7 - On a Chord in the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata

Summary

WHEN A WORK IS as familiar as Beethoven's ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, it can be easy to forget how atypical it is of its genre and form. In a brief analytical essay on it, Donald Francis Tovey comes straight to the point:

It was, and still is, a very unusual thing that a work introduced so broadly in a major key should proceed to a stormy and passionate first movement in the minor. I am aware of only two instances before the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, the first being Mozart's G major Violin Sonata (K. 379), where, however, the opening adagio is felt as something much more independent than an introduction, and the second being a very early pianoforte quartet on precisely the same lines as the Mozart sonata, by Beethoven himself – a work which he afterwards carefully disowned. … It is only the first four bars (for the unsupported violin) that are really in A major, though their breadth is such that the seal of A major seems at once set upon the work. But the entry of the pianoforte casts a most dramatic cloud over the opening and sets the tone for that wonderfully wistful, yet terse anticipatory expression that makes this introduction one of the landmarks in musical history (Tovey 1944, 135).

This ‘dramatic cloud’ invites comparison with a mid-nineteenth-century landmark in music history, the opening of Tristan und Isolde. Example 7.1(a) offers a voice-leading analysis of the piece, showing the function of the ‘Tristan chord’ as an example of what Riemann labels one of four ‘characteristic dissonances’, that is notes added to an upper or lower dominant which are ‘borrowed from the other dominant’.

The ‘Tristan chord’ is based on the example Riemann gives in A minor: ‘for the minor subdominant, the prime of the minor upper-dominant and fifth of the major upper-dominant respectively (in A-minor, b | d f a…)’ (Riemann 1893, 55). Ernst Kurth, who reads the harmonic function in a different way, notes the psychological effect of Wagner's pungent melodic dissonance in b. 2.