ABSTRACT
The quest for the origin of the Tristan chord, this icon of nineteenthcentury harmony, has been one of musicology’s favourite obsessions.1 The influential musicologist Peter Raabe gave a new twist to the long list of precursors when in 1931 he drew attention to Franz Liszt’s song ‘Ich mo¨chte hingehn’. Although Raabe considered the song musically weak, he appreciated it for its historical importance:
Liszt’s contemporaries must naturally have thought a composition bold which
already presented this progression [see example 5.1], ten years before Wagner
wrote the first note of ‘Tristan’.2
