Old-time musicians

Entrance to the Bayreuth Festival Theatre.

The fans climbed up the hill breathlessly and looked up at the destination they had finally reached.

There were still about twenty workers standing on the suspended scaffolding on the arch, doing the final stress check and fine-tuning of the bronze skeleton device inside the wooden structure. The clicking sound of the gears meshing could be clearly heard.

The art critics waiting and socializing below had to argue at the top of their voices:

"See that big oval thing? It is said that its acoustic design is specially designed for this musical. One composer, one work, one theater. Hey, what is perfection!"

"That's nothing! The general director of the opera, Edward Marley, also required that the stage must rotate slightly with the rhythm of the aria, just like the sailboat of Knight Tristan tossing in the sea of ​​​​lust!"

Backstage of the performance.

Ms. Beche, editor-in-chief of the Keil Isum Review, squeezed into the vent of the prop warehouse, quickly recording the internal conversation she overheard with a pencil.

"Director Marais customized a seven-layer gradient tulle skirt for the heroine in the second act. Every step she moves will refract the 'moonlight' of different color temperatures..."

"What? You're asking how to solve the chromatic aberration caused by scattering and ghosting? The crew innovatively used the newly invented electric arc lamp!"

As he was writing, the door of the warehouse next to him opened with a click, and a gentleman wearing sunglasses appeared surrounded by bodyguards - commissioned by the investor Prince Louis, the director of the Hoffman Phonograph Company personally escorted a special pickup equipment to the scene!

It is said that these brass horns wrapped in cashmere can accurately capture the "high-frequency overtones like angels' sighs"!

After the director witnessed that all the sound pickup equipment was in place, he supervised the engineers who were doing the final debugging in the basement.

The pointers of thirty recording devices trembled with the test sound coming from afar, like divination rods waiting for an oracle!

Theater lobby.

“Ding——” “Ding——”

The second reminder bell will ring 5 minutes before the performance officially begins.

The last wave of spectators who were stranded on the road due to severe congestion finally entered the venue and found their seats safely.

Female attendants in silver uniforms began to move between the first few rows of the ancient Janus-style stepped auditorium, delivering truffle chocolates to the distinguished guests.

The Marquis and Marquis McAdam in the seats were the first to get two small ones.

"Is it so detailed?" The Marquise opened a pill, shook her head and smiled.

In the rich and tempting aroma, under the dim and comfortable waiting gas light, she saw a faint fragment of the piano score of "Prelude" on the gold foil wrapped around it.

This is the "limited performance food" urgently developed by the Genevieve Candy Factory.

The manufacturer noted in the GG lyrics that the wine used is the "Death of Love" red wine that the Piodoro Winery has just opened for pre-sale, and claimed that the chocolate's "melting temperature precisely matches the human body temperature when the aria reaches its climax"!

As the time counted down to 8 o'clock in the evening, the dim lights used in the waiting area began to go out one by one.

The moment the last waiting gas lamp was swallowed up by the acoustic dome, three thousand electric arc lamps emitted a vibrating buzzing sound at the same time, and the exclamations from the audience were crushed by the sudden roar of the steam pipe!

Sixteen copper-clad pillars spew out mist mixed with rose essential oil, turning the entire stepped theater into a melting pot of mysterious atmosphere!

"Oh my God, why is my perfume bottle resonating?" Several ladies in the seats on the side were shocked to find that the liquid in the crystal bottle was vibrating at some strange frequency!

“Hua La La La—”

The metal chains made a sharp sound as they slid, and twelve brighter beams of scorching light pierced through the darkness, focusing on the slowly rising orchestra pit on the stage, and on the conductor's podium that rose higher in the center of the orchestra pit!

Fanning, wearing a black tuxedo, stood with his back to the audience. The thistle medal of "Saint Janinger the Illuminator" worn on his clothes flashed like a sharp blade in the hot light!

"Master Fanning!"

I didn’t expect that the conductor and the musicians were already in place! This was completely different from the usual “file-in” style of entering the venue!

There was a frenzy of cheers, even greater than the previous "resurrection".

"Master Fanning!" "Master Fanning!"

The thunderous roars made the crystal chandeliers tremble faintly. The workers in the last row of the standing area were the first to stomp the rhythm of the march with their work boots, while the ladies waved their playlists wildly and raised the monoculars provided by the sponsors.

It’s a pity that the orchestra pit that they had a brief meeting with rose and then quickly fell.

In the audience's telescope, when Fanning raised his right hand to start the song, only the shadow of his upper body was projected onto the wall!

The scene of the figure holding the wreckage of "The Old Days" falling down was magnified into a slow motion shot like a oracle from the gods, and the entire audience suddenly fell silent!

Tristan and Isolde, Prelude, bidding begins!

Roy moved the bow and the cello "Gianandrea" played a single melody beginning that seemed to be in A minor.

First, it jumps from A to F, and then goes down a semitone to E, showing an extremely dark and depressing line.

Then, on the fourth #G note, the woodwind section stacks and rises a strange chord!

“Buzz!——”

Severe, desperate, and electric-like spasms!

"This chord!?"

In fact, quite a number of the audience here have already heard the piano version of this "Prelude".

This dark, depressing, and fatalistic introduction is indeed very well written.

But they didn’t think that this chord had any more novel structure than modern avant-garde music!

"F is the root note, and then B, D#, G#, four notes." Many musicians reconfirmed their listening experience, "Yes, these are the four notes. Isn't this a half-diminished seventh chord?"

"Well, maybe it's a miracle of orchestration, and I admit that Master Fanning is well versed in this."

"But logically speaking, if we judge this piece of music as A minor based on the harmonic function, then this is just a double dominant 43 chord with a flat fifth, which is used to prepare for the dominant function."

There are still a few romantic art masters trying to dismantle inspiration.

The melody under Roy's bow did not stop, but changed to ascending semitone, still with a wandering and suppressed atmosphere.

Sure enough, on the third beat, the orchestra's harmony switched to the regular dominant seventh, and the cello melody also stayed on the fifth note E in A minor.

But then Roy's bow dropped from the string.

The melody ended without success.

"Hmm? No more?"

"Yes, I remember that the harmony was not resolved at all."

"How can we prove that it is in A minor without resolving to it? How can we identify the center of this cadence?"

At this time, the original orchestral version of the "Prelude" amplified this "tight but not relaxed" feeling of oppression, making people who had heard it before and those who had not heard it before feel uneasy.

“B—#G—G—B!”

The cello plays the prelude's motive again, but it moves up a minor third!

“Buzz!——”

The strange, severe chord, like an electric current spasm, rises again!

The music seems to have started to change key from the 5th bar, from A minor to C minor, and the dominant seventh chord used in preparation also appears as expected.

But, the melody came to an end again!

A blank, no solution at all!

In the uneasy silence, the cello played the prelude motive again, moving upwards again!

The tonality of the entire "Prelude" has thus become extremely vague! The tone has become extremely dark!

"This chord. This chord cannot be guessed, cannot be analyzed, cannot be named!"

Emotions gradually become tense, but they are never resolved.

The audience's finger joints were frozen tightly, but the playlists they were holding were loose and shaking violently!

Not to mention all the listeners, just those who know something about art, how could they not know by heart what the half-diminished seventh chord sounds like?

But at this moment, when it was played again and again by the orchestra, the Bayreuth Festival Theater carefully transformed by Marais directly became a mysterious temple of despair and horror like a vortex! ——The sunken orchestra pit completely blocked the orchestra, the wooden structure of the auditorium was arranged in the golden ratio, and the sound waves formed a perfect and terrifying resonance field in the space! !

“It is a unique and ineffable thing that can never be deconstructed by past musical cognition or experience!”

Even the avant-garde and new groups present were slumped in their seats in cold sweat because of the terrifying spiritual vibrations in the theater!

These rebels who pursue more stimulating sounds would probably never have dreamed that one day they would be overwhelmed and conquered by a work of "Late Romanticism"!

"I'm afraid, I'm afraid, only by calling it the 'Tristan Chord' and acknowledging that it is a unique symbol of this play can I dispel my fear of cognition!"