This video is a deep dive into Wagner’s Tristan chord, the most famous and enigmatic harmonic event in history.
Matthew King explains the chord from a number of perspectives, and helps to put this microcosm of Wagner’s genius into a broader dramatic and historical context, with some discussion of Wagner’s development, and a quick survey of subsequent literary and musical events that occurred under the spell of Tristan und Isolde.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his younger years was a close friend of Wagner’s, wrote that, for him, “Tristan and Isolde is the real opus metaphysicum of all art… insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death. . . it is overpowering in its simple grandeur”. In 1868 he wrote about the effect of the Prelude: “I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is a-twitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture”. Long after his split with Wagner, he still admired Tristan und Isolde: “Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan — I have sought in vain, in every art.”
A really interesting sociopolitical look at Tristan und Isolde as object-subject dichotomy and then dissecting the famous chord. Tristan Chord is the Root of Modern Music Gang.
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Also, the chord in its context with the prelude and Liebestrod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4bqRlNSQQE
The central idea of classical music to that point was that there is a core note, the tonic, and it sounds good when you resolve that tonic by playing around it and returning to it. Wagner introduces the tonic in the prelude as his Tristan Chord. It’s representing a love that can’t be fulfilled because he’s the knight of the king she’s pledged to wed. Wagner spends four hours teasing the audience with an infuriating series of notes that never register as complete music. It’s the first real modernist use of dissonance in music I can think of, using an unpleasant sound for a bigger reward.
One of my most consistent sources of musical frisson
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
