VOICE‐LEADING ENERGETICS IN WAGNER'S ‘TRISTAN IDIOM’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent theories of musical energetics have typically given tonality – often a powerfully synthetic, prolongational monotonality – a decisive role in accounting for sensations of musical tension, force and attraction. Though well‐suited to music of the common practice, these models fare less well in certain repertoires of the later nineteenth century, where tonal centres are often fleeting and traditional syntax is weakened or even annulled—as is often the case in Wagner's late music, where dissonant tertian tetrachords are combined in new and sometimes confounding ways. This study offers a new perspective on tonal tension and relaxation in such passages – which I call Wagner's ‘Tristan idiom’ – by focusing on voice‐leading contour. Taking a broad cue from Ernst Kurth, it asks what might be gained by bracketing questions of chord identity and structure to focus instead on the voice leading that produces and interconnects them. Using a tool called kinetic displacement metrics (KDMs), it assigns emergent psychokinetic tension values to chord pairs based on the directions that their voices move, both in pitch‐ and pitch‐class space. Of special interest throughout is a phenomenon I call ‘directional variance’, where opposing contours in a single passage (between abstract and real voice leading, for example, or between the harmonic layer and the melodic one) seem to have psychodramatic relevance for the stage action. After a brief exposition of the theory and its uses (and limitations), with brief examples from all of Wagner's post‐Lohengrinoperas, it then moves to a series of longer vignettes on excerpts fromTristan und Isolde: the opening of the Act I Prelude, the closing of the same, and the entirety of the Act III Prelude.

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