music

This video is a deep dive into Wagner’s Tristan chord, the most famous and enigmatic harmonic event in history.

Matthew King explains the chord from a number of perspectives, and helps to put this microcosm of Wagner’s genius into a broader dramatic and historical context, with some discussion of Wagner’s development, and a quick survey of subsequent literary and musical events that occurred under the spell of Tristan und Isolde.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his younger years was a close friend of Wagner’s, wrote that, for him, "Tristan and Isolde is the real opus metaphysicum of all art... insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death. . . it is overpowering in its simple grandeur". In 1868 he wrote about the effect of the Prelude: "I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is a-twitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture". Long after his split with Wagner, he still admired Tristan und Isolde: "Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan — I have sought in vain, in every art."

A really interesting sociopolitical look at Tristan und Isolde as object-subject dichotomy and then dissecting the famous chord. Tristan Chord is the Root of Modern Music Gang.