‘Tristan’ chord

(Ger. Tristanakkord).

The first chord in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, f–b–d'–g', or an enharmonic spelling of it. The name has often been used for any four-note chord made up of a minor 3rd, a diminished 5th and a minor 7th, reckoned upward from the lowest note; a generic term sometimes used for this chord is Half-diminished seventh chord. Apart from its dramatic importance, as a single vertical sonority which carries all the qualities of a leitmotif, the ‘Tristan’ chord has been viewed (by Kurth and others) as the basis of a ‘crisis’ in Romantic harmony. For although it can be explained in ordinary functional harmony as an augmented (French) 6th (f–b–d'–a') with the g' as a long appoggiatura to the a', or alternatively as an added 6th chord in first inversion with chromatic alterations (e.g. d–f–a + b, inverted to f–a–b–d' with lowered 3rd and raised 6th = f–a–b–d'), it seems to have its own harmonic significance in this work and later operas of Wagner (especially Parsifal). It played an important role in the last developments of chromatic harmony in the late 19th century and the early 20th, and seems to have been crucial to the limitation of the applicability of functional theory to harmonic analysis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Kurth: Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Berne, 1920, 2/1923/R)

A. Lorenz: Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner, ii (Berlin, 1926/R)

M. Vogel: Der Tristan-Akkord und die Krise der modernen Harmonie-Lehre (Düsseldorf, 1962)

M.H. Schmid: ‘Der Tristanakkord’, Musik als Abbild: Studien zum Werk von Weber, Schumann und Wagner (Tutzing, 1981), 263–75

C. Hill: ‘That Wagner-Tristan Chord’, MR, xlv (1984), 7–10