A Love Potion That Works: Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde

Despite all the high talk about Wagner’s preoccupation with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of Will and Representation, or more precisely, because of it, at its heart, Tristan und Isolde is an opera about a spell and a love potion.

Wagner’s remarkable and enduring achievement was to discover a musical translation for a love potion that actually works! His harmonic progressions affect and infect anyone who hears them. In Tristan und Isolde, the orchestra literally delivers an addictive drug into ears of its audience. For the next four hours and long after the opera concludes, that drug continues to work its way into the deepest emotional reservoirs of our psyches.

What causes a drug to be addictive? From Google search:
“Most drugs affect the brain's reward circuit by flooding it with the chemical messenger dopamine. Surges of dopamine in the reward circuit cause the reinforcement of pleasurable but unhealthy activities, leading people to repeat the behavior again and again.”

Wagner figured out how to translate this process to music by “corrupting” a common tonal chord progression—ii-V-I. The reward circuit in this progression is the expectation for the chords to fall into each other: the ii to the V, and then the V to the I. Centuries of tonal music condition this expectation in us. The Tristan progression intensifies this standard “reward” by injecting a high dose of chromatic voice leading that creates ever more intense dissonant chords. These dissonant chords create an even stronger desire for resolution. But when the progression finally seems to achieve its goal, Wagner withholds final resolution! Instead, the progression starts over but starting on a higher chord to lend even more urgency. Again, he withholds the resolution. This process continues essentially for four hours!

The Tristan progression is just four chords. But the remarkable chromatic voice leading of those chords (each voice of the chord moving either up or down by a half step) creates exotic, dissonant 7th chords. That dissonance begins with the very first chord of the piece— the actual Tristan chord—a half-diminished 7th chord that immediately expands outward to another dissonance (a French augmented sixth chord). The French augmented sixth chord is even more intense than the Tristan chord. It seems to resolve in a third chord. But we’re duped! That third chord is just a different French augmented 6th, equally dissonant! Yet it feels like a quasi-resolution. The top voice pushes up a half step while the bottom voice falls down a half step. But we’re left with even more hunger for a real resolution. The fourth chord holds that promise. It is a most familiar chord—the dominant seventh, the chord that fuels the motion to resolve in all classical music. We now fully expect a final tonic chord to follow. Only Wagner leaves out that part. The dissonance is left hanging in the air. The “hunger” of these deceptions leads to continual sequences repeating the same behavior: an enriched and altered ii chord leads to an enriched and altered dominant chord that itself seeks another altered ii. The I chord—the chord of resolution—is always in sight, but we never get it!

This addiction cycle of false resolutions fuels the entire opera. In the transition to the finale of his 5th symphony, Beethoven famously builds incredible anticipation for resolution by suspending a dominant harmony for a full minute before resolving gloriously to C major. Wagner uses this same technique of suspension, but extends it for four hours! Only when Isolde herself expires at the end of the aptly titled love-death (Liebestod). does the Tristan progression arrive at a true and final harmonic resolution.

The Tristan progression appears and reappears like endless waves in the ocean. Each wave begets another wave. As Shakespeare wrote immortally about Cleopatra: “she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies.” (by the way, this is the Schopenhauer idea of Will creating suffering with endless desire).

Wagner creates this feeling of insatiable desire, a desperate need for increasingly stronger drug hits of these chord progressions. They really do produce the same obsessive and irresistible romantic and sexual frustration of an intoxicating love affair. We come to crave hearing this progression and its variations repeatedly, experiencing the same emotions Tristan and Isolde sing out on the stage.

Brahms commented on Tristan
” If I look at that in the morning, I am cross for the rest of the day.”

I suspect he was referring precisely to this frustration.

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(Click to hear examples)