphonies of Beethoven and three symphonies by Mozart...24th, 25th and 29th. Those are some great music. I just kept listening...and reading.

Like you, I can recite all the lyrics my favorite rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd (and play a few) but always kept some classical handy. The vinyl albums are the best because they include lots of information to read on the music and its history. It's like anything else....repetition.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Now...Mozart doesn’t make me cringe...because the music is so good. “Die Fledermaus” ain’t so bad.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Yeah...I tried the Ring Cycle one time years ago. Long...I know...and it was OK. But...not my cup of tea really.