A Study On Harmony In The Opera "Tristan And Isolde"

Richard-Wagner was a world-renowned German composer and musician of late Romanticism in the nineteenth century. His creation had distinctive characteristics, and especially the harmony of his opera "Tristan and Isolde" that was reformed in the ideas of music drama seemed to be particularly important:the music of the whole opera had extremely artistic characteristics based on his horizontal "no-final melody", mainly supported by vertically non-stop and continuous harmony and in the mode of cadence evasion, delay, faintness and vagueness.Selecting the opera "Tristan and Isolde" as the main object, this paper is altogether divided into four parts,i.e., the birth of "Tristan and Isolde", the cadence evasion, the cadence delay and the melody expansion formed by the cadence faintness and vagueness. It analyzes the internal harmony to summarize the characteristics of the integral harmony, i.e., to see how the music of the whole opera strives to pursue the "no end" of harmony in the process of developing the traditional harmony to its acme starting from thecadence and in the modes of mutual integration of harmony and the changes of tonality thinking.