Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  CHAPTER TEN

  “A mystical pit, giving pleasure to individuals”

  TRISTAN UND ISOLDE

  The biographical and artistic background—Mathilde Wesendonck as Wagner’s muse—The Ring set aside in favor of Tristan und Isolde—The original conception of the work: happiness may be found in love even if it ends in tragedy—Return to the archetypal scenario of “redemption through destruction”—Does there have to be a third act after the love duet of act 2?—The “defeatist” productions of Heiner Müller and Christoph Marthaler—The dialectics of the score: unsatisfied longing and momentary fulfillment—More than in the Ring, Wagner able to “push himself to the limit musically”—Eros and Thanatos—Wagner’s efforts to win over Arthur Schopenhauer to his concept of sexual love—Tristan und Isolde as a work beyond all metaphysical speculations—Wagner’s ability to imagine emotional landscapes—His “endless melody”—The stimulus of specific sonorities—The “traurige Weise” as an example of the difficulty of putting music into words—Wagner not only as a sorcerer but also as a constructor—Nietzsche’s description of the work as Wagner’s “opus metaphysicum” applicable above all to the music

  This photograph of Wagner was part of a series taken in Franz Hanfstaengl’s Munich studio in the second half of 1865 and is inscribed to an otherwise unidentified acquaintance of his uncle Adolf Wagner. In general, this set of images documents Wagner’s increasing fondness for the purely decorative, the former revolutionary having become—at least superficially—a member of the upper classes eager to impress his fellow citizens while not feeling entirely comfortable with that role. The Wotan pose that he adopted in the later series of photographs taken by Hanfstaengl suited him rather better. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: N 2828.)

  On March 2, 1859, shortly before completing the second act of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck:

  My friend, things are difficult for me, oh so difficult. But my guardian angel is beckoning. He consoles me and gives me peace whenever I need it most. So I shall thank him and tell myself: “This is how it had to be in order that it could be so!” Only he who has worn the crown of thorns knows the palm; and this palm rests so gently, floating in our hands and arching over our heads like the airiest angel’s wings cooling and refreshing us by fanning us.1 Wagner’s letters strike a poetic note whenever he needs to describe his current feelings. In this case he appears to have availed himself of motifs from a fairy tale that his muse, who had poetic ambitions of her own, had only recently sent to him.

  Wagner’s situation at that time throws so much light on the subject of “art and life” that it deserves to be examined here in somewhat greater detail. The letter from which we have just quoted was written in Venice, whither Wagner had fled in the wake of the “neighborly embarrassment” that had repeatedly made life difficult for him in Zurich.2 Wagner and his wife had been living cheek by jowl with Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck on Zurich’s “Green Hill” since the end of August 1857, the Wesendoncks and their three children—Myrrha, Guido, and Karl—in their newly built luxury villa, the Wagners in an outbuilding in the villa’s grounds. Given the intensity of the friendship that bound Wagner to his muse of many years’ standing, marital tensions could hardly be avoided, with the result that within a year Wagner had abandoned his self-styled “refuge” and repaired to Venice, where he remained for seven months, occupying a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani on the Grand Canal. By coincidence, another of the buildings on the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Corner Spinelli, had been built, in part, by Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance artist and art historian who helped to create the myth of the modern artist as a divino artista, a figure who, no longer serving as a paid craftsman, was handsomely rewarded by his patron as an artistic genius.

  The palatial dimensions of Wagner’s music room reflected his own view of himself as an artist: in his current straitened circumstances he saw himself in the grand tradition of the quintessential divino artista within the realm of music. And yet his situation was hardly comparable to that of the painters of the Renaissance: the demands that he placed on his art were a source of suffering to him; he suffered with his characters in a manner reminiscent of the tormented Savior; and he railed at a fate that had brought him to Venice not as a fêted hero but as a political refugee under the watchful gaze of the Austrian secret police. At the same time, however, he saw himself as the representative of a religion of art achieving superhuman feats and in consequence demanding not only generous patronage but, like his contemporary Giuseppe Verdi, aspiring to the artist’s ancient right to a muse as well as a wife.

  And this brings us neatly to Tristan und Isolde. In May 1857, after completing the opening act of Siegfried, Wagner tried to convince both himself and his benefactress Julie Ritter that he could still complete the Ring within two years. Indeed, he even had ideas on casting the roles in the finished cycle. Within two months, however, we find him admitting that it was “only after a great deal of effort” that he had persuaded himself to “abandon Siegfried in the forest for a year” and “catch his breath by writing a ‘Tristan & Isolde.’”3 Evidently Wagner felt that the world was closing in on him—there is a certain irony to his living at this time in a part of Zurich known as “Enge,” literally “a narrow defile,” but the word also includes a sense of straitened circumstances and the feeling of having been driven into a tight corner. First and foremost, there were artistic problems, Wagner having spent three and a half years laboring over the Ring, and while he did not feel that he had burned himself out, he was nonetheless exhausted. Working on the vast cycle was like a game of chess that became more complicated with each successive move. The mythological plot that Wagner was striving, Sisyphus-like, to shove uphill involved a wealth of leitmotifs, each of which demanded to be treated with proper regard not only for the moment but also for the overall context. This required extreme concentration and threatened to cramp his creative imagination. At the risk of over-simplification, we could say that Wagner needed to keep on presenting the same material in more and more new ways.

  Conversely, Wagner will not have been particularly keen to see himself cast in a role that was subsequently assigned to him by Claude Lévi-Strauss—namely, that of a structuralist who, however ingeniously, set out to force music into a prescribed pattern. Rather, his aim was creativity in the compositional process. Fourteen years later, when he was once again in harness to his work on the Ring after a twelve-year break, he complained to Cosima: “How easy it would be if I could just write arias and duets! Now everything has to be a little musical portrait, but it must not interrupt the flow—I’d like to see anybody else do that!”4 Against the background of this comment, it is no wonder that Wagner broke off work on the Ring during the second act of Siegfried, even if he then went on to finish the second complete draft, for it was here that the difficulty of finding his way back from fairy tale to myth was at its most daunting. The opening act contains not only a number of “portraits” that do not “interrupt the flow” but also a series of numbers that the “naïve” Siegfried is able to trumpet forth like so many miniature arias without regard for the mythological context, whereas the rest of the action threatens to be overwhelmed by myth, with its dead weight of the past. And, of course, Wagner knew that Götterdämmerung still awaited him and, with it, the need to elaborate an increasingly dense fabric of leitmotifs and “tangled passions” that Nietzsche was later to describe as “confused.”5

  But there were also entirely practical material reasons for setting aside the Ring: Wagner was heavily in debt, and his present publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, was proving reluctant to pay 10,000 thalers—in itself, not an unreasonable fee—for an unfinished work. “What is the opposite of Breitkopf & Härtel?” Wagner asked Hans von Bülow at this time, before providing his own answer to his question: “Tight-Ass and Weakling.”6 In a letter he wrote to Liszt on New Year’s Eve 1858, Wagner was reduced to begging: “Money! M
oney!—It doesn’t matter how you get it and where you find it. Tristan will repay it all!”7 Wagner may have thought of his appeal as a desperate joke, but on this occasion the long-suffering Liszt was disinclined to see the funny side of it.

  Wagner had first announced his Tristan project to Liszt in December 1854, two months after his initial “conception” of the subject:8

  Since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from start to finish: I have planned in my head a Tristan and Isolte [sic], the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception; with the “black flag” that flutters at the end, I shall then cover myself over in order—to die.9

  In other words, Wagner had already been toying with the idea of writing a music drama on the subject of Tristan and Isolde long before he set aside the Ring. And yet, in spite of his having been introduced to Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung by 1854 at the latest and possibly as early as 1852,10 his initial concept of the work—which, notwithstanding the version of events peddled by his autobiography,11 was almost certainly not set down on paper at this time—was barely affected by the philosopher’s quietistic views, which Wagner initially found “repellent.”12 Quite the opposite, in fact: at this date he evidently wanted to raise a monument to absolute love in all its uncompromising intensity, an interpretation confirmed not only by his reference in his letter to Liszt to the “most full-blooded musical conception” but also to his allusion to a particular motif from the medieval corpus of poems on the Tristan legend—that of the white and black flags. In the version by Gottfried von Straßburg that was familiar to Wagner from his days in Dresden with Ulrich von Türheim’s ending, Tristan and Isolde do not regard their absolute love as a source of unending torment, but of temporary fulfillment. (This was evidently a view of love that puzzled and even alienated medieval readers whose values were based on a clear distinction between Platonic hôhe minne and the sexual attraction of nidere minne.) After King Marke’s discovery of the relationship between his nephew and his wife, Tristan seeks refuge in the haven of marriage by marrying Isolde of the White Hands in her native Brittany. In one of his many battles he is dealt a fatal wound by an envenomed glaive and sends word to his former lover in Cornwall, appealing to her to come and heal him, just as she did when he was injured by Morold. Isolde’s safe arrival in Brittany is to be heralded by a white sail, but his jealous wife tells him that the sail on the approaching vessel is black, whereupon Tristan, robbed of all hope, dies.13 Although this version of events ends tragically, Tristan’s life up to that point had certainly not been unremittingly gloomy, and it was no doubt this aspect of the medieval narrative that Wagner had in mind when in his letter to Liszt he enthused about the “happiness of love” as “the fairest of all dreams” and spoke of a passion on which he planned to “sate” himself. At all events, it was initially not the torments of love that were to form the subject of his music drama,14 and although this torment was to be one of the main motifs in his definitive poem, Wagner was content for the present to focus on the idea of fulfillment in love, a fulfillment which, even if it was denied to him in real life, was at least to come true in the field of the musical drama.

  But what exactly did Wagner mean when in December 1854 he told Liszt with a sense of resignation that he had “never enjoyed the true happiness of love”? How can this be reconciled with his infatuation for Mathilde Wesendonck, whom a number of his biographers even credit with the inspiration behind Tristan und Isolde? He had always felt that his wife, who, however much she may have “deserved his respect,” was in his eyes “completely unsuited” to him15 and lacked all understanding for his art: “What will you say,” he asked Liszt in March 1853,

  when I tell you that I have never enjoyed the true happiness of love? I now spend my life poised between privation and a resigned regard for the limitations of the people who are closest to me, people who with each passing day are less and less able to understand and comprehend me! I cannot and will not cause open offence here (since my own heart would suffer as a result—habit is an undeniably potent force!), but I must at least be able to acquire the means to withdraw from this desolation from time to time in order to unfold my wings unhindered and unchecked.16

  Mathilde Wesendonck promised to requite Wagner for this feelings of desolation. She was twenty-two when she arrived in Zurich in 1851 and the following year heard Wagner conduct Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and his own Tannhäuser Overture: “I shall never forget the impression of the first rehearsal [. . .] in the darkened auditorium of the old Company Hall in Zurich,” she wrote enthusiastically. “It was a veritable frenzy of happiness, a revelation.”17 The young Frau Wesendonck wanted to be more than just a mother, more than just a trophy wife in tourist centers and elegant spas. Rather, she saw herself as a patron of the arts, with poetic aspirations of her own, and in this respect she exerted a powerful appeal on Wagner. Until the Wesendonck Villa was completed in the summer of 1857, the family occupied a suite of rooms in Zurich’s fashionable Hôtel Baur au Lac, so it cannot have appeared unseemly if Wagner visited her there on a regular basis over an extended period of time. As she was later pleased to recall: “What he composed in the morning he would play on my grand piano in the afternoon, checking over what he had written.”18

  Friendly contacts between the two couples were slowly forged, the Wesendoncks inviting Wagner to various functions that Minna, too, often attended. Two years were to pass before Wagner began work on the first complete draft of act 1 of Die Walküre, the sketches of which contain the infatuated abbreviations to which we have already referred. As we have seen, this draft, which was completed on September 1, 1854, is the only one to contain these coded messages, although it may be worth mentioning in this context that in September 1855 Mathilde gave birth to a son, Guido. A second son, Karl, followed in April 1857. In neither case does this suggest that the Wesendoncks were drifting apart as a couple. Conversely, Wagner’s “Annals”—the brief outline of his life that he kept between Easter 1846 and the end of 1868—contain an entry for September 1855: “Foul temper, especially toward the Wesend[oncks]. Refused to be a godfather because it would be unlucky.”19

  Events such as these appear to have done little to undermine the friendship between artists on the part of Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck. Indeed, the continuing closeness of that friendship is reflected in a single detail: throughout the time that he was in Zurich, Mathilde would ink over large sections of the composition sketches of Wagner’s works, which he himself had prepared in pencil. This task, which was later assumed by Cosima, required both a sympathetic understanding of the nature of the work and a good deal of patience. At this point it is worth mentioning a curious entry in the composition sketch for the third act of Tristan und Isolde, on which Wagner began work in April 1859: “One has to help the child a little.” Later corrections had made this passage difficult to decipher, obliging Wagner to intervene and correct Mathilde’s inking over of the notes. This, at least, is the interpretation proposed by Ulrich Bartels, who has devoted an entire study to these sketches.20 But how can this be so? By April 1859, Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck were living hundred of miles apart, with no real contact between them. More likely is the hypothesis that it was Wagner who inked over this passage and that he imagined himself back in the days when he and his muse had still been in very close physical contact.

  Of course, he hoped that this intense relationship between artists would develop into a no less passionate affair, but it seems highly unlikely that his dream came true—not that this may have prevented Mathilde from occasionally playing with fire.21 While writing out the score of Das Rheingold using Mathilde’s gold pen, Wagner may still have harbored concrete hopes reflected in his outburst in one of his letters to Liszt: “Everything is seething inside me and making music. It is—oh! I am in love!—and such a divine faith inspires me that I myself no lon
ger have need of hope!”22 But it seems likely that Wagner’s hopes will have faded after his initial enthusiasm had passed. More importantly, his art, too, was increasingly being drawn down into the eddying waters of world-denial in the course of his years in Zurich. During the long period when Tristan und Isolde lay fallow in his thoughts—in other words, from the autumn of 1854 to the late summer of 1857—Wagner not only took a detailed interest in the philosophy of Schopenhauer but drew up a prose sketch for a stage work, Die Sieger (The Victors, WWV 89), that was inspired by the theme of redemption through renunciation.23 A single musical theme has also survived. This period additionally found Wagner toying with the idea of introducing Parsifal into the third act of Tristan und Isolde. In the event, this idea was not pursued any further, not least because Wagner was already thinking of an independent work on the subject of Parsifal’s quest for the Grail.

  By now Wagner was once again powerfully drawn to his old subject of “redemption through destruction”: love was no longer synonymous with fulfillment, as it presumably had been in his initial conception of Tristan und Isolde, but was associated above all with torment. Here, too, Wagner’s desire to distance himself from Siegfried makes sense, for what would have been the point of ending the third act with an impassioned love duet for Siegfried and Brünnhilde on the sun-drenched heights of the Valkyries’ rock, when all would be set at naught in the ensuing Götterdämmerung in keeping with Wagner’s Schopenhauerian view that in the course of the Ring, love, initially hailed as “uniquely capable of bringing us love,” had come to be seen as “utterly and completely annihilating.”24 A similar degree of skepticism is found in a more or less contemporary pencil sketch that contains a revised version of Brünnhilde’s peroration: here, too, there is the same Buddhist tendency to deny the world.