... Weingartner - but in their attempts to imitate they entirely lost sight of his goals, and have sunk into obscurity. Others, who composed in their own idiom with integrity and aspects of Wagner, are far more his heirs. Tristan is traditionally Wagner's seminal work1. Its harmony was years ahead of its time, whatever that means, and tonality could never be the same again. The chord, prepared in bar 1 and stated in bar 2 is not resolved in bar 3. It has no simple resolution. The work is concerned with the extreme emotions, frequently emotional anguish, of two people, emotions which do not subside until the end, when one is dead and the other collapsed. The true resolution comes at the end. Such wide-scale use of delayed-resolution was unparalled, although its cause almost common. Throughout the opera, the tonic key is established primarily by implication rather than statement. This and the ...

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