With this chord, Wagner actually provoked the sound or structure of musical harmony to become more predominant than its function, a notion that was soon explored by Debussy and others.
In the words of Robert Erickson, "The Tristan chord is, among other things, an identifiable sound, an entity beyond its functional qualities in a tonal organization".
[21]According to Jacques,[22] discussing Dommel-Diény[23] and Gut,[24] "it is rooted in a simple dominant chord of A minor [E major], which includes two appoggiaturas resolved in the normal way".
Chailley did once write: Tristan's chromaticism, grounded in appoggiaturas and passing notes, technically and spiritually represents an apogee of tension.
I have never been able to understand how the preposterous idea that Tristan could be made the prototype of an atonality grounded in destruction of all tension could possibly have gained credence.
This was an idea that was disseminated under the (hardly disinterested) authority of Schoenberg, to the point where Alban Berg could cite the Tristan Chord in the Lyric Suite, as a kind of homage to a precursor of atonality.
Schenker and later Mitchell compare the Tristan chord to a dissonant contrapuntal gesture from the E minor fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I.
[32] William Mitchell, viewing the Tristan chord from a Schenkerian perspective, does not see the G♯ as an appoggiatura because the melodic line (G♯–A–A♯–B) ascends to B, making the A a passing note.
He then supplies a Wagner-approved analysis, that of Czech professor Carl Mayrberger[36] who "places the chord on the second degree, and interprets the G♯ as an appoggiatura.
[38] Debussy also jokingly quotes the opening bars of Wagner's opera several times in "Golliwogg's Cakewalk" from his piano suite Children's Corner.
[40] Paul Lansky based the harmonic content of his first electronic piece, mild und leise (1973), on the Tristan chord.