The Tristan Progression In More Depth
Digging Deeper Into The Tristan Progression…
In my previous blog, I suggested that the musical secret in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is not so much the celebrated Tristan chord, but rather the Tristan progression—a progression of four chords. Those four chords are the actual love potion of the opera. They tantalize. They promise resolution with increasing intensity,. And they continually deny that promise.
Another equally powerful aspect of the Tristan Progression that its shape encapsulates the opera’s narrative of star-crossed lovers. Specifically, as the top voice (melody) moves upwards by four half steps, the bottom voice (bass), twice as slowly, moves downwards by half step. In other words, simultaneously as the harmony yearns for resolution, the voices are pulling (being pulled?) apart. The more Tristan and Isolde desire each other, the farther apart they feel.
This progression not only concentrates/embeds the love story of eternal desire and separation. It also embraces the deeper psychological/philosophical narrative that permeates Tristan und Isolde: that human suffering comes from our binary view of opposites, a representation that the Will imposes on the world. The push-pull, upwards-downwards of the progression translates the libretto’s twists between day and night, water and earth, light and dark, love and death. In the second act, the lovers proclaim only night can illuminate their love. In the third act, only death can express the full life-eternity of their love.
Wagner’s Tristan progression is an incredibly potent device and it is his “weapon-of-choice” for every important idea and moment in the opera. The progression continually reappears and evolves in dozens of variants. Many of these variants explore the idea of opposites, so central to the entire libretto. The Healing Motif is the Tristan Progression inverted— outer voices converge instead of diverging. The upper melody goes backwards at moments of anguish and pain. It repeats rapidly and frantically to express exuberance and ecstasy The progression represents love and transcendence when the bass voice goes upwards instead of down. Only at the end of four + hours does Wagner reveal a true resolution of the progression, first an actual dominant to tonic progression that defines a home key (B major), and finally, a plagal cadence (“Amen”) where those diverging outer voices reach to a final sublime resting place of transcendence.
Listen to some audio examples of the Tristan Progression and its evolution:
The bass voice reverses direction and goes upwards by a half step and the melody falls down by step to a delicious F major chord. Yet even this progression is a deceptive cadence!
We hear this inverse variant whenever the lovers talk about the time Isolde healed Tristan’s wounds. Instead of diverging, the outer voices successive converge by half step.
In the third act, when Tristan is himself wavering between life and death, the progression discovers new ways to resolve.
The opening of the third act transforms the progression into a tragic plagal cadence in F minor. You’ll hear where Tchaikovsky got his idea for the Pathetique Symphony :)
The melody is similar to the Love Realization, but the bass, at long last, is a standard dominant-tonic progression that establishes a key—B majorl
This is a long suspension of the Bliss Motive that occurs at the climax of the Liebestod—the strongest cadence in the opera, dominant to tonic
The concluding measures of the opera take the Tristan Progression to its ultimate goal—a plagal cadence (iv-I) to B major. As the harmony moves in its at-long-last satisfying “Amen” cadence, the melody climbs stepwise to its final destination of D#, traveling from the four notes—G#-A-A#-B—to C# (the goal of bliss)—and finally to D#, a final arrival at transcendence. Incidentally, the note D# harks back to the beginning of the opera, when the cellos begin with a melody that descends to D# at the precise moment we first hear the Tristan chord.
There are so many unique musical devices in this opera—the continuous drama that seamlessly merges/blurs recitatives and arias, the deep exploration of woodwind colors, the novel solos of the bass clarinet and English horn, a love scene that extends for almost 200 pages of score, and many more! But the most unique is the obsessional centrality of this one chord progression as musical fuel for the entire drama.
Below, I’ve created a “draught” of the Tristan progression together with several variants into a 3 minute soundscape. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and drink with your ears. Let the chords seep into you. As the potion intoxicates, you may find yourself irresistibly seeking to embark on the entire Tristan und Isolde journey.
Compilation of the Tristan Progression and some of its variants