"The German composer Richard Strauss wrote that Wagner’s music “would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous dischords.” Interestingly, Strauss later recanted this early assessment and became an ardent admirer of Wagner’s music."

Magazine
Winter/Spring 2002

The "Tristan chord"


by Judd Danby

The Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde opens with a brief three-note melodic passage in the cellos, followed by the following much-celebrated chord, the so-called “Tristan chord,” in the cellos and woodwinds:

The opera, and this one chord in particular, have generated a remarkable amount of celebration, commentary, and controversy among musicians over the past century and a half.

Monsieur Scudo of Paris’ L’Anneé Musicale dismissed the Tristan chord as a “monstrous piling of discordant sounds,” while the noted critic and aesthetician Eduard Hanslick condemned Wagner’s melodic writing as incoherent and “musically undermining.” Tchaikovsky wrote that Wagner’s music left us “tormented and exhausted,” and the German composer Richard Strauss wrote that Wagner’s music “would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous dischords.” Interestingly, Strauss later recanted this early assessment and became an ardent admirer of Wagner’s music.

Other musicians and musical thinkers reached Strauss’ belated appreciation more quickly. They sensed immediately an important new form of musical utterance when they heard Tristan and Isolde. Many have since studied the work with awe and reverence, and have celebrated it for its forward-looking creation and use of musical “language.” The focus of much of this study and celebration has been the strange new sound-world brought into being at the very beginning of the work through the Tristan chord.

It may seem strange that a single chord could generate such controversy and interest, but the Tristan chord does represent a watershed moment in musical history.

As the very first chord in the work, it would have surprised and perhaps even confused listeners in Wagner’s day. It contains nothing but dissonant intervals above the bass, and is particularly unstable. What is even more remarkable is that from that opening chord, the upper voice moves up, creating another dissonant chord, followed by yet two more dissonant chords in the following measure. Nowhere in this passage do we hear a stable, referential chord which would establish the key for us. Thus in purely musical terms we are thrown into a confused and tormented state mirroring that of the ill-fated lovers Tristan and Isolde.

In this opening musical gesture, twice repeated, Wagner distorted the traditional, universal harmonic practices of earlier Western music and made them submit to the musical/dramatic demands of the moment. He set the stage for the non-universal (or contextual) harmony, which has informed so much of the history of Western music since Wagner. It is for this reason perhaps above all others that Tristan and Isolde incited such acrimony from some, and such celebration from others.

Judd Danby is a composer, jazz musician, and assistant professor of music at Wabash. These remarks are excerpted from his C&T lecture.

Return to the table of contents