by Martin Geck
We need to take seriously Wagner’s own interpretation of the prelude to act 1 of Tristan und Isolde, which dates from 1859: “Yearning! Yearning, insatiable longing ever reborn, thirsting and repining! The only release was to die, to perish, to fade away, nevermore to awaken!” And further:
The musician who chose this theme to introduce his love drama was bound to feel entirely at one with that most absolute and unrestricted element that is music, so that his sole concern was how he might best restrict himself, inasmuch as the theme he had chosen could never be wholly exhausted. And so he depicted that sense of insatiable longing which, rising to but a single climax in a single long-drawn breath, passes from the most timid confession and tender attraction to anxious longing, hope and apprehension, plaints and desires, rapture and torment and, finally, to the most powerful impulse, the most violent attempt to find that breach in the dyke that might open a way for the inexhaustible craving heart to enter the sea of love’s endless delight. In vain!25
It was no accident that Wagner was at this point pursuing the plan of following up this definitive “In vain!” with the denial of the self-tormenting will in Die Sieger, as he explained to Liszt in July 1856: “You must first have digested my Tristan, especially its third act [. . .], for only then will Die Sieger become clearer to you.”26 Instead of writing Die Sieger, Wagner composed Parsifal and in doing so killed two birds with one stone, Parsifal’s motto (“Strong is the magic of him who desires, but stronger is that of him who renounces”)27 being his response not only to Tristan und Isolde but also to the Ring.
Mathilde Wesendonck would have preferred Die Sieger to Parsifal. When she heard this last-named work in Bayreuth in 1882, she was afraid “that the world would revert to Catholicism! You can laugh at me if you like, but I’d rather have had ‘nirvana.’”28 And so she went on to write her own verse legend on the theme of compassion, calling it Unter schatt’gen Mango-Bäumen (Under shady mango trees) and turning Parsifal into Devadatta and Gurnemanz into the Buddha.29 As for Tristan und Isolde, however, Wagner regarded his muse as irreplaceable: she was an actual or virtual confidante, without whose help he may never have been able to tell what he called this “terrible tale.”30
Writers have asked why this “terrible tale” does not end when the curtain comes down on act 2. “Why,” wonders Nike Wagner—and her question is more than merely theoretical—
do we need a third act in this opera? Why must we—and the singer—endure the anguish and shouts, the ravings and delirium of such a badly injured man? [. . .] The story, after all, is finished, the two of them discover love in the garden and enjoy the ecstatic vision of death now that there is no longer any help for them on earth: “Now banish fear, lovely death, yearningly longed-for love-death!” sing Tristan and Isolde, rising to a paroxysm of passion at the words: “Glowing white-hot in our breast, love’s supreme delight!” Brangäne’s scream then rends the night air, the music’s tempo and temperature change, and “desolate day” irrupts in the form of Marke, Melot, and their attendants, all of them dressed for a hunt. The rest of act 2 provides, as it were, the consummation of this process as the lovers are unmasked, the king reveals his helpless dismay in the face of his favorite vassal’s betrayal, and Tristan throws himself on Melot’s sword, precipitating the final curtain.31
Even the mystic union with the universe invoked by Isolde in her final words in act 3
In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tönenden Schall,
in des Welt-Athems
wehendem All—
ertrinken—
versinken—
unbewußt—
höchste Lust!
[In the surging swell, in the echoing sound, in the world-breath’s wafting universe—to drown—to sink—unaware—highest bliss!]
is already adumbrated in act 2:
O sink’ hernieder,
Nacht der Liebe,
gieb Vergessen,
daß ich lebe;
nimm mich auf
in deinen Schooß,
löse von
der Welt mich los!
[O sink upon us, night of love, let me forget that I am alive; take me to your bosom and release me from the world!]
Thus the lovers sing, before continuing with the words
wonne-hehrstes Weben,
liebe-heiligstes Leben,
nie-wieder-Erwachens
wahnlos
hold bewußter Wunsch.
[Weft of joy most sublime, life of holiest love, sweetly conscious wish that we may nevermore awake.]
In this context it is no accident that Isolde’s “Transfiguration” (the traditional term “Liebestod” is not Wagner’s), beginning with the words “Mild und leise wie er lächelt” (How gently and softly he smiles), harks back to a passage in the Love Duet in act 2:
So starben wir,
um ungetrennt,
ewig einig,
ohne End’,
ohn’ Erwachen,
ohne Bangen,
namenlos
in Lieb’ umfangen,
ganz uns selbst gegeben
der Liebe nur zu leben.
[And so we died in order that undivided, one forever, without end, never waking, never fearing, namelessly embraced in love, given wholly to one another, we might live for our love alone!]
In his encomiastic tribute to Tristan und Isolde, Ernst Bloch makes no secret of his belief that
one has already heard all this in the great final duet of Act Two, so much more beautifully than in the orchestral writing at the end of the third act. [. . .] It must be said, with all due respect, that the so very deliberately inserted and seemingly discrete final orchestral piece “Isoldens Liebestod” begins to decline into insufferable softness, into unmystical sweetness, which—as with the arpeggiated triads, with the sixty-fold celebration at the conclusion of Parsifal that refuses to end—threatens to drop all the more steeply from its tremendous height as a proper, theatrical ending tries to ally itself with the entirely different definitiveness of the birth of redemption from the spirit of music.32
If Wagner—an astutely intelligent man of the theater—had stuck to his original conception, however problematical such a reconstruction may be, he might have written a musical drama in two acts, with Tristan and Isolde dying in each other’s arms at the end of the second act, which would then have ended in the pitch-black garden in the spirit of early romanticism. Evidently such an ending struck Wagner as too positive in the wake of his conversion to Schopenhauer. As a result, he needed the third act to articulate his thoughts on the “curse of love” to which he refers in one of his sketches for the later libretto.33 As Egon Voss has written, hitting the nail on the head, “The monument that Wagner wanted to raise to love in writing Tristan und Isolde was intended as a deterrent.”34 Only after act 3 has demonstrated this point in the most graphic terms can Isolde’s “Transfiguration” bring the work to an end in the spirit of a homecoming myth.
No matter how much or how little Wagner was influenced by Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, which he read “like one of the Scriptures,”35 there is no denying the consistency with which he continued to explore his theme of “redemption through destruction,” for the penitent Tannhäuser who ultimately finds salvation through the Virgin Mary is here transformed into a desperate figure breathing his last in a feverish delirium without any obvious sign of divine grace. Whether we follow Ernst Bloch in seeing Isolde’s beatific transfiguration as a concession to the world of the theater or whether we interpret it as second-degree metaphysics in the spirit of the redemption motif that appears at the end of Götterdämmerung, the events that unfold in the castle courtyard at Kareol exhibit a painful realism that first and foremost affects our experience of time: Tristan’s wait for the ship that is coming to save him lasts around fifty minutes, including the introduction. As a result, it is no longer possible to speak of time onstage speeding up, since the listener experiences Tristan’s impatience in real time with an intensity t
hat is almost unbearable. The gesturally loaded music that accompanies his delirious fantasies has a different, but equally realistic dynamism.
It makes sense in this context that neither Heiner Müller (1993) nor Christoph Marthaler (2005) made any attempt to stage the work in Bayreuth in a historicist medieval setting or in the tradition of Wieland Wagner’s timeless mystery play about love and death. Each of them emphasized the experience of isolation, alienation, and decline, Müller expressly welcoming the fact that his reading of act 3 evoked associations of the “end of time” and “devastation” redolent of the world of Samuel Beckett.36 In Marthaler’s production, Tristan ends his life in a hospital bed, with no suggestion of any union between the lovers, whether ecstatic or “mild and gentle.” Quite the opposite, in fact: Marthaler’s aim was explicitly to exclude the utopian vision of the original.
Just as society in Wagner’s day was riven by contradictions, so the music of Tristan und Isolde is laid out along dialectic lines, for on the one hand it expresses the perpetually dissatisfied longing to which Wagner referred in his note on the prelude, while on the other hand it possesses a utopian element implying the momentary fulfillment of that longing. Such ambivalence has always enabled listeners to find heaven on earth in music, a belief abundantly illustrated by countless examples from Ovid to Gottfried and Shakespeare. Or take the Baroque poet Paul Fleming: “The voluptuous sound bewitches our senses and makes us sick with longing, yet by a woe that is sweet.”37 A musical equivalent would be the Christmas cantata on the late medieval carol In dulci jubilo by Fleming’s Baroque contemporary, the composer Dietrich Buxtehude, which ends with the line “Eya, wär’n wir da” (Oh, if only we were there). The words merely register the hope of heavenly joys to come, whereas the musical setting by the organist of Lübeck’s St. Mary’s Church treats the final word “da” (there) in an altogether unusual manner, repeating it a dozen times as if he wanted to cast the singers in the role of little children by a Christmas tree, their hopes having become a reality.
Wagner tackled this same dialectic in a very different way, of course, explaining to Mathilde Wesendonck that the final act of Tristan und Isolde was a “real intermittent fever—the deepest and most unprecedented suffering and yearning, and, immediately afterward, the most unprecedented triumph and jubilation.”38 He characterized the completed second act with the words “Life’s utmost fire flared up in it with such unspeakable ardor that it almost burned and consumed me.”39 And, commenting with hindsight, he described the work as a whole to Cosima:
You can understand that I felt the need, after writing these parts of the Nibelungen [i.e., Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and the first half of Siegfried], to leave this element of dreadfulness and write Tristan und Isolde, which was, so to speak, just a love scene; indeed, I thought of it as an Italian opera, that is to say, to be sung by Italian singers—and in Rio de Janeiro.40
Wagner was referring here to the fact that he briefly toyed with the idea of composing Tristan und Isolde for the Italian opera company of Dom Pedro II of Brazil, a Wagnerian who later attended the first Bayreuth Ring in 1876. But his playful expression conceals behind it a serious impulse, for on completing Die Walküre Wagner came increasingly to view the Ring as a “terrible” onus of superhuman proportions. The cycle was turning into a game of mythological chess involving a multiplicity of pieces that was threatening to overwhelm him. Perhaps only an artist can judge what must have been going through Wagner’s head at this time. After all, he was living in and through all his characters and was constantly concerned for their future.
Although the poem was complete, it was the music that determined the weal and woe of these characters. They had to be believable at every single moment and in every situation. Yet even if he had wanted to, the German composer could only dream of depicting his Siegfried, Wotan, and Brünnhilde in such a straightforward way as Verdi depicted characters such as Otello and Desdemona. Wagner returned to this subject on numerous occasions: while working on Parsifal, for example, he spoke to Cosima of his “need to push himself to the limit musically, since in the Nibelungen the requirements of the drama frequently forced him to restrict the musical expression.”41
Commentators who adopt a less insistently philosophical view of Tristan und Isolde than they do of the Ring certainly have Wagner on their side, and this begins with the characters: Brangäne, Kurwenal, and Melot are subsidiary figures of a kind that simply do not exist in the Ring, for although they propel the plot forward, they are largely irrelevant to the inner action. Even Marke, the deceived husband, can do little more than raise his hands in calm dismay, before lowering them again with equal ineffectuality. Everything revolves around the lovers. There are hundreds of books and articles on the nature of their love. Portentous terms such as “atheistic metaphysics,” “deathly erotic undertow,” “mystic union,” “metaphysics of fusion,” “return to archetypal oneness,” “oceanic feeling,” “erotic solipsism,” and “apotheosis of fulfillment,” as well as negative expressions such as a “symptom of decadence” and the “rigorous blueprint for a union between two neurotic individuals doomed in advance to fail” haunt the literature on Tristan und Isolde, spanning a range of interpretations of which it is hard to gain any overview.42 One writer even offers a clinically matter-of-fact analysis: “Tristan’s pathological characteristics, which we have related structurally to those of a borderline personality, acquire a degree of differentiation through the component of [Heidegger’s] existential philosophy that entitles us to coin the term ‘Tristan syndrome’ to describe this particular psychopathological type.”43
This analysis may be compared with the crass formulation by the German-American cultural historian Peter Gay, who locates the delirium associated with the work in the whole attitude to life of the bourgeois fin de siècle, noting that
its music heavily underscores its story, especially in the love scenes with its luxuriant themes and flowing rhythms rising, rising, and those final satiated moments with Tristan breathing his last in Isolde’s arms; it evokes the thrilling journey to what the French call the little death, which seals sexual intercourse happily completed. In such representations, the regressive pull toward primitive feelings is almost irresistible, sublimation far from complete, with the erotic sources of the composition unmistakable, consciously exploited.
The Wagnerian’s task, Gay goes on, is to sublimate his or her musical experience and “elevate the Master’s explorations of sensual appetites into the sphere of the sublime.”44
Readers may be tempted to distill a heady brew from all of these quotations and use it to create a coherent narrative, but they may also adopt the opposite course of singling out a particular theory and seeking to interpret the work on the basis of this one hypothesis alone, but in neither case will they get very far. Rather, we need to recognize that various approaches intersect here, and that although these lead to contradictions, this does not detract from Tristan und Isolde as a work of art. Among its most important motifs is that of Eros and Thanatos, a motif stretching back over several millennia to which Wagner himself alluded when describing the night of love in act 2: “Even the ancients placed a lowered torch in the hand of Eros as the genius of Death!”45 Wagner was sufficiently familiar with classical myth to have read about the primeval womb of the earth goddess Gaia and to know that everything emerges from this womb, only to return to it in the end: Eros symbolizes becoming, Thanatos fading away, the two of them merging in the cycle of creation.
Writing in his classic study Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Edgar Wind argued that “to die was to be loved by a god and partake through him of eternal bliss.”46 The gods’ amorous kisses had something fatal about them. Wagner drew a similar conclusion when discussing the final scene of Siegfried: “The kiss of love is the first intimation of death, the cessation of individuality, that is why a person is so terrified by it.”47 But it is precisely this dissolution of the self that is central to Tristan und Isolde: “You Isolde, Tristan I,
no more Isolde,” Isolde sings, while Tristan—in one of the few “duets” that Wagner felt able to acknowledge in the light of his aesthetic views at this period—replies: “Tristan you, I Isolde, no more Tristan!” And both of them conjure up the “ardently longed-for love-death.”
This brings us to Schopenhauer, who may not have influenced the work’s entire philosophical substructure but who certainly provided Wagner with the support that he needed while working on the score. Schopenhauer, too, regarded death as “the great opportunity no longer to be I.”48 Conversely, the idea of a love-death certainly did not have his approval. For him, sex was no more than an animalistic instinct designed to propagate the species. When it came to glorifying love, Wagner could not have found it easy to argue, knowing that Schopenhauer was looking over his shoulder. But, self-confident to a fault, he thought of writing to the Sage of Frankfurt at the end of 1858 and acquainting him with his conviction that “sexual love” offered “a means to salvation, leading to self-knowledge and denial of the will—and not just the individual will.”49
Schopenhauer would presumably have shaken his head in disbelief at this suggestion, but it seems that Wagner never sent his letter, for it survives only in the form of a draft. Nonetheless, Wagner’s “Venice Diary,” the entries of which were addressed to Mathilde Wesendonck, likewise refers to his intention of writing to Schopenhauer and persuading him to “correct his system” by pointing out the “path to salvation [. . .] which involves a total pacification of the will through love, and not through any abstract human love, but a love engendered on the basis of sexual love, i.e., the attraction between a man and a woman.”50 This conviction merely serves to point up the yawning gulf not only between Schopenhauer’s “system” and Wagner’s but also within Wagner’s own system, a gulf impossible to bridge even with the best will in the world. If the work were to have ended with act 2 and the love-death of its two main characters, it might have been possible to speak of love leading to a pacification of the will. But the third act then follows, bringing with it all its desolation and torment. And even if we choose to interpret Isolde’s “Transfiguration” as an example of the “pacification of the will,” this “love-death,” as it is erroneously called, has nothing to do with sex. Rather, it resembles a happy ending which, according to Wagner’s intentions, should really not exist at all, since Tristan’s self-lacerating torments, which are the result of sexual love, should be followed not by “supreme bliss” but by nirvana at best.
