Robert Gauldin
While the analyses of the instrumental passages in the Brown/Dempster/Headlam article support Schenker's negation of the tritone as a Stufen, those excerpts employing text are less convincing. Taking as my tact the supposition that text-painting or extra-musical references may give rise to striking deviations from Schenker's voice-leading norms, I will critique their three vocal citations and attempt to validate the existence of a direct tritone relation. The remainder of the paper will illustrate some further examples of this relation in selected passages from the music dramas of Richard Wagner, using as a working hypothesis the notion that in each case the positioning of the "IV/V in their overall tonal structure logically originates from either the libretto, associative keys, or more general dramatic issues.