Responses and Influences
The chord and the figure surrounding it is well enough known to have been parodied and quoted by a number of later musicians. Berg also quotes it in his Lyric Suite for string quartet, deriving the figure from his twelve-tone compositional material. Arthur Sullivan uses the chord (re-spelling it as a chord of F seventh with a flattened fifth) during a recitative in his operetta H.M.S. Pinafore, and Debussy includes the chord in a setting of the phrase 'je suis triste' in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussy also jokily quotes the opening bars of Wagner's opera several times in "Golliwogg's Cakewalk" from his piano suite Children's Corner. Benjamin Britten slyly invokes it at the moment in Albert Herring when Sid and Nancy spike Albert's lemonade and then again when he drinks it. More recently, American composer and humorist Peter Schickele crafted a tango around this same figure, a chamber work for four bassoons entitled Last Tango in Bayreuth.
The Brazilian conductor and composer Flavio Chamis wrote Tristan Blues, a composition based on the Tristan chord. The work, for harmonica and piano was recorded on the CD "Especiaria", released in Brazil by the Biscoito Fino label. Flavio Chamis found an intriguing relation between the Tristan chord/resolution and the blues scale - much used in jazz - in which all have practically the same notes.
In 1993, the opening theme was used in the film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould in the scene on Lake Simcoe as performed by the NBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini (recorded 1952). Gould had been a fan of Wagner and adapted some of his music to piano, one of Gould's rare recordings from the Romantic Period.
Read more about this topic: Tristan Chord
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