Strauss' Earth-shattering Dissonance
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ย. 2024
- It really isn't a hyperbole. This chord in the final scene of Strauss' Salome Op.54 has been called "the most sickening chord in all opera". One of my teachers constantly recalls the moment he'd heard this chord live and it had literally shocked him out of his sleep. I myself recently went to watch Salome in Paris and I can testify to the incredibly horrifying effect this chord alone can produce.
Of course, that's probably what Strauss had wanted - a cacophonic representation of lust, revulsion, horror and doom all at once. Salome kisses Jochanaan's severed head and the 2-hour long opera reaches its greatest climax. Essentially the bottom harmony of the chord could be replaced with the V7 chord and the melody would make sense in that context, the genius is combining that same melody with another chord that also has an attraction strong enough towards the I chord - the Italian 6 in this case. A and G both resolve outwards to the G sharp in the resolution and the C sharp is a common tone.
A few leitmotifs are used in this final scene: the "kiss" motif which is played whenever Salome expresses her desire to kiss Jochanaan, the "desire" motif which is a rather romantic descent of four notes and Salome's leitmotif itself which is played by the clarinet at the very beginning of the opera - a light, graceful flourish.
Recording (Stratas, Vienna Philharmonic): • Strauss Salome final s...
Salomé was very controversial. A journalist asked Strauss if he had any regrets. Strauss: "Why? I financed my villa in Garmisch from this scandal."
My My, How very German practical he was. Hold your head high and show up your detractors! Bravo!
So Strauss sits down, and he thinks, how can I capture the grotesque, lust of an evil woman, and make sure this music sounds nothing like the beautiful chords of Rosenkavalier. I know, I will write an utterly gorgeous melody and chordal progression, but I'll throw in an appalling atonal clash amongst the lush yearning chords. He was truly a genius. No one has equalled his mastery of the romantic art, even with the advent of so many film composers of quality, none come remotely close to his ability to 'invent' the most incredible image painting with music. We are so lucky to have experienced his genius.
Except Rosenkavalier was still 5 years in the future!
@@celloguy And Salome isn't evil. Especially when one thinks about what she has likely suffered at the hands of Herod before the opera begins...
her vibrato gets SO HUGE at 1 minute in holy shitt
Strauss is woefully under appreciated. Not just his chords but also his key changes are at times incredibly magical. Mahler, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff were also, in my opinion, able to pack an otherworldly amount of emotion into single chords/key changes
Absolutely, his chord progressions are otherworldly, really take you by surprise in the best way possible
Rach doesnt belong
@@ToxicTurtleIsMad listen to the first version of his second sonata, the chord(s) that came to mind for me was at the climax of the last movement. Probably the most emotive piano climax that I’ve ever heard
@@ToxicTurtleIsMad in addition, the rest of the sonata is filled with many less intense but equally emotional chords
The godfather of that is Schubert.
ENDING OF SALOME!!! one of my favorite moments in opera. this is suuuuch a cool analysis!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I love how you just wrote ???, which just made perfect sense for me
I don't think I could've expressed it better
V9(-5 b9 add13)/bII with some dissonant voicing. Somehow I forgot this was Strauss and expected an Ivesian nightmare of a chord, so I thank Strauss for this relatively tame, easy to understand chord.
@@itamarbar9580 although I think contrapuntal investigation is the only serious answer, this is much more akin to a common tone augmented 6th chord. Read Harmony and Voice leading by aldwell and schacter, it will better prepare you for passages like this. (i know that it is not written as an aug 6 but as a 7th, however I'm sure you can see that it is best understood as an F double sharp, just like the errant Bb close to the end of chopins E minor prelude)
@@oibruv3889 huh. Interesting ideas! Regarding it as an Fx really does take things into a different perspective! I am learning harmony but by the rules of Sadai. I'll take another look and come back.
@@oibruv3889 mid-thought: Ok, It6 makes sense in the roots, but how do you categorize the right hand into the chord?
strauss is still so underrated. effortlessly harmonically inventive.
He was definitely not during his lifetime. His association with Nazism might have something to do with him being pushed into oblivion nowadays. He was such a revolutionary composer
Studied Salome in my music history sequence. It is certainly one of the operas of all time
Orchestration simply peaked with this man.
So truee
1:23 is like a car crash in musical form, its so nasty but you cant stop listening to it
Love the "???," sometimes I think one can get too wrapped up into naming every single chord vertically. Sometimes a chord is more for a motion of voices purpose, or just a "wtf" purpose. ??? sums it up perfectly!
I agree! In some cases, Roman numerals can only get you so far...
I liken it to trying to understand a film purely by looking at still pictures from the film. Some harmonies are meant to be passed through and don't make all that much sense when frozen in time.
I was a teenager when I first saw _Salome_ in West Berlin on June 12, 1966. (I keep all my programs.) I had already seen _the Marriage of Figaro_ , _Cosi fan Tutte_ , _The Flying Dutchman_ , _Fidelio_ , _Der Freischütz_ at the Deutsche Oper and I had no idea what I was getting into with this. The whole opera is gut wrenching, much more than the episode in the Bible, which reads almost like a factual news report. I had never heard the music before. I mean, I was 14 from a working-class American family, and the only opera I had ever seen before I went to Berlin was probably _Amahl and the Night Visitors_ on NBC TV. (The moment of the miracle in that opera still makes me cry.)
Here you are at this sickening, grotesque, inhuman moment and that chord from hell happens instead of the other possibilities you might be expecting. Forget about _The Rite of Spring_ that Paris was up in arms about in 1913. This was the equivalent of an earthquake or volcano. For me, it was, like, OMG, is this whole building going to collapse on us because of that chord?
Always good to be reminded of the emotional power of this moment.
Who were in the cast when you saw it in 1966?
Strauss' tone poems and operas are, in my opinion, the greatest achievements of late romanticism.
Richard Strauss was the greatest Opera Composer of the 20th ....his Music is breathtaking ....what a Genius. The Mozart of the 20th Century. .thx for posting
Even years before I stumbled across this little clip, I chose that particular chord as the sexiest dissonance ever.
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring chord doesn't seem so bad after this...
Not really. To me it's more about context. This chord resolved and only exist for a moment.
@@choiyatlam2552 exactly, in fact in the case of stravinsky it's almost as if we're desensitised to the dissonance after hearing the chord being pounded over and over again whereas in Strauss, the rarity in this sort of dissonance gives it such an arresting, almost stupefying quality in its tonal context.
What about the last chord in "Volare" - big-band version?
which one though?
i brace myself whenever I see an incoming tower of accidentals of different kinds
I saw it in Paris on the 12 this month. I knew the score but listening to all that live was mindblowing. Genious work
That moment is brutal!! Interesting how the clash between A and A# is also realized horizontally in the preceding trill.
Which part are you referring to exactly?
I mean the preceding trill in the upper woodwinds, which is itself composed of A and A#, and which lasts from the beginning of the video until the big cadential I64. If I remember correctly, the trill starts right as the king "screams" those same two notes (using vibrato) and Salome starts singing the "I have kissed your mouth Jochanan" part right?
By which I mean, the king hits a very intense high A which with the wide vibrato is very similar to the trill that starts at that precise moment.
In a way the trill kinda represents the "reverb" or echo of the king's scream.
Yes indeed! I like your interpretation about the echo. A small precision about the trill - if I'm not wrong they're actually trilling A and Ab(G#) at the beginning. And the trill is one of my favourite things about this excerpt, creating such a small mysterious dissonance at first but evolving into a huge sonic mass at the end; practically all the woodwinds are trilling at the big cadential 64 section.
Richard Strauss is the most underrated of the famous composers.
In fact, I don't see he's underrated, is he?
@@JosefFuxhe’s certainly not programmed as much as his other romantic contemporaries are, and he also lived in the rising of modernism and musical serialism which had a lot of the public musically preoccupied. that’s not to say he is completely unknown, but i think you’d find that less people are familiar with his work than most other famous composers.
side note, this probably isn’t helped by the fact that concert string player are predisposed to hate him because of don juan 💀 and as such they think his music is “just hard” and never give him a listen
This is absolutely beautiful. I’ve never heard this piece before.
I personally hear this as just a very grotesque modal mixture iv/IV - I with the final pitch G acting as a leading tone onto the V degree as you also mentioned (It's also an octatonic subset which is a pitch resource elsewhere in the opera and just generally something that started appearing a lot around this time.) I like the iv/IV interpretation better since it accounts for 4 out of 5 pitches in a simple way and is in line with what we'd rhetorically expect at this moment (a plagal reconfirmation of the tonic after having achieved our big V-I) whereas a polytonal Ital6 applied to a tonic makes the moment sound more bewildering than it really is. Indeed, I think a big part of what makes this moment so remark worthy is not how radical it is, but how *close* it is to the Romantic tropes of the era. So close and yet.... not at all. We know exactly what to expect, which is what makes stand out so much what shouldn't be there. It's very much an uncanny valley effect.
In any case, the highly unusual voicing and voice leading into it as a sort of double(/triple?) appoggiatura is what makes it. Cool excerpt.
One of the most transcending and amazing strauss moments
Its like flying then you remember you cannot fly and gravity strauss smash you to the ground, genius work
Ich bin in diese Oper verliebt! Vielen Dank!
If only Oscar Wilde could have lived longer to see this. He would have loved that.
Hey, I just discovered your channel and I love it! I am a poet myself from Spain, beauty demolishes the barrier of different artistic fields in a transcendental way. Thank you for your work.
I'm working on setting some poems from Dionisio Cañas to music at this moment!
That actually gave me goosebumps.
Music that changed the world forever.
For me there are more horrifying dissonances earlier in this scene. For instance at figure 355, but also in many other places. This one is almost comic in its horrifying way. Salome is the much more disturbing and also musically creative score when compared to Elektra. Capriccio and Salome are his two most perfect operas in my opinion, though I absolutely adore many of the others.
I really loved this analysis, as a wind player myself this makes me wish I knew how to compose!
I had the pleasure of hearing it live in Dublin a few months ago.
Like this comment if you were aware that she is kissing a severed head in this scene.
sounds magic 🌞
It’s a minor plagal cadence in C#, chord iv flat 11. The notes are F#, A, C#, (E), G, and B flat. (Written as A# for voice leading reasons.) The 7th is omitted.
There's no way you actually hear the F sharp as the root in the chord, the voicing of the chord is simply too complex for that.
@@skylarlimex Ah, I think I know what it is, I heard it as a C# pedal point. The timps kind of cover up the bass motion because they're constantly hammering out C#s. Looking at the full score, the bass instruments do indeed go to an A for that chord, but I heard a constant C# in the bass. I suppose thinking that it was a tonic pedal primed me to listen for standard cadential patterns, and that's why I heard plagal harmony.
Edit: also the last triplet in that bar is an F# which goes to C#. IV to I is a super strong motion, so I might have subconsciously reinterpreted the chord as having F# as the root.
Stunning
Top music theory channel.
Very kind of you!
Somehow Strauss always manages to include some “hope” among his less happy notes. Death and Transfiguration is the best example I can offer, and I have to add that I am not as familiar with with Salome. Maybe also the opening of 2001…oops I mean Also Sprach Zarathustra. Playing the triads game and well done.
outstanding analysis, excellent chan.
Brilliant
Amigo, revisa la Metamorphosen, por favor!
Me encantería en el futuro!
Wow this is incredible😍
What a coincidence, just learned about this crazy piece in class and before you know it you have a video on it. But ngl the song and that one chord have nightmarish vibes.
Nothing prepares you for that. Not even the warning
But why did you leave out the best part? The part after this where the orchestra part goes absolutely crazy as Salome is killed by the soldiers. That piccolo part is intense!
I have not seen the opera, but i hope that chord plays when Salome starts making out with the dead corpse head of John the Baptist, as an audible cringe from Herod, Herodias, and everyone else in the opera hall but Salome, as the most scandalous thing about this opera is brought to life, before Herod calls it all to end, which it generously does.
It sounds like you have indeed seen the opera! 🤣
The A major 7th chord is, enarmonically (G for F double sharp), the augumented sixth (german) chord in C# scale. The A#, if considered a B flat, is the minor 9th and the F# (added 6th) is the real dissonance here. But, in fact, the whole chord is a double broderie: G#-A-G# & G#-G natural (F double sharp)-G#. It is the context that gives the tremendous effect.
Hmm - you have the grotesque moment described as dominant V in the upper voices over It6 in the lower - but the top voices are outlining the subdominant IV. We're in the key of C# major, and the upper voices are playing F# and A#. Dom would be G#.
Also early in the video you describe a C# major chord as Dom, but it's a tonic I chord, just in 2nd inversion, with the 5th in the bass as a pedal. It only fully moves to a dom chord at the end of Jocha-na-AN
I personally heard the A sharp in the upper voices as an appoggiatura leading into G sharp which is why I analysed it as a dominant but as another comment pointed out, they're indeed just neighbour notes.
The I chord in 2nd inversion actually has the function of the dominant since it does go to the dominant like you've pointed out. The chord is just a huge appoggiatura
the "desire" motif also appears in Brahms 1, 4th movement!
Didn't notice that! Thanks for the share, on hindsight it does sound very brahmsian
This chord is utter depravity, which mirrors the story perfectly.
But the whole opera is so fucked up thematically, that this chord is kind of satisfying. "Bitterer Beigeschmack" we would say in german like bitter additional taste (ref. to the kiss). I would still prefer Elektra over Salome, its even more freaked out, but way more coherent and musically Strauss best work in my opinion. Salome is so disgusting, while Elektras Electicism is electrifying and captivating!
That's interesting, would you say bitterer beigeschmack when eating dark chocolate for example?
@@skylarlimex never ever^^, this idiom doesn't relate to food at all in everyday language, as far as i know, maybe originates from there. It was a pun here. It depends on the situation, expresses ambigious feelings. But "the cacophonic representation of lust, revulsion, horror, doom" sounds definitely more sophisticated! ;)
Beautiful. Who are the singers?
thank you. it's infuriating that the channel doesn't care
Stratas made a video of this role that was shown on US television. If memory serves, it was quite controversial at the time. During the Dance, a part of the female anatomy not commonly revealed to American TV audiences of that more innocent era was briefly exposed on the screen.
What would be the most representative way to play that dissonant chord on a guitar?
Can you upload the ending fugue of Feinberg’s sonata no.3 or Medtner’s sonata minnacciosa? Thanks
At first glance (and hearing), the big dissonance seems to be the bitonal result of divergent voice leading in the bass and treble parts.
Well that chord may be vaguely dissonant. But it’s primarily a clash of F# major and A major 7.
As much as I love Der Rosenkavalier, I have to admit this is painful. I know it was intentional. Strauss always said he could "set a stein of Beer" to music. (perhaps badly translated).
I don't think I want to listen to the entire opera. I mean, I can listen to the Berg Violin Concerto and love its dissonances. But this seems for me to be step too far.
Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
Wheres the ka boom? There was supposed to be an earth shattering ka boom?
At 1:38, wouldnt V⁷+5 of IV just be chord I
Chord I with added notes yes, which changes it's entire function to V/IV
The chords: C# to A7 with borrowed F# scale isn't so bad. Jk lol 😂 it's basically just A7(b13) at that point
"ear-shattering" is right!
1:47 Me enjoying these chords.. suddenly "Go kill that woman" 💀
Thankfully it's in German! 🤣
Isnt it a D7#13b9. I think its quite common but the weird part ist how he moves the upper structure
I’ll explain it as a dominant flat 9 (13) chord which often used in jazz, and had major 3rd relationship with tonic.
Polychord of F# over A7 (ACG)
Was für ein Geschrei.
love it, The thing sounds to me like a very dissonant A augmented 6 (susV/V7) or A7.