Tristan und Isolde at the Margins of Music-Analytical Discourse: A Dialogic Perspective

Abstract

Whether or not the Prelude to Richard Wagner's 1859 music drama Tristan und Isolde is the most analyzed piece in the history of Western music, owing to its ongoing canonical status, it behooves us to consider how it has affected the field of music analysis over the past 150 years. More than any other piece, Wagner's Prelude is able to expose the many conflicts that arise between analytical approaches: while it can demonstrate the limits of one particular approach vis-à-vis another, it may also reveal new potentialities that divergent analyses offer when seen from an intertextual point of view. As a test case, this article will position three contemporaneous analyses of the opening measures of the Prelude against one another: Horst Scharschuch's post-Riemannian harmonic analysis and Jacques Chailley's style-historical analysis, both from 1963, and William Mitchell's Schenkerian analysis of 1967. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of "dialogism" and "heteroglossia," I will trace a broader historiographical and intertextual network surrounding the history of analyzing Tristan, with the goal of refocusing our analytical priorities around this work and penetrating the continuities and discontinuities between competing analyses. In this way, the article aims at opening up a further dialogic space in music analysis, both in our historical considerations and in the way we approach analysis as an intertext—that is, by traversing the fissures in the reified verities of a "unified" analysis and the multiple interpretative transpositions underlying our deciphering of analytical texts. It will conclude by offering yet another interpretation of Wagner's famous chord.