ELEISON COMMENTS CXX (24 October, 2009): “TRISTAN” CHORD
To an objective structure of the human soul corresponds an objective structure of music. Both can be disrupted by men’s discordant choices, but subjective free-will cannot change these structures, nor their correspondence to one another. Is it not common sense that as soft music is piped into supermarkets to incline women to buy, so rousing music is played in the army to incline men to march? Marketing and fighting are activities too real for the fantasies of liberalism to be allowed to interfere.
Yet liberals do fantasise. Hence surely the current production of “Tristan and Isolde” at Covent Garden, striving to “de-construct” Wagner’s masterpiece, as described in “Eleison Comments” last week. However, a two-page article in the programme notes for the same production brilliantly illustrates the objective correspondence between kinds of music and kinds of human reaction. I wish I could quote it all, but do not be scared of the technical details, readers, because these are exactly what prove the point.
The article is taken from the book “Vorhang Auf!” (Curtain Up), by a living German conductor, Ingo Metzmacher. It centers around the famous “Tristan Chord”, which first appears in the third bar of the Prelude. The chord consists of a tritone (or augmented 4th), F and B below Middle C, and above it a 4th, D sharp and G sharp above Middle C. In this chord, he says, is a tremendous internal tension striving for resolution, but each of the four times that the chord appears in the first 14 bars of the Prelude, it only resolves into the dominant 7th, itself a chord unresolved and calling for resolution. And when at last a stable F Major chord is reached in bar 18, it is immediately destabilized by the bass-note rising a semi-tone half a bar later, and so on.
Semi-tones are in fact the key, says Metzmacher, to the new harmonic system which Wagner invented in “Tristan” to portray the boundless yearning of romantic love. The semi-tones “work like a virus – no sound is safe from them, and no note can be certain that it will not be shifted up or down”. The chords being thus continually breached, repaired and immediately breached again, constitute an unrelenting succession of states of unresolved tension, which corresponds perfectly in music to the lovers’ longing for each other, “growing immeasurably as a result of the impossibility of its ever finding fulfilment”.
But Metzmacher points out the price to be paid: music based on the system of keys, a structured mixture of semi-tones with full tones, “draws its vital strength from an ability to give us the sense of being at home in a particular key”. On the contrary with the Tristan system, “we can never be certain that any secure feeling is not really a deception”. Thus the Tristan chord “marks a turning-point in the history not only of music but of all humankind”. Metzmacher would well understand the old Chinese proverb : “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake”.
Maybe as “Tristan” subverted tonal music, so this Covent Garden producer tried to subvert “Tristan”. Where then does the de-construction of life and music stop? Non-Wagnerian reply: In true celebrations of the Mass! With the Masonic New Mass true Catholics will never feel at home. Kyrie eleison.