Prelude from Tristan und Isolde

Program Note:

It has often been said that music is the most temporal art form. This does not deny that other arts have a temporal component. Paintings and sculptures, whose contents are essentially visible all at once, still must be interpreted as a succession of impressions. Music, even more than literature and poetry, forces its temporality on the listener, especially in live performance. Not able to skip ahead, not able to ruminate over one part of the work for an indefinite amount of time, we must adhere to the flow of music or be left behind. In this way, music controls us and determines the pace of aesthetic reflection.
All of this goes to say that the decision of what material will begin a work is incredibly important. We, as listeners, all begin at the beginning of each piece. Because of that simple truth, composers have spent considerable effort and invented a range of opening strategies: from the serene to the violent, from emerging ex nihilo to comic misdirection. Tonight’s concert brings together some of the very best beginnings in music history.

The Prélude to Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is a remarkable beginning to a massive, psychologically powerful three-hour music drama. But even more, the very first notes of the Prélude rank among the most auspicious beginnings ever written. Three isolated notes (A, F, E) suggest various tonal centers; indeterminacy contributes much to their impact. They lead to a chord, novel in its day, that has been the subject of intense book-length analyses. The so-called Tristan chord contains four tones (F, B, D-sharp, G-sharp) that nominally spell an augmented sixth chord (German variety, if one allows a brief substitution of the topmost G-sharp for an expected A). In other words, this poignant sonority is a ramped-up, chromatic augmented-sixth chord. Wagner relies on chromaticism to create maximally intense, upwardly striving tonal implications that can be consistently withheld until key moments of breakthrough.
In its day, this pattern of excessive stimulation without release bordered on the indecent. Wagner composes waves of material in search of resolution. Once this series of repetitions and tentative probings are done, the Prélude bursts forth in a radiant phrase presaging the opera’s climactic scene. Not surprisingly, the premise of Tristan und Isolde touched a nerve for Wagner. The plot centers on the forbidden love that emerges between Tristan, nephew of Cornwall’s King Mark, and Isolde, an Irish princess and “spoil of war” now betrothed to Mark. Wagner himself worked at Tristan between 1857 in 1859 as he tried to pick up the pieces of his life following an illicit affair with the wife of his benefactor. Life imitates art imitates life . . . .

(c) Jason Stell