Tristan und Isolde

Tristan und Isolde is a musical masterpiece of unmatched proportions. I mean this not only because of Wagner's groundbreaking advances in harmonic vocabulary but also by dint of the opera's unparallelled expressiveness. It's best for me to elaborate on the latter quality first.

Music scholars generally agree that, up to the mid-19th century, Ludwig Van Beethoven was the composer most successful in injecting his own personality, or psyche, into his music. His late string quartets and piano sonatas are so idiosyncratic that they are like a musical diary of the composer. Well, Wagner shot past all the earlier efforts that Beethoven had endeavored in this aspect, making operas like The Ring, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal the most personal expressions of ego in the history of Art. Now, when I write "ego", I don't mean in the sense of, say, Paganini's violin virtuosics; Paganini was often more an example of one-sided ego gratification standing in the way of multi-dimensional personality expression.

In the case of the aforementioned operas, Wagner powerfully imposes both his unique personality and will upon the person experiencing the opera. It's like meeting a story teller whom uses his own individual attributes to make a story even better, to make that story completely his. The storyteller's personality would leave you no choice but to surrender your own, in order to fully absorb and benefit in the telling. Encountering a story told from such a person would make it so you couldn't hear that story in any other medium without longing for the original personality who presented it to you.

But Tristan und Isolde is even better than that. The opera is a window into Wagner, even when performed by different ensembles, all over the world.

Wagner intended Tristan und Isolde to be his own, unique musical representation of desire, or will, itself. There is very little relief musically throughout the opera, because there's very little relief from desire in any person's life, at least in Occidental culture. Wagner's goal of the pure representation of desire in music might seem a bit dubious at first, but one can understand his motivations better through research of the philosophical system he was basing his work upon. This system was the product of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. I personally found it helpful to have an understanding of Schopenhauer's philosophy, in order to get all I could of the late Wagner operas, and I reccomend to the novice at least a basic grasp of those principles. I can help with that here.

But first, to more fully illustrate the extent of the influence of Schopenhauer upon Wagner, I'd like to point out two, nearly identical, quotes concerning metaphysics and music. The first is from Wagner, after having been introduced to Schopenhauer's philosophy:

"What music expresses is eternal, infinite, and ideal; she expresses not the passion, love, desire, of this or that individual in this or that condition, but Passion, Love, Desire itself...in such infinitely carried phrases as lie in her unique possession and are foreign and unknown to any other tongue."

and, earlier, from Schopenhauer's classic philosophical tome, "World as Will and Representation":

"Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain. delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives."

We can surmise from the above that Wagner brought a Schopenhauerian state of mind to the writing of Tristan und Isolde. So much so that it seems from his diaries and letters he convinced himself his mission would be to deliberately apply the philosopher's Weltanschauung to the arts (namely, his). Luckily, Wagner injected his own take on those ideas, which we will go into later.

First, let's delve into Schopenhauer's views of music and metaphysics:

"...we may regard the phenomenal (sensual) world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing-will, the fundamental world-essence, expressing itself as nature indirectly and indistinctly as through Platonic ideals, but immediately and subtley in music as will-in-itself".

Schopenhauer's philosophy could be seen as reductionist, that is, he sought through his devices to reduce all experience to a monadal concept, which he called the noumenon. Webster' dictionary defines "noumenon" as:

"The of itself unknown and unknowable rational object, or thing in itself, which is distinguished from the phenomenon through which it is apprehended by the senses, and by which it is interpreted and understood."

Schopenhauer believed the noumenon equalled the will to live in an individual; that is, stripped of any phenomenal ornamentations, the whole of our individual experience boils down to the will to live, and this experience itself is a window into the big picture, the "World Will" that exists also completely outside of our experience. Quote:

"All possible efforts, excitements, and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that which reason itself includes in the wide negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies (in music), but...always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon; the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon, without the body."

"...music expresses in a perfectly universal language, in a homogeneous material...and with the greatest determinateness and truth, the inner nature, the in-itself of the world, which we think under the concept will, because will is its most direct manifestation."

There is a helpful map of how the noumenon and phenomenon are related at this excellent University of Texas Tristan und Isolde site: .

Eric Chafe, author of "The Tragic and the Ecstatic" (one of the definitive books of Tristan und Isolde scholarship), writes that Schopenhauer's theories regarding the

"...analogies of music and the movement of the will...speaks of the kinds of musical devices that are central to the language of Tristan: delayed resolution of dissonance and avoidance of tonal closure as the counterpart of unfulfilled desire, sudden modulation to a distant key as a simile of death, minor key adagios as the expression of suffering, and the like".

The dissonances throughout Tristan und Isolde signify the tension of desire, a tension only resolved through death (though Schopenhauer would have argued that the world as Will never dies). The non-resolving nature of much of the music in the opera requires the listener to focus him or herself beforehand. Here are an excellent set of quotes from the online paper, "The Guardian", which further elucidate the dense nature of the opera's music (the article is quoted with the express permission of its author, Tim Ashley):

"The lovers' unfulfillable passion finds expression in music that hovers in suspended animation between arousal and climax. If music is itself the embodiment of cosmic Will, then it must remain in an unceasing state of flux, perpetually changing and never finding melodic or harmonic resolution. The entire score consists of protracted chromatic dissonances from which neither the characters nor the listener can escape, and the only responses possible are rejection of the work in its entirety or total immersion."

So, be prepared to really listen to Tristan und Isolde, with minimal distractions, because this is easily Wagner's most difficult opera to absorb. One of the things that coincidentally reinforces this assertion and underscores the groundbreaking nature of the opera, is the fact that there were as many negative as positive reviews of it when it first was performed (kind of like my Lyraka cd laughing). In fact, more than one opera house at the time deemed it "unfit for performance". But soon it was recognized for what it was: an explosively innovative work of genius. Many consider it to be the most important work by Wagner, and musically this is quite understandable: nowhere (not even in late era Beethoven) had unresolving harmonies and hard to ascertain keys been used to such monumental effect, in a cohesive way. Where the "post modern" composers like Shostakovich took the influence to often unlistenable extremes, Wagner, despite the aforementioned intense dissonances and purposefully weak cadential structures, kept his opera sounding coherent and perfectly paced throughout.

Mr. Ashley offers another take on how Schopenhauer's thinking influenced Wagner's writing (once more from his Guardian article):

"Schopenhauer rationalised both Wagner's experience and Tristan und Isolde's denouement. The "gloomy prophet" (as Nietzsche called Schopenhauer) had a quasi-Buddhistic vision of the world as driven by an implacable cosmic energy called Will, which links the phenomenal universe in an eternal flux of cause and effect. Desire and volition are perpetually unsatisfied. The only release lies in the voluntary rejection of the strivings of Will and the dissolution of the self in what Schopenhauer, using eastern terminology, calls Nirvana, and which Wagner, in Tristan, calls "the entirety of the moving breath of the world".

Finally, I feel that this next Ashley quote sums up the whole, Gothic morbidity of the opera well:

"The equation of love and sex with death, around which the opera notoriously pivots, is one reason why Tristan und Isolde remains such a uniquely disturbing experience. Wagner was, of course, working within 19th-century cultural and social parameters that frequently demanded that those - particularly women - who broke with social convention and openly expressed desire should come to a sticky end. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are two prime examples, and like them, it is Isolde who sets in motion the work's catastrophic chain of events. Compared with Tolstoy and Flaubert, however, Wagner is extreme. Some have assumed that he portrays the love of Tristan and Isolde as a union of souls capable of transcending the grave, like that of Cathy and Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights, but he goes one step further. His lovers feel a desire for each other so intense that the physical world cannot contain it and its only fulfilment lies in their voluntarily embracing the "supreme pleasure" (the closing words) of the total dissolution of identity, being and life. The Renaissance conceit that called orgasm "the little death" is seemingly pushed to its absolute extreme."

How much more Heavy Metal can you get?

In Act II, the lovers use the words day and night metaphorically. "Day" signifies the light of everyday concerns: the rules and rulers; words in and of themselves; social mores; desire itself; being governed by the abstract. The night represents what is only of the heart: giving into what is felt with no (light-of-day intruding) reservations; surrender of will; letting oneself be taken away with the moment... one could say: love without parents. Tristan asserts to Isolde that it is only in the night that they can be completed, without separation.

It is with ironic intent that when the lovers speak of the "highest joy of love," a resounding dissonance in the orchestra sounds, forcefully shattering the night they gave reign to with inexorable daylight.

It's rare that I get so profoundly moved as to have extreme shivers. That's what this opera gives me. There are few more heavy metal moments in the history of music as Isolde's gusting in the first act, or the Liebestod at the end. I reccomend the Daniel Barenboim-conducted Bayreuth dvd of this opera, and the Karl Böhm conducted cd set featuring the most Metal of sopranos, Birgitt Nilsson. Stellar Metal indeed! A great studio recording is the cd conducted by Carlos Kleiber, with Margaret Price singing the female lead.

I discover something new from this opera with each listen.

Tristan und Isolde had a huge effect on composers like Mahler, DeBussy, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Schoenberg...even Stravinsky (though he'd never admit it).

To Be Continued