102: Wagner (who was terrible, in case you didn't know), Tristan, and French Sixths

 Let’s turn our attention to one chord—yes, one literal chord, not one class: F-B-D#-A. The original context that made this “The Chord” that everyone talks about—the reason this opera is as famous as it is—is its inclusion in Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.” The whole opera lasts just shy of four hours, but it’s most remembered for this one chord. Here it is, in red, from the Wikipedia article about the opera, during which a hugely significant amount of time is spent just talking about this single chord. It almost cannot be overstated how important this chord was to the development of music in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

Some have said—again, referring to quotes in the Wikipedia article—that the power of this one chord in the late 1800s was the same as the transformative power of Beethoven 3 or 9 in the first part of the 1800s; I don’t think that’s hyperbole in the slightest. Deplorable as his personal politics were (he was violently antisemitic and the favorite composer of Hitler), it’s impossible to deny the impact Wagner had on music and the legacy he has left which has come through the Tristan Chord.

 

There has been much debate about what the Tristan Chord even is—how to name it, how to describe it, how to give it function. I think this chord is what we call a “French sixth.” For the rest of today’s article, I’ll get into why I think so, and what makes a chord a French sixth in the first place. Tomorrow and the day after, then, we’ll look at two more “nationalities” of sixths, the German and the Italian.

You must always begin to build a sixth—whatever its “nationality” from its root. What constitutes a French sixth is a chord built on the notes which are that root, that root plus a minor third, that root plus a tritone, and that root plus an augmented sixth. (Of course—the French, Italian, and German are all augmented sixth chord, so they all feature an augmented sixth against the bass.) 

There is considerable debate about whether it is or isn’t a French sixth—some say it’s rooted at B, not the F that the French sixth hypothesis presumes, and this gives rise to several alternative theories; others say D. But the prevailing general consensus is the French sixth hypothesis, which I am inclined to support because of the way the chord behaves coming out of itself. As you see in the picture above, the Tristan chord behaves as all French sixths do: the bass falls by a half step, the tenor frustrates down a minor third, the alto voice remains constant, and the soprano voice rises by a whole step. If you apply these transformations to the Tristan chord, you get the correct resolution of a French sixth—that is, into a dominant seventh—in the key in which Tristan and Isolde is written.

Part of what makes this chord so enduring is that it’s the first one of the piece, the first time harmony is ever heard in the opera. (Until this point, the cellos have been playing the first few notes of the opera alone, before the winds join in and create the iconic chord.) The other significant factor is the allure that no one knows for sure what is intended, and everyone just must make their best guesses at what Wagner meant with this.

Again, I despise Wagner politically. But even so, I do absolutely acknowledge the enormous impact that this one chord had on the harmonic landscape that followed it and its creator. Music today, having passed through Chopin, Ravel, Debussy, and so many others, is what it is today because those giants got intellectual permission for their harmonic adventures from the mystique around the Tristan Chord. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the chord’s importance in history, while maintaining absolute clarity—again I’ll say it a third time—about how horrible a person Richard Wagner was. (Several orchestras, most notably the Israel Philharmonic, have, since the late 1930s, put a moratorium on ever performing his music in their halls, in protest of the hateful ideologies he espoused and which were associated with him long after his death.) Antisemitism, anti-immigrant sentiments, homophobia, and so many of the values shared by Wagner and the Nazis,  of course, has no place whatsoever in any of our hearts and ought to be condemned with the utmost force in public discourse. If Hitler thought of someone as his musical hero (and we know he said as much), that person was, categorically, unequivocally, a terrible, despicable human being whose music was coopted by a regime whose goal was no less than the total extermination of a people, and which was used for propagandistic ends by the perpetrators of the greatest crime in living memory. 

   


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