About the Book

The book shows how Wagner, the Romantic musician of Classical rigour, who knew like Bach, Mozart and Beethoven the emotional power of musical form, successfully combines an essential dramatic continuity with an equally essential musical structure.
      The opera prelude in which the initial key of A minor is invariably and immediately succeeded by C major, introduces the basic musical material, intensifies in a development-recapitulation to a powerful, orgasmic climax.
       In the first scene, which is framed by the song of an unseen sailor introducing musical material fashioned from the basic motives and specific to Act I, we meet a furious, frustrated Isolde screaming in C minor for death to the whole ship's company, and a caring, concerned Brangäne trying to calm her in E flat.
       Scene 2 is mainly a mock minuet in which an over polite Tristan makes fatuous excuses to Brangäne for refusing to meet Isolde.
       In scene 3 Isolde at first tells (to the prelude's thus named "glance" melody) of her and Tristan's declared love in the past and of his subsequent betrayal. Later to the return of the prelude's opening music (which occurs at significant moments in all three acts) a discussion of the magic draughts Brangäne has brought with her, in particular the love and death draughts to their respective themes, leads to -
       Scene 4, landfall and the imminent arrival of the ship in Cornwall, forcing Tristan to confront Isolde in the final -
       Scene 5. Here the third basic motive, hitherto the less frequently occurring resolver of the tensions set by the other two, now comes to the fore in its corresponding remedial dramatic role as: for Isolde (with whole tones) revenge and death to them both; for Tristan (semitonal) his own death with honour. But it is not the anticipated poison that is taken, but the love-draught, prompting a recapitulation of the whole of the prelude music, some of it more than once.

Act I, like the opera prelude has a dual tonality of A minor and C major and these two keys are employed mainly structurally.

The music of the prelude and first scene of Act II, concerned with Isolde's impatience for Tristan's arrival, spends about 130 bars on the dominant pedal of B flat. The resolution on the tonic duly appears with Tristan, but only momentarily, for the white-hot exuberant intensity forces the music upwards, so that the required strong tonic affirmation is in C. B flat after so long would have been an anticlimax (cf. Beethoven's eroica symphony's recapitulation). Thereafter the association of keys with dramatic concepts (already present in Act I) becomes more prevalent; A flat with the Night, A with Frau Minne, the love goddess etc. Tonal promiscuity is associated with treachery (The Tagesprach), the multi-stated 4-note "day" motive being made again and again to start in one key and finish in another. At the opera's centre its prelude's opening music, given an A major happy ending, leads to the formal Night Song, the Night representing Schopenhauer's World as Will (see excerpt below).

In Act III Wagner has put together a drama in which a feverish, delirious, deranged Tristan, longing unbearably for Isolde and then death, ranges in his mind through all that has happened. Here the Classical development technique can have its head, and Wagner uniquely has the musical genius to do it justice. He excels even himself, increasing the already unprecedented potency of musical expression to an unbelievable degree - twice. After building to some powerful climaxes Tristan's first delirium ends when his joyous belief that Isolde has arrived is dashed by the reappearance of the on-stage shepherd's mournful tune, musically and dramatically the starter of this immense first scene and dramatically already a harbinger of disappointment in Tristan's past life as he tells us in his second delirium, which has the additional dimension of the incessant interweaving of this melody, becoming at last an obsession, creating its own appropriate harmony and eliciting from Wagner a contrapuntal skill at times worthy of Bach.

The 700 pages of the book contain over 500 music examples in piano score which transcribes nearly three quarters of the work and more of the orchestral detail than in any published score. In addition there are 16 summarising diagrams, showing the musical  and musico-dramatic structure of each scene both thematic and tonal.

The first chapter deals with the difference between a basic motive, which is unifying, pervasive and purely musical, and a leitmotive, which has a dramatic association. The second analyses the opera prelude in some detail, citing in addition some possible thematic sources. The following chapters are each devoted to a scene or part of a longer scene with an additional chapter on each act as a whole. A final chapter on the opera as a whole considers:-

1: the overall structure in relation to Liszt and the symphonic poem and to such ternary element as is evinced by thematic restatement;
2: the opera's tonality, structural, associative, dual and progressive;
3: the harmony;
4: the orchestration;
5: the musico-dramatic technique;
6: the music of each character;
7: the position of Tristan in Wagner's oeuvre;
8: the effect on other composers and music in general.

Specimen Pages