In the analysis of late tonal music, analytical approaches which attempt to understand tonal function on the one hand, and harmonic transformation viewed through a neo-Riemannian lens on the other, often stand in an uneasy relation. Through analysis of Act 1, Scene 3 of Götterdämmerung, this chapter attempts to bring neo-Riemannian theory closer to its origin in Hugo Riemann’s functional theory, and so to point the way towards a new theoretical frame for understanding the tonal function of chromatic music. We urge this return to Riemann because it enables twenty-first-century listeners and theorists to appreciate the complex power of tonality as a system which, like the great socio-economic, legal, religious and scientific systems that have endured into the twenty-first century, has an indefatigable ability to subsume anything that might seem to pose a challenge to it back into itself, as a source of further power.

This chapter brings Strauss’s music into constructive dialogue with Hollywood film, via the persona of Erich Korngold. It examines Korngold’s historical connection with Strauss through the former composer’s operas and concert works, before exploring the ways in which Strauss can be heard in the film scores by Korngold and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 40s. The use of one particular Straussian harmonic trait – third-related triadic sequences (of both octatonic and hexatonic variety) – is highlighted in Korngold’s scores and traced in more recent film, including in the output of John Williams. Williams’s use of what Frank Lehman calls "chromatically modulating cadential resolutions" can also be found in Strauss and Korngold. The chapter concludes by suggesting that hearing Strauss in Korngold and Williams is just one way of constructing a Straussian Text, one that reveals the power of seeking to encounter Strauss’s music in varied and surprising contexts.