Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

TRISTAN SHOUT!

1859. There was such a lot going on, musically, and yet it is a year that is largely going to be remembered for more or less one chord. OK, so I'm pushing it a bit, but still, there is something in it. It is the big chord in 1859, yes, but it's also the big chord of the next 250 years. People never forgot it. Maybe they never will. Certainly, music professors are still talking about it in 2004. It is, possibly, the MOST FAMOUS CHORD IN HISTORY - if you don't count 'The Lost' one or the one that held up Adolf Hitler's father's trousers. And, oddly enough, this chord has a name. It's called 'Tristan'.

Tristan, the chord with a name, is the latest little baby of Ric 'I'm hard' Wagner. We've already had Ring Cycle Parts 3 and 4 - Siegfried and Gotterdammerung - and so, by way of a little light relief, he starts to busy himself on a little love story. Of course, Wagner being Wagner, he comes up with one that will take its place in history. To the illustrious list of lovers that include Orfeo and Euridice, Romeo and Juliet, and Mills and Boon, is added the eternal pairing of… Tristan and Isolde. At the time, Wagner was having one of his many extra-marital affairs, this one with the impressively named Mathilde Wesendonck. Some say she inspired him to make the character of Isolde, whereas other say it was the other way round - writing Isolde made him yearn for an affair with her. Who knows? What is certain is that Tristan and Isolde was to go down as one of the most important works of the entire nineteenth century, not least for its harmony.

Harmony, yes. Especially in that chord, 'Tristan', or, to give it its posh full name, 'The Half-Diminished Seventh'. That chord was just part of the whole, well, shifting sort of 'gear changing' stuff that Wagner was doing with the harmony in this opera, T amp;I. He pushes the 'key' thing to its limit, so that you can't really tell, musically speaking, where the original key is at all. Or indeed, where the current key is.

If die word 'key' means nothing to you - as I am frequently told it means nothing to me, usually after I've sung something - well, try this instead. Imagine you can hear home - your own home, imagine it has a sound. Much like it has a smell. Yes? Come on, get it in your heads, what does your home 'sound' like? Right? Is it there? Well, that's it's 'key'. Now, imagine: most composers, up until T amp;I, had stayed 'around die home', as it were, in their pieces of music. Sometimes they wandered off, but never too far, or if they did go too far, they always knew how to get back. And they always did get back. Home, that is. And, more importantiy, if they did wander off, they could always see home - or hear it - and maybe even left themselves a good old ball of wool as a trail. Well, if all that is the case, then in Tristan and Isolde, Wagner has basically walked way out of the garden, miles away from home, and has taken an amazingly complicated route round town - like a cabbie on low money day. You can't see home at all, now. Not at all. In fact, you are unsure if you ever did know where home was in the first place.

Does that help? No, didn't think so. Still. Anyway, that's what Wagner was doing. He was pushing the whole 'key' or 'home' thing to its limits, and calling it 'chromaticism', which is, strictly speaking, the word for it.

And he was doing it in 1859. Now, though, of course, it's soapbox time, and the subject is the rather convoluted: 'Going to See Live Music, Especially Stuff you Might not Normally Consider'. I know I keep mentioning this - and why not? - but Tristan and Isolde is a perfect example of something you have to go to hear live to appreciate fully. Someone once said, 'Delius is all the same intoxication, but Wagner has a hundred different ways of making you drunk' - and nowhere is this more apt than in Tampersandl. Sorry, T amp;I. It is the music of utter speechlessnesslessness. Music that can make you unaware of the time. So that famous quote about Wagner I shared with you earlier - well, ignore that completely. That was clearly said by someone who didn't know shinola from anything. Wagner operas, if done well, are exactly the opposite. They make you hate the interval with its crush bar and its wine glasses resting on one of those gadgets for perching wine glasses on the side of plates so that you can still have one hand left over to do the actions to the word 'Daaaaaaarling!' Wagner operas done well are Lost Worlds where you are lost for words, where you can go to forget other inferior music. In fact, come to think of it, talking of being lost for words, it's said that Wagner hated the saxophone. Absolutely loathed it. He said it sounded like the word lReckankreuzungsklangkewerkzeuЈfe\ a lost word itself, which translates as… well, something untranslatable, really - it's a series of German puns, all in one word. Reckankreuzungsklangkewerkzeuge. Absolutely. Write it down and bring it out at parties. Will clear a room in seconds.

Now let me build a bridge between Wagner's 1859 and Verdi's 1862.