Keeping track of how appreciation and understanding of Tristan und Isolde has evolved, in live performance, recording and scholarly studies, is a formidable task. One path through the labyrinth is opened up by Wagner’s poetic text, in which the title characters express their disorientation, their alienation from communal norms. Stage directors and musicological commentators alike have found ways of dramatising the particular tensions between conformity and nonconformity that encapsulate the drama’s representations of love and death, in settings that balance magical interventions (the love potion) against the worldly intrusions of King Marke and his entourage. Surveying and critiquing accounts of the role that Tristan und Isolde has played at the heart of fundamental changes to musical form and style since the 1860s reinforces the value of arguing that the continued presence of modernist qualities in contemporary music – works by Schoenberg, Nono, Henze, Andriessen and Anderson are instanced - is a direct consequence of Wagner’s materials and methods, particularly in Tristan.

This chapter approaches Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde from the viewpoint of its temporal dramaturgy. It highlights the opera’s specificity by interpreting it as a tragedy of hearing: a tragedy in which the main characters, Tristan and Isolde, stuck in their melancholy, are bound to the discursive and plot-oriented forms of musical-operatic time, while the redemption they desire – aesthetically presented by Wagner through acoustic means – points musically beyond the opera’s temporal structures. These connections can be traced on the structural level and that of musical dramaturgy and musical form but also on the level of the characters’ psychology.

In the analysis of late tonal music, analytical approaches which attempt to understand tonal function on the one hand, and harmonic transformation viewed through a neo-Riemannian lens on the other, often stand in an uneasy relation. Through analysis of Act 1, Scene 3 of Götterdämmerung, this chapter attempts to bring neo-Riemannian theory closer to its origin in Hugo Riemann’s functional theory, and so to point the way towards a new theoretical frame for understanding the tonal function of chromatic music. We urge this return to Riemann because it enables twenty-first-century listeners and theorists to appreciate the complex power of tonality as a system which, like the great socio-economic, legal, religious and scientific systems that have endured into the twenty-first century, has an indefatigable ability to subsume anything that might seem to pose a challenge to it back into itself, as a source of further power.

This chapter demonstrates that despite Wagner’s claims that traditional operatic compositional schemes limited the composer’s ability to project drama successfully, he relied on these procedures in the operas from Die Feen through Lohengrin, and continued to use them thereafter in the mature music dramas. Analysis of Wagner’s first six operas demonstrates that Wagner utilised the formal conventions of Italian opera, including clearly articulated cabalettas, far more frequently than has previously been noted. The conventional Italian form accounts for one-third to one-half of musical numbers in these works. The chapter includes close analysis of four numbers (from Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin) and tabular presentation of all of Wagner’s appropriations of this formal convention in the first part of his career. The chapter further identifies vestiges and transformations of la solita forma in the later music dramas, concluding with speculation on why these formal devices have eluded critical commentary until now.

Revisiting selected passages from Siegfried and Parsifal, this chapter argues that the archaic surface of Wagner’s late counterpoint – the result of contrary motion, constructed symmetries, stepwise motion and rhythmic uniformity – relies less on historical styles than on a musical ‘laboratory situation’. Through a combination of nineteenth-century counterpoint pedagogy and historical and contemporary models (including some of Wagner’s own earlier works) with aspects of memory studies and Adorno’s ideas on late style, the chapter shows how a composed image of ‘counterpoint’ creates acoustic and analytical conditions that draw attention to the constructive elements of Wagner’s late style.