The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization by Howard Goodall

Author:Howard Goodall [Goodall, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781480447622
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

It has been credited, the humble Tristan chord, with signalling the end of four hundred years of order in Western harmony and the beginning of modernity – a bold claim, to say the least, and even bolder considering Liszt had been using this chord, and many others of its ilk, for years before Wagner wrote it into the opening phrase of Tristan und Isolde some time between 1857 and 1859.

Notwithstanding Wagner’s debt to Liszt, it would be churlish not to stress that the greatest composers have always tended to synthesise the styles and currents of their time, that they were not necessarily innovators, and Wagner’s music in any case has far better tunes than Liszt’s. Tristan und Isolde is an out-and-out masterpiece, with sweeping, yearning themes, deserving of its place in music’s pantheon, whatever it may or may not have innovated. As a musical experience it is luxuriant and overwhelming, and has the two greatest build-ups to a climax in all music (only one of which is consummated, as it were; the first veers off at the last moment). What it is not, though, is the one thing that Wagner most wanted to bring to the world: musical drama. Clara Wieck Schumann saw the opera in Munich in 1875 and her summary says it all: ‘During the entire Second Act the two of them sleep and sing; through the entire last act – for fully forty minutes – Tristan dies. They call that dramatic!!!’ (Like Verdi’s La Traviata, twelve years earlier, Tristan is about a doomed love affair, death and destiny. Of course.)

The relative inertia of Tristan’s plot, with so little action taking place over nearly six hours in the theatre, makes it closer in form to an extended symphonic poem with singing than even Wagner’s other operas. It is the most extreme example in his catalogue of another striking hallmark of his style. It is not Italian.

For a good part of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth century, the populist, light, tuneful Italian style of opera was what most people went to an opera house for. Italian style in opera was completely dominant. So much so that even an Austrian composer like Mozart should really be seen, stylistically, as a German-speaking Italian. All but one of his famous operas is literally Italian, from The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte to La Clemenza di Tito and Don Giovanni. (The exception is his German ‘singing play’, The Magic Flute.) The other centre of operatic style in the nineteenth century was Paris, though French opera at that time was essentially a grander version of Italian opera. Wagner did not fit either of these moulds. Indeed, one of the reasons musicians from all over Europe flocked to hear Wagner’s music dramas at Bayreuth in the 1870s was because they were so radically out of step with the mainstream. Notwithstanding his debt to Liszt, Wagner’s sound was, to them, incredibly daring and original. The essence of that originality was to take

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