This demo is now aviable at the As Kvlt as Hell Records.
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Tristan und Isolde is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Straßburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 and premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting. Wagner referred to the work not as an opera, but called it "eine Handlung" (literally a drama or a plot), which was the equivalent of the term used by the Spanish playwright Calderón for his dramas.
The notes of the Tristan chord are not unusual; they could be re-spelled to form a conventional half-diminished seventh chord. What distinguishes the chord is its unusual relationship to the implied key of its surroundings. When Tristan und Isolde was first heard in 1865, the chord was considered innovative, disorienting, and daring. Musicians of the twentieth century often identify the chord as a starting point for the modernist disintegration of tonality.
According to J. Chailley , "it is rooted in a simple dominant chord of A minor [E major], which includes two appoggiaturas resolved in the normal way".