Prelude and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde

After Tristan und Isolde music was never the same again. It has been claimed that Wagner changed the course of musical history with just one chord, the one where woodwind join the cellos in the second bar of the Prelude to the opera. In fact, other composers– ­including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven – had used that same chord before him and had changed nothing much. The significance of the so-called “Tristan chord” is not the dissonance itself but Wagner’s use of it. Instead of resolving it immediately, as he would have been expected to do, he prolongs the tension by moving freely from one unresolved harmony to another. The erotic yearning of the two lovers expressed by that chord is sustained by the denial of    its definitive resolution until the closing bars of the opera several hours later.

After a passionate development of the melodic material presented in the opening bars, the Prelude ends very quietly with two pizzicato notes on cellos and basses. Although, in the opera, much has happened in the meantime,    most prominently the death of Tristan, in this version the Liebestod (literally, love-death) follows immediately. Contemplating Tristan’s body and recalling music from their amorous duet in the previous act, Isolde sings of a love so transcendental that it inspires her to will herself to join Tristan in death. Even without the vocal part, which is often doubled by instruments in the orchestra, the ecstasy of Isolde’s transfiguration is as intensely felt as the finality of the resolution of the “Tristan chord” in the closing bars.

Wagner himself conducted the Prelude and Liebestod in this purely orchestral version before the much-delayed first performance of the opera in Munich in 1865.

After Tristan und Isolde music was never the same again. It has been claimed that Wagner changed the course of musical history with just one chord, the one where woodwind join the cellos in the second bar of the Prelude to the opera. In fact, other composers – ­including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven – had used that same chord before him and had changed nothing much. The significance of the so-called “Tristan chord” is not the dissonance itself but Wagner’s use of it. Instead of resolving it immediately, as he would have been expected to do, he prolongs the tension by moving freely from one unresolved harmony to another.

By no means all of Wagner’s contemporaries appreciated what he was doing. For the more progressive among them, however, it was a revelation of what can be achieved with an inspired use of dissonance. In Tristan und Isolde the expression of the erotic yearning of the two lovers is introduced in the opening bars of the Prelude and is sustained, by the denial of the definitive resolution of that first chord, until the closing bars of the opera several hours later. The Prelude also has the function, as it so passionately develops the melody presented by cellos after the harmonically speculative introduction, of indicating that the yearning is there before the action begins. Tristan has killed Isolde’s betrothed and he is now taking her, against her will, from Ireland to Cornwall as a bride for his uncle King Mark. Even so, the love potion which they unwittingly take before they land serves not so much an artificial stimulation of passion as a revelation of deep-seated emotions they had been unaware of.

The Prelude ends very quietly with two pizzicato notes on cellos and basses. Although, in the opera, much has happened in the meantime – most prominently the death of Tristan at the hand of one of King Mark’s henchmen – in this version the “Liebestod” (literally, love-death) follows immediately. Contemplating Tristan’s body and recalling music from their amorous duet in the previous act, Isolde sings of a love so transcendental that it inspires her to will herself to join Tristan in death. Even without the vocal part, which is often doubled by instruments in the orchestra, the ecstasy of Isolde’s transfiguration is as intensely felt as the finality of the resolution of the “Tristan chord” in the closing bars.

Wagner himself conducted the Prelude and “Liebestod” in this version before the much-delayed first performance of the opera in Munich in 1865.