Wagner’s chord was nothing new. Beethoven had lobbed one into his 18th piano sonata more than half a century earlier, and Mozart’s Dissonance quartet predated that. We call it the “Tristan Chord”, though. It comes in the Prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which Auckland Philharmonia presents in concert form on August 10, and it changed music.
It doesn’t sound it now, but in 1859 that chord – F, B, D#, G# – was a bit of a racket. Before Wagner, the dissonance resolved into a consonance, a musical ahhh. Wagner’s dissonance led to another dissonance, then did it again, and again, and again.
This is tantric opera, an itch left unscratched for the length of the work until finally, with (spoiler!) Isolde’s death, the chord resolves. It’s not a coincidence that the heroine’s last words are “utmost rapture”. But Tristan is a long opera; it takes almost four hours to achieve release.
“And yet,” says Auckland Philharmonia music director Giordano Bellincampi, who conducts the concert, “it feels like it’s over in a second. As a performer, it’s a transcendental experience. From the moment you start rehearsing till the performance is done, you live in a completely different world.”
The conductor might float in a reverie, but it’s a physical stretch for singers and players; the strings get a proper workout. Bellincampi’s challenges lie elsewhere.
“In a way, it’s not difficult to conduct. It’s complex to interpret and keep the big arc of the music, but technically it is quite straightforward. [Instead] it’s about the mental energy of keeping the structure so that the tension and release are given at the right moment.”
The chord is not Wagner’s only compositional trick, and Tristan stands as an important work in Wagner’s development.
“There are so many nuances and meanings, both to text and subtext,” says Bellincampi. “The text has what they are saying, but you also have to express what they are thinking, which is often related to what the orchestra is playing underneath, so it’s multilayered. [Tristan] is kind of a modern psychological drama which predicts what will come later.”
Shame its composer was such an awful human – there are scholarly papers dedicated to whether Wagner had borderline personality disorder. Can we separate the man from the music? Should we?
“I think we should,” says Bellincampi. “That goes two ways. If super-nice people write mediocre music, it doesn’t make the music better. In general, I think the personality is secondary. As long as we don’t go into personality cult. It’s not like we want to put artists on a pedestal, we just need to look at the art.” l
Auckland Philharmonia, Tristan und Isolde. Auckland Town Hall, Saturday August 10, 4pm.
