# The Tristan Chord



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Should analysis reflect what we hear and experience, or is it a stand-alone explanation unto itself? And, are other interpretations possible?

From WIK: [The Tristan chord's significance is in its move away from traditional tonal harmony, and even toward atonality. With this chord, Wagner actually provoked the sound or structure of musical harmony to become more predominant than its function, a notion that was soon explored by Debussy and others. In the words of Robert Erickson, "The Tristan chord is, among other things, an identifiable sound, an entity beyond its functional qualities in a tonal organization"]

This sounds like Wagner has bypassed the notion of function in a tonal sense. It's a half-diminished chord, F-G#-B-D#, or F-Ab-Cb-Eb.

If it's an altered subdominant on ii in A minor, it's a suspension B-D#-F-G#, the suspension being G# in the key of A.

It could also be a IV of A minor; or a V of V (B as root resolves to E).

Even Wagner's approved analyst, Mayrberger, is torn: he calls it a ii in A minor, but says the chord is a Zwitterakkord (an ambiguous, hybrid, or possibly bisexual or androgynous, chord), whose F is controlled by the key of A minor, and D♯ by the key of E major. This sounds like Schoenberg's "vagrant" chord idea.

Then there are "non-functional" analyses, which say this is all contrapuntal. The fact that 12-tone music relied on counterpoint is worth noting.

All of this shows how the Tristan chord is ambiguous functionally, and could be seen to be in different keys; it resists functional analysis, and turns various functional solutions into "arguments" for what key it's in. These diminished and half-diminished structures lie in the cracks of tonality.

It depends on which argument you want to believe, hopefully with subjective experience being the guide. There is no objective answer.

Personally, since tonal analysis is not completely able to analyze it, I tend to see the chord as a free-floating structure in a neo-Riemannian sense. This makes it a clear foreshadower of non-tonal ways of constructing music, not necessarily 12-tone, but simply harmonic structures and symmetries which result from free relations between notes; harmonic structures which are essentially chromatic in nature, not tonal.

The politics are just a distraction. 
Chailley: "I have never been able to understand how the preposterous idea that Tristan could be made the prototype of an atonality grounded in destruction of all tension could possibly have gained credence. This was an idea that was disseminated under the (hardly disinterested) authority of Schoenberg, to the point where Alban Berg could cite the Tristan Chord in the Lyric Suite, as a kind of homage to a precursor of atonality. This curious conception could not have been made except as the consequence of a destruction of normal analytical reflexes leading to an artificial isolation of an aggregate in part made up of foreign notes, and to consider it-an abstraction out of context-as an organic whole. After this, it becomes easy to convince naive readers that such an aggregation escapes classification in terms of harmony textbooks."

Yes, it is possible to analyze it in terms of textbooks, but not definitively, since by nature it's not a "definitive structure" in functional terms. So, I tend to go with the idea that it is "an aggregate in part made up of foreign notes" and view it "as an organic whole" or in neo-Riemannian terms.


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