7 - Waltraute’s Plaint: Riemannian Tonal Function and Dramatic Narrative

Summary

In the analysis of late tonal music, analytical approaches which attempt to understand tonal function on the one hand, and harmonic transformation viewed through a neo-Riemannian lens on the other, often stand in an uneasy relation. Through analysis of Act 1, Scene 3 of Götterdämmerung, this chapter attempts to bring neo-Riemannian theory closer to its origin in Hugo Riemann’s functional theory, and so to point the way towards a new theoretical frame for understanding the tonal function of chromatic music. We urge this return to Riemann because it enables twenty-first-century listeners and theorists to appreciate the complex power of tonality as a system which, like the great socio-economic, legal, religious and scientific systems that have endured into the twenty-first century, has an indefatigable ability to subsume anything that might seem to pose a challenge to it back into itself, as a source of further power.