Nineteenth-century harmony is usually described as chromatic, and the word hides the important part. A chromatic passage is not a passage that has left its key. It is a passage that has widened the key until it includes notes and chords the older vocabulary could not explain, and it stays tonal precisely because the widening is measured against a centre that the music keeps returning to. The history of the century is a history of how far that expansion could go before the centre stopped being audible.
\nChromaticism itself is not a nineteenth-century invention. Gesualdo’s madrigals at the end of the sixteenth century go further in some bars than anything before Wagner, and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue is built out of exactly the resource the twentieth century would later claim as its own. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen of 1753 codified an expressive, harmonically restless keyboard style a generation before the Romantics.
\nWhat changes in the nineteenth century is the status of the chromatic chord. In earlier music it is an event, a moment of heightened expression that the surrounding diatonic harmony frames and explains. In Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner it becomes the ordinary medium: a phrase may pass through four chromatic chords on its way to a cadence, and the cadence still arrives where the key promised. The tonic does not lose its authority, but the area it governs grows much larger.
\nFour devices account for most of the sound, and each one extends the key in a different direction.
\nThe chromatic mediant moves between chords whose roots lie a third apart. C major and A flat major share a single note, and their roots are a major third apart on the flat side: the relationship is outside the diatonic circle of fifths and produces an immediate change of colour, often at a phrase boundary where a functional connection would be expected.
\nThe diminished seventh is a chord of four notes, each a minor third from the next, and that symmetry is a licence. The same four pitches can be spelled four ways, and each spelling points at a different destination, so the chord can be used for a modulation that does not declare where it is going until it arrives.
\n| Spelling | Resolves into |
|---|---|
| B, D, F, A flat | C, major or minor |
| D, F, A flat, C flat | E flat, major or minor |
| F, A flat, C flat, E double flat | G flat, major or minor |
| A flat, C flat, E double flat, G double flat | A, major or minor |
That chord is one sonority with four available meanings, and the analysis depends on which spelling the music chooses next.
\nAugmented sixth chords and the Neapolitan do a similar job with more direction, and they belong to the section of the vocabulary that arrives from mixture rather than from free chromaticism. Their function is usually clear: they prepare a dominant. The Romantic extension of them is that they are used in sequence, which weakens the preparation and turns a functional chord into a colour.
\nThe last resource is not a chord at all. Delaying resolution is what makes chromatic harmony sound chromatic, because the ear is given the notes but not the arrival. A suspension held for a whole bar, a dominant that resolves to another dominant, a cadence that is prepared and then withdrawn: all of these widen the phrase without adding new chords.
\nSchubert’s harmonic language is the clearest early evidence that third relations had become a normal resource rather than a special effect. His late music regularly places a movement or a section in a key a third away from the home key, as the String Quintet in C major of 1828 does by putting its slow movement in E major, and the Winterreise songs move through harmonic territory that the opening key does not obviously own. Where a Classical composer would modulate to the dominant to create tension, Schubert’s music often shifts sideways, and the effect is a change of light rather than an increase in pressure.
\nChopin’s contribution is the conversion of chromatic harmony into texture. In the Nocturnes and the Mazurkas, and in the G minor Ballade, chromatic inner voices and mixture are not events the music stops for; they are the fabric, and the melody floats above them. This is also where chromaticism becomes an interpretive problem, because a texture made of chromatic lines has to be voiced, and voicing is a decision the notation does not make. A keyboard soloist has to choose which of several moving lines the ear should follow.
\nBeethoven’s late quartets are the immediate precedent for both, and Liszt’s B minor Sonata of 1853 shows where the technique leads when it is applied to form: a single continuous movement in which themes are transformed by chromatic alteration rather than set against each other.
\nThe chord that begins Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, completed in 1859 and premiered in 1865, is spelled F, B, D sharp and G sharp. It resolves immediately to a chord of E, with the G sharp held over as the third of that chord, in a progression that circles A minor without settling into it.
\nRead enharmonically, F, B, D sharp and G sharp is F, A flat, C flat and E flat: a half-diminished seventh chord on F, with its root in the bass and the enharmonic equivalents of its third, fifth and seventh stacked above it. Every note has an obligation. The B is the diminished fifth of the chord and wants to resolve; the G sharp is a leading tone; the F and the D sharp are the suspended weight of the sound. The reason the chord has been discussed for a century and a half is not that it is unprecedented but that it is overdetermined: it can be spelled to lead several places, it delays rather than establishes, and the delay is the point.
\nWhat the chord does not do is end tonality. It resolves, it belongs to a key, and the music around it spends the rest of the opera returning to that key with a new intensity. The claim that tonality collapsed at this moment is a twentieth-century summary that flatters the twentieth century. What collapsed, and only gradually, was the assumption that a key has to be confirmed at every level of a phrase.
\nThe temptation in analysing this repertoire is to give every chromatic chord a name that implies a function. Sharp-four chords, borrowed chords, applied dominants and slashed numerals are all available, and a passage can be described almost entirely in them. The descriptions are often true and sometimes useless, because they can make an undirected chromatic colour look like a functional progression.
\nThe procedure that keeps analysis honest runs in a fixed order. Find the key area first and say how securely it is established. Then identify which notes are prolonged and which are ornamental: a chromatic note that behaves as an appoggiatura or a suspension is a voice-leading event, and no chord label changes that. Only then ask whether the resulting chord has a function, meaning whether its resolution confirms it. If the resolution is vague or withheld, the honest label is a description of the spelling and the voice leading rather than a function, and the functional model has reached the edge of what it can describe.
\nThe same discipline applies to the whole repertory. Two analysts can disagree about a passage and both be right, if one is describing the voice leading and the other is describing a chromatic route to the dominant. The disagreement is only a problem when a label is presented as an explanation.
\nChromatic textures put most of their difficulty in places the notation does not mark. Intonation is the first: in a chain of chromatic thirds or an extended augmented sixth, each player has to decide which line the ear is following and tune towards it, and a chord that is theoretically pure can sound sour if the players have chosen different leaders. The leading tones in a dense chromatic passage are the notes most likely to be played too low, and the resolution of a suspension is the note most likely to arrive early.
\nPacing is the second. Chromatic harmony invites a slowing that the notation does not ask for, because every dissonance sounds like an arrival. The nineteenth-century repertoire is full of passages that should move through their chromaticism at a steady tempo, and the habit of treating each chord as an event is what turns a passage of tension into a series of stops. The test is whether the music still has somewhere to go after the passage ends.
\nVoicing is the third, and for keyboard players it is the hardest. A chromatic inner line has to be audible without becoming the melody, which is a matter of touch rather than volume, and a sustained pedal turns an intended progression of separate sonorities into one blurred chord. The practical method is to mark, in the score, where each tendency tone resolves, and to play the passage slowly enough that the resolutions can be heard as resolutions. If you cannot say which note goes where, the voicing decision has not been made, and the chord remains an effect rather than a progression.
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