Diminished and Augmented Chords

(whooshing music)- Dear friends, welcome to the fourth lecture in our series,"The Life of Chords." I'm today joined by Peter Donohoe, who is going to play a lot of virtuosic and interesting pieces for us, and we're going to talk about diminished and augmented chords. I have a picture of Liszt here because he had most, probably of all composers, most to do with both of these kinds. So, we'll start with the chord which is called diminished seventh chord. Now, these chords that I'm going to talk to you about today, they might not be just as important structurally as the ones we were talking about last time, in fact you probably can do without them, but they bring a lot of color to the music, and expression, and particular effect, so composers have always been using them for effect, for example, this diminished seventh chord.(dramatic music) So that was from the score of "King Kong," and probably, even if you didn't know that, you probably would have guessed that something terrible has happened. Or the gentler version of the same chord, which is a harp glissando.(enchanting harp music) So that has become so popular that it's now a sound that you can download, it's a library of sounds, harp glissando, diminished seventh chord, if you want to use it in your piece, so it is something like a stock idiom. So, if we look at a couple of composers from the 20th century, looking back at this chord, Schoenberg, for example, describes this diminished seventh

"Wherever one wanted to express pain, excitement, anger,"or some other strong feeling,"there we find, almost exclusively,"the diminished seventh chord." Or Luigi Dallapiccola says,"Every shock, every horror, every rape and abduction,"every surprise, every apostrophe, every curse,"and sometimes even desperate invocations,"are underscored by the diminished seventh chord." So what is it, how do we get to it? So, on every note of the scale, we can have a triad, we talked about that. Most of them are major and minor, but there is one note of the scale, which is the seventh note of the major scale, where we don't get either a major or minor triad, but we get a very strangely sounding, maybe you can give us that?(eerie piano music) A triad which doesn't form a key, there is no diminished key. So the fifth, the interval of the fifth, between the lower note and the higher note, is not the pure, consonant fifth that we're used to, it's squeezed, it's diminished.(eerie piano music) And so if now we add another step like that, another third on top to it, so make it into a seventh chord,(eerie piano music) that's our diminished seventh, so that is the sonority that you want to hear. Where do they come from, where do get these chords, and their associations, their expressive associations? They mainly come from opera, and probably one of the first instances that we can find comes from an opera by Giovanni Legrenzi, it's actually a popular aria which lots of singers have sung, and it, amazingly, starts from that chord. It's an aria about, it's a complaint addressed to Cupid, why are you tormenting me like this? How can you create all this torment for me? So it is something very tormented, that's how it goes.(dark piano music)♪ Che fiero costume ♪♪ D'aligero nume ♪♪ Che a forza di pene ♪- So just the very beginning is already extremely emotional and expressive. If we take operas maybe of a composer that you've never heard about, Johann Adolph Hasse, and you will see then how ordinary people, so to speak, use these chords. These are a couple of recitatives, and every one of them, where this chord, or this interval of diminished seventh appears, has to do something with tears, or with exclamation, with pain. For example, the first one,"I'm going to find Fabrizio and cry," so if you could just give us a sense?(sorrowful piano music)"O cara madre," "Oh poor mother," "Oh dear mother," so you have all these exclamations, and sighs, and tears in operas. So this is all quite simple, quite straightforward, but at the same time as Hasse, we have Bach as a contemporary of Hasse, and Bach seems to have discovered the potential of the diminished seventh chord like nobody else has done, he used it in so many ways, I can't think of any other composer who has done that. For example, there is this chorale, the Lutheran chorale"Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt," which means that because of the fall of Adam, the world is corrupt, everything has been corrupted. The melody of that chorale is on the top line, but everything that happens underneath is kind of pictorial. So first of all, you have those intervals, well, this is an organ piece originally, so in the pedal, you will have those diminished sevenths going down.- [Peter] Would you like me to do the seventh?- [Marina] No, just separately.(dark piano music) Very strange line, it seems like Schoenberg has written it, or something like that. That represents Adam's fall, and it's very strange, it's very disturbing, in a sense. Then, in the middle, there is a kind of snaking line, which might even be representing the serpent that was implicated in Adam's fall.(snaking piano music) Yeah, so there's a snaking line, and then there is the top line, which is just the melody of a chorale, and it's very simple. So there's quite a lot of complexity. I think, if people, when they would have heard this music for the first time, they would be extremely surprised, because the harmony becomes very complex, and it's really disturbed by these diminished sevenths which appear every now and again, and kind of corrupt it, almost. So if I can ask you to play us the whole piece, it's a very beautiful piece, it's in the arrangement by Busoni, so it's a piano version, and we'll just hear it complete.- Yes, of course. We should clarify, maybe, that the original is an organ piece, which Busoni was very, very good at transcribing for the piano, he did many, many of Bach's great organ works for piano solo, and this is one of them, a brilliant transcription.(elegant piano music)- It's quite amazing.(audience applauds) Thank you, thank you very much, it's quite amazing, quite confusing. Really, it's impossible to tell, I think, that it was written at the beginning of the 18th century, it's complex. Bach used the chord also in a very dramatic way, if you're thinking of exclamation, or a chord that is really surprising you, really gives you the jilt, makes you jump. This is how he does it in his "St. Matthew Passion," in the very important moment when Pontius Pilate asks the question, who are we going to save, is it Jesus or it going to be Barabbas? And the crowd chooses Barabbas to save, and you will hear this chord, it's very separate from everything that precedes it and that follows it, it's extremely dramatic, that's how it goes.♪ Diesen zweien ♪♪ Den ich euch soll losgeben? ♪♪ Sie sprachen ♪♪ Barrabam ♪(discordant music)♪ Pilatus sprach zu ihnen ♪- It really stands out, so I think there's a direct line from that moment to what you've just heard in "King Kong," this really incredibly dramatic moment. Another piece which is also astonishing, I think possibly even more astonishing than the chorale prelude that we've heard, is Bach's "Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue," although we are, right now, interested in the fantasia. The title of it, chromatic, already tells us that it will have a lot of these tonal colors, and one of the most important colors is the diminished seventh, and it is used here in all kinds of ways. One way, for example, could be to make it into an extension of a dominant seventh chord so that you get a ninth, if you could?(elegant piano music) So it sort of appears on top there. Another way is to have several diminished chords in a row, kind of snaking downwards, and what that does is completely remove the sense of a key, remove the sense of tonality, so it disorientates us, there's something woozy about it, isn't there?(strange piano music) There's also a dramatic turning point, the use of it, like in "St. Matthew Passion."(dramatic piano music) Then it also can be used with a different melodic note, an extra dissonance on top, which becomes very plaintive, it's like a sigh, like a lament, but also incredibly expressive.(plaintive piano music) And finally, another way that he can use it, he can stay on that chord a very long time, all that that is in yellow, is basically an elaboration of this chord, and while we are on it, we don't know which key, we've forgotten the key that we were in before, so then that allows him to go somewhere else quite distant, because we've already forgotten what they key was. So it's way to completely mislead you and make you lose your way, so maybe you could play that?(elegant piano music) We're going in all sorts directions, and all that, because the diminished seventh kind of loosened us out of the key. Now, I would like you to play the whole of the fantasia, because it's such a marvelous piece, and it definitely has this, I think, tragic, a sense of tragedy as well, because it condenses these chords to the point of almost unbearable intensity. Let me just check that it works. Okay.(intricate toccata music)(reflective piano music)(elegant piano music)(audience applauds) It's an extraordinary piece, isn't it. This is Bach's son, saying, many years later,"No chord is more convenient than the diminished seventh"as a means of reaching the most distant key"more quickly and with agreeable suddenness," so obviously, he must have learned a thing or two from his father. And you would think, this is such an encyclopedia of the use of this chord that there was nothing for Bach's followers to do. Well, thankfully, Bach's music was forgotten for a long time, so they were discovering the potential of the diminished seventh chord on their own. The next chapter of our lecture is about two contexts that scholars have identified in 18th century music in which this chord appears most, and they call them ombra, as in shadow, and tempesta, as in tempest or storm. The first word, you can see, refers to the supernatural, to the supernatural horrors in which the 18th century started taking more and more interest. And in particular, this is an ode to Shakespeare by the composer William Boyce, and there is a moment hear, if we could just there, where that diminished seventh comes in, it comes in with the word,"And terror with distorted mien"erects the hair and chills the blood," you have these chords coming in.(dark piano music)- [Peter] Would you like a bit more?- A bit more, yeah.(dark piano music) So it's interesting that it is associated with particularly those words, with terror and raised hair. We have quite a lot of theory about this coming at the same time. For example, Edmund Burke writes about the new aesthetic category which he calls the sublime, something that is more intense than the beautiful, something that exceeds our human scale, something that is so strong that it excites our feelings almost to an impossible degree. And this is what he says,"Whatever is fitted in any sort"to excite the ideas of pain, of danger,"that is to say,"whatever is in any sort terrible,"or is conversant about terrible objects,"or operates in a manner analogous to terror,"is a source of the sublime,"that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion"which the mind is capable of feeling." And another Scottish poet, James Beattie, writes a few years later about that pleasing horror,"which, when joined to words descriptive of terrible ideas" music can invoke quite effectively, effectually. So it's the idea that horror can be pleasing, that it is something that we're looking for in music. And I think probably one of the ultimate expressions of this ombra topic, ombra context is the final scene of Mozart's "Don Giovanni," where the statue finally comes for him, and it begins precisely with a diminished seventh chord.(intense and dark orchestral music)♪ Don Giovanni ♪♪ A cenar teco ♪♪ M'invitasti e son venuto ♪♪ Non l'avrei giammai creduto ♪♪ Ma faro quel che potro ♪♪ Leporello, un altra cena ♪♪ Fa che subito si porti ♪♪ Ah padron ♪♪ Ah padron, siam tutti morti ♪♪ Vanne dico ♪♪ Ferma un po' ♪- Another one comes in. So it's full, of course, of other elements, such as the trombones, that introduce this very funereal rhythm, but the harmony and these diminished seventh chords play a great role in intensifying this moment. And we also find that that very capacity of the diminished seventh to make us forget what they key is, to lose all orientation, is also being considered sublime. This is the English composer William Crotch

"When the harmony and modulations"are learned and mysterious,"when the ear is unable"to anticipate the transitions from chord to chord"and from key to key,"if the melody and measure are grave,"the effect will be sublime." I think we can refer this very much to the "Chromatic Fantasia" that you've played for us, because, although, probably, the word wouldn't have been used then, but it certainly answers this description. Now, if we talk about the other context, which is the storm, there are obviously natural storms depicted in music extremely efficiently, for example in the "Pastoral Symphony," where the storm actually interrupts the previous movement, the previous movement doesn't have an opportunity to quite finish.(triumphant orchestral music)(dark orchestral music)(stormy orchestral music) So, everything was lovely in the previous movement, and suddenly, you really feel like the clouds have darkened and you get a bit of rain coming in, and then, finally, the thunder and lightning come in. And in Beethoven's pieces which don't have necessarily that pictorial title, so we don't know, for example, what "Appassionata" is about, it's not his own title, but we can compare to that what we've just heard in the "Pastoral" and I suppose deduce that, also,"Appassionata" has to do something with a storm. It might be a storm of emotions and feelings, not necessarily a natural occurrence, but it's the same kind of thing that happens there. And I would like you to play, also, the transition from the unfinished, interrupted slow movement to the finale.(elegant piano music)(dark piano music) I think it's extraordinary how that chord is also voiced, it's quite an unpleasant sound, isn't it.(dark piano music) I remember, my child had it as an alarm clock, and I also thought that was a very unpleasant way to wake up in the morning, it'll definitely get you out of bed. There are a couple more ways in which he uses the chord later on as well, interrupting the music, sending us, again, into this strange sense of uncertainty.(darkly energetic piano music) And I think you have another one, where it also, once again, sounds like an interruption of the flow of the stream, and every single time, it happens with the diminished seventh.(elegant piano music)(eerie piano music)(elegant piano music) Yes, thank you very much. So you really can feel it, how everything stops, you're suspended, without the key, for a moment. I was looking for something more modern that would also use this tempesta context, and I found a lovely piece by Thea Musgrave, which is called "Turbulent Landscapes," so it's actually based on paintings by Turner, and each one of them is turbulent in some way, and she uses this diminished harmony almost throughout in these pieces, and also, she uses a scale that is associated with this diminished harmony, and that scale is called an octatonic scale. It's called octatonic because it has eight notes in it. So if we half fill-in every little bit of the diminished seventh chord, we should be able to get it, if you can just play it?(unsettling piano music) Yeah, very strange scale, unusual scale, so you will hear it for a moment in this piece,(unsettling orchestral music) So it's called "Sunrise with Sea Monsters," I think, the sea monsters, she uses the tuba to represent at least one of the monsters, and the tuba is playing this strange scale. So you can see how that idea, that context actually has survived into the 21st century. Now, we are approaching an interesting topic, which some of you might have already predicted that I will have to address. There is this common perception that one of the intervals, or actually, there are two of them, if you show us how the interval of the tritone is part,(eerie piano music) is part of the dominant seventh, so then there is another one, kind of interlocking with it.(eerie piano music) So you have two tritones together.(eerie piano music) Yeah, exactly. People get excited about that because they have this idea that, during the Middle Ages, this interval of a tritone was a forbidden interval, and the reason for that was that it was associated with the Devil, diabolus in musica. You must have heard that?- Yes I have, I must actually tell a really strange story about that. There is a comedian, who's a very intelligent, incredibly clever man, with an unbelievable musical brain, called Bill Bailey, I'm sure many of you know him, or know of him. Apparently, we look alike, and we've never been seen together in the same room, so.(audience laughs) But anyway, he was interviewed on, I think it was "GMTV," several years ago, in anticipation of a tour that he was doing that was around classical music, and the funny aspects of it, and he was trying to explain to the people on "GMTV" about the tritone, and I've never seen such an expression of total blank, glazed-over faces that he was greeted with, because they were very worried, obviously, that everyone would turn over onto BBC because he was being too intellectual. But it was really very interesting to actually discover, through Marina, that it's wrong, it's not the case that, in medieval times, the tritone was associated with the Devil.- Yes, people have been looking really hard, looking through about 60 treatises, not in a single one of it there is that association. There is a description of the tritone as something very unpleasant, something very unpleasant to the ear, something to avoid, but the first time this phrase diabolus in musica is used is actually 1725, so well after the Middle Ages, and it's by a composer and theorist who wrote a book on counterpoint called Fux, and basically, he comes out with this little pneumonic phrase for singers,"Mi contra fa, diabolus in musica," so it's something to remind them of what not to do when they're singing. So maybe the phrase indeed existed, but it probably just was a joke, actually, the tritone didn't have to be forbidden for that reason. They were trying to avoid it precisely to avoid that kind of unpleasant sound. And it is considered the most dissonant interval that there is, the frequency ratio is quite high, so it is quite harsh, and this is why people always represent car horns, or something, in music with a tritone, like Gershwin, I think, in "American in Paris."- [Peter] Yes, that's right.(dissonant piano music)- Although your own car horn is not actually tuned to the tritone, it's a minor third. But anyway, there's this perception that it's the most dissonant and the most unpleasant.- Do you mind if I just mention something that's just occurred to me? Britten's "War Requiem," Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem," which of course is in memoriam of all the people who died in the First World War, an incredibly tragic work, but there's this moment, which I think comes three times, where the choir sings something like this. I hope I get it right.(melancholy piano music) And at that point, the tubular bells go.(dissonant tinkling music) And eventually, it resolves onto this,(elegant piano music) which is the end of the requiem. But this bell,(dissonant tinkling music) which is exactly the tritone that we're talking about, it's piercing, and so incredibly tragic in the context, it's a wonderful moment. It just occurred to me that I remember it well from my youth as a fantastic representation of the tragedy of war.- At some point, I think, in the 19th century, I'm not quite sure when, and probably from Fux, but composers started realizing that it's associated with the Devil, and started actually using it as a representation of the Devil, and the diminished seventh chord also in that context, in particular related to Satan. One very famous example is from Weber's opera "Der Freischutz," where you have this Wolf's Glen scene, where magic bullets are made, and these are the bullets which cannot miss their target, so obviously, they're made with the help of the Devil. And there's this character, he's called Samiel, but actually, eventually, we realize that it's the Devil himself, and every time Samiel appears, you hear the tritone, and you hear a tremolo, and that diminished seventh chord, and it's the first ever leitmotif in music, the first ever little snatch of music that tells us exactly what is happening. So I just wanted to paly you a little bit from that scene.♪ Mondes fiel aufs Kraut ♪♪ Uhui, uhui ♪(dissonant music)♪ Spinnweb' ist mit Blut betaut ♪♪ Uhui, uhui ♪(dissonant music)- Some kind of witches shouting there the tritone. At the very same time, very close to that, 10 years later, we have Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," and in the finale, we have a Witches' Sabbath, also starting with a diminished seventh, and not just one, but a whole chain of them descending, like, I don't know, witches cackling with laughter, or something like that.(dark orchestral music) Again, very disjointed music, they're just gathering for the sabbath, but you feel that something really, really evil is happening there. I should have shown this first, these are the tritones, how they are formed within the diminished seventh chord, and these are our people who came up with this idea in the 18th century. One of them, actually, Mattheson, says,"Older singers called this pleasant interval"the devil in music," and you wonder, he might have been sarcastic, we don't know how to read these treatises, or maybe he considered it pleasant, but it might have been described as hostile to nature, annoying and irritating, but not as the devil. Once again, if we even go later on into the 20th century, this association just stays, so you have a piece by George Crumb which is called "Devil-music."(unsettling music) So violins and electronics making it even more unpleasant. Now, we finally come to Liszt, and this is a particularly interesting thread in Liszt's works, because he wrote a lot of works about Mephistopheles, there are at least four Mephisto waltzes, there's a Mephisto polka, there's a Faust symphony, there is a B minor sonata which seems to be also connected to that idea, so there's a whole lot of them. And he starts, the first time he uses this tritone and diminished harmony for the Devil is in his fantaisie on "Robert le Diable,""Robert the Devil," another Meyerbeer opera, again around, I think it should be'31, actually, not '41.(dark piano music) So, very striking beginning. It's not actually in the opera, he makes it much worse. I think it might have been something almost autobiographical, because both his virtuoso predecessor, Paganini, the virtuoso violinist, and Liszt, who was so exceptionally virtuosic on the piano, they were compared to the Devil, it was felt that there was something supernatural about their playing. You can see that both Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann describe him as the demon,"The demon's power began to awake,"he first toyed with the public as if to test it"then gave it something more profound,"until every single listener was drawn up into his art,"and then the entire mass of the audience"began to rise and fall"exactly in accordance with his will."With the exception of Paganini,"I have never encountered any artist"who possessed to such a high degree"Liszt's powers of subjugating, elevating,"and leading the public," so they really felt it was demonic power. And Clara Schumann, who really disliked him, I think, quite a lot, had to admit as well,"He played, as always"with a truly demonic bravura."He lorded it over the piano like a devil,"I know no other way to express it." So I think he was aware that this was happening, and possibly, some of his struggles were represented in music as well, because, as you might know, he later ended up being a minor cleric, a religious figure, and wearing religious dress, so he certainly was torn between Heaven and Hell. Some of these struggles are represented in his amazing, extremely long work, which is his "Piano Sonata in D Minor," and there is a theme, although, again, there is no title there, it doesn't tell us that it's Mephistopheles, or that it's devilish, but we can guess, can't we, if you could give us a sense of it.(dark piano music) Lots of diminished seventh chords thrown in there, I put circles round them all. And on the very last page, it's a very long work, I can't remember how long.- [Peter] 31 1/2 minutes.- [Marina] 31 1/2 minutes, so it depends on how fast you play.- [Peter] Depends on who's playing it.- [Marina] But up to the last page, even on the last page, you still get a little bit of that Mephistopheles theme in the harmony, and then, after that, only that last two lines, there are just pure triads, which are supposed to be more religious and heavenly.- [Peter] Yes, it's a resolution of the conflict of the whole piece.(consonant piano music)- So you think that there is a resolution?- I really like to think so, yeah. There's a massive climax earlier on in the piece, on the diminished seventh, it really makes a very big point of the actual harmony. May I play it?- Yeah, sure.- It's just a few seconds.(grand piano music) So that's absolutely the pinnacle of that part of the piece.- And of course, like in the "Faust Symphony," where there is actually a movement which is called "Mephistopheles," that also begins in the same way.(dark orchestral music) Again, this laughter, demonic laughter. Now, we're moving to the augmented triad, and this is going to be a much shorter chapter because it hasn't been used for so long. And in fact, a lot of people, when, even, they recognized that there was a theoretical possibility to get this triad, it appears in the minor, like in C minor, it would be note three of the chord, so it's kind of there. But it was not used very much, and they referred to it as a chord of extraordinary hardness, as sharp musical spice, and also, as one theorist said, something quite useless, so they were not very keen on using it, with the exception of Haydn, because Haydn would try anything, we've played so many examples from Haydn for various things, he really experiments with things. So in one of the string quartets, in the trio of the minuet, of all places, which is supposed to be extremely simple music, but you have this augmented triad, which maybe you can give us first what it actually sounds like.- [Peter] An augmented triad?- Yeah, any.(strange piano music) Yeah, so there are two big thirds stuck together, so it's more than a fifth, so it's a kind of augmented fifth rather than a diminished one, so a very strange sounding chord. They actually show you when it happens, it's a kind of painful moment, with a little bit of an extra melodic note added in, and then the second time that kind of music comes in, it's actually a diminished seventh, so as if Haydn knew what lecture I was going to, so he has both augmented triad and then diminished seventh, and he comes back to that. And every time that that happens, you will notice it.(dark strings music) There's the diminished seventh.(dark strings music) They're really making a meal out of it. So that is a very strange, but quite an isolated example. Even as late as 1850, one of the theorists, A.B. Marx, said,"If we take the major triad and raise the fifth,"we're confronted by the shrill sound"of the augmented triad."No one has ever dared to use several of these triads"in succession,"and we should do nothing to encourage this." So sure enough, Liszt, three years later, does exactly the same thing.(dark and chaotic piano music) So that's quite an extraordinarily horrible noise. So it was particularly loved, this idea of using this chord, and was proud of it. He actually wrote about it,"The augmented triad was still something remarkable"at the time."Wagner had used these chords for the Venusberg," in "Tannhauser," actually, there's not much there,"but I had written them for the first time already in 1841," so there was a little bit of competition going on of who would use this chord."This brought much adverse criticism upon me," he says,"but I didn't trouble over the matter." The first time, in '41, he mentions the 1841, he actually uses it very prominently as a kind of individual chord, not connected to anything, something that occupies a whole bar. And it's in Liszt's Petrarch sonnet, which first appears as a song, later on, he turns it into a piano piece. And the text of that sonnet, it's about love, how love completely tears you apart, infatuation, he says,"I find no peace but have no war to wage,"I fear, I hope, I burn, and turn into ice," so you're kind of torn into these different directions, and I think that's what it probably is associated with.(sweet piano music) So you can see how it can be beautiful, but it still creates this moment of strangeness. And most famously, he used that chord at the beginning of his "Faust Symphony." Amazingly, even back in the 18th century, one of the theorists says that, although it's a very unpleasant sound, but it would be good to use in the context of death, suffering, and doubt, and I like that doubt is one of the things that he wants to use it for. Liszt, of course, uses it exactly for Faust's doubts and questions. And it's an extraordinary beginning, I will play it, the first 12 notes are all different. So basically, he uses up four of these triads, four times three, he uses up all the notes of the chromatic scale.(reflective classical music) There is no key in this passage at all, because, again, just like a diminished seventh chord, it gives us this sense of strangeness. The next person to use all 12 notes like that was Schoenberg, so Liszt really does some amazing experiments in that regard. Liszt communicated very much with Russian composers, who learned a lot from him, and he learned a lot from them, so there was a kind of going back and forth between them. And Russian composers starting using this triad as part of something that we associate very much with the Russian harmony, you will recognize this sliding from major to minor, and back. If you could give us a little bit of that "Scheherazade" tune?(sweet piano music) We're in the minor now.(reflective piano music) So that sounds, to a lot of people, like very Russian music, because they used this pattern, basically, to death, in almost every piece. In almost every theme where they wanted to create a Russian style, they would go from major to minor via the augmented triad, and then, very often, back, also via the augmented triad. Just coming back to Liszt's sonata for a moment, I wanted to introduce a moment when the augmented triad is used as part of a very special chord, a kind of portal that transfers us from one part of a sonata into another one, in a very unusual way. This is actually a dominant seventh with a raised fifth, so the augmented triad is kind of part of the dominant seventh chord. But the point is that it shouldn't be in the key where we're starting from, which is G minor, so it shouldn't be there, it appears in a magical way.(elegant piano music) So that absolutely magical moment, and once again, this is called enharmonicism, where one chord is completely renamed, all the notes, you can see here in his manuscript, they all had flats, and the next chord has all sharps, and even double sharps, so everything morphs into something else that is useful for a distant key. So again, this is what he uses these chords for, again, moments of sublimity, sublime beauty, and very unusual modulation. Late in life, Liszt tried even to write pieces where the chord almost becomes a tonic, the augmented triad, he sort of sits on it for a very long time. This is, again, in the context of death, so this is one piece called"La Lugubre Gondola," so it's a funeral gondola that takes the body, floating on the lagoon, to the cemetery, so it's supposed to float in limbo between life and death.(mournful piano music) We sit on this chord, it's an extraordinary expansion of the remit of that chord. We have a sense that Liszt, in his late years, was trying various ways to unsettle tonality and actually write some music that could possibly be without a key, and one of them, he actually called that, he called it "Bagatelle Sans Tonalite,""Bagatelle Without a Key." Also, in the manuscript, it had a subtitle, "Mephisto Waltz No. 4," and it starts with a tritone, doesn't it,(dark piano music) so it's again a portrayal of evil."And it's a highly capricious tone picture," as one of the listeners said,"which whirls through all the keys"and then ends abruptly"one a chord of the diminished seventh," it doesn't actually have a proper ending. Peter's going to play the whole of it, it's quite short.(dark piano music)(frenetic piano music)(audience applauds) Thank you. Thank you very much. The augmented triad also is associated with its own scale, and that's the whole-tone scale, if you could just give us.(unsettling piano music) That's an even weirder scale. And the first time that was used in a very dramatic way was by Glinka in his scene of abduction of Lyudmila, she's abducted in the middle of her wedding feast, and this evil sorcerer comes in and they grab her away, and this strange scale, which Glinka called chemical scale, sounds in the whole orchestra.(darkly intense orchestral music) So he was extremely proud of that, and then all the Russians also wanted to use that scale, Mussorgsky used it for Boris' nightmares, and things like that. And Debussy, who was very keen on Mussorgsky, also got interested in that scale, and then it became very much part of his language. So we, at the very end, will have this mini recital with Peter playing a couple of pieces, one of them is called "Voiles," which is translated as veils or sails, we don't know, so something misty, so I've chosen a picture for you to represent that, and that is all, except for the little middle section, it's all full of these augmented triads and whole-tone harmonies of various sorts.- In fact, almost the whole piece is based on the same harmony, isn't it, so much so that, on one occasion when I was playing this piece, I didn't realize that the piano pedal had stopped working properly, because it sounds fine all on the same pedal.- [Marina] So you can leave it on.- And then I finished the piece, and of course backed away from the piano in readiness for the next one, and realized the piano was just continuing to play this sound,(eerie piano music) and it wouldn't stop, which was when the whole concert was canceled.- And the second piece is called "The Joyous Island,""L'Isle Joyuese," and in it, that scale is used in a very different context, and actually, quite unusual, it's not for something horrible or death related, it's the opposite, it's the joys of love. He was inspired by Watteau's pictures of all kind of things going on in the 18th century, which was very decadent. And I think it gives you a contrast, you will hear a lot of major chords, fanfares, very joyful, but there is also this dizziness that comes from the whole-tone, which I think adds something into it. So, I've come to the end of my lecture so that now we're just going to hear these two pieces from Peter, so please give him a bit of applause before that happens.(audience applauds)(unsettling piano music)(radiant piano music)(unsettling piano music)("L'Isle Joyeuse" by Claude Debussy)(jarring piano music)(pleasant piano music)(jarring piano music)(audience applauds)- [Moderator] I'd like to thank Professor Frolova-Walker, that was incredible, an incredible lecture, we all feel really educated, from "Appassionata" to the shadows and the devils, and particularly, I'd like to thank Peter Donohoe, that's made the evening and was a real pleasure for all of us, and I think we've all been very privileged tonight.(audience applauds)