by Martin Geck
Andreas Dorschel claims that behind Tristan und Isolde lies an “infatuated enthusiasm” for the sort of “return to archetypal oneness” that Wagner shared with the German romantics, but which was bound to be repellent to a writer like Schopenhauer.51 According to Dorschel, this contradiction is inherent in the very subject: “Perhaps the music, as art, conjuring up the moment of supreme happiness in Isolde’s love-death, is forced to say ‘yes’ where in order to be philosophically logical, it should have said a most emphatic ‘no.’”52 In this sense Wagner’s music presents us with the force of a love that motivates the action, keeping it moving forward from first to last.
The composer has no need to be ashamed of such contradictions, of course, for although Tristan und Isolde cannot be salvaged as a coherent philosophical work, we are under no obligation to rescue it in this way. Unlike the Ring, the fascination it exudes rests not on the depiction of a baleful system but on an underlying message that we would do best not to examine too closely. Rather, we should simply allow the work’s powerful images to impinge upon us, for few of today’s audiences will regard the world of Tristan and Isolde as a fascinating and viable alternative to the deceitful contemporary world in the way that they may have done in Wagner’s day, when moral pressures in terms of marriage were arguably so great that attempts to break free could plausibly be accepted as rash and in some cases fatal, as they are in Tristan und Isolde and in Fontane’s Effi Briest. If we look more closely at Wagner and at his own marriage with Minna, he appears to have been more than just the philanderer that his enemies are fond of claiming but he was also a husband who, while occasionally deluding himself about his own motives, clearly thought in terms of strict moral categories and, where the subject of infidelity was concerned, wrestled with his conscience.
Such is the liberalism of today’s society that the subject of adultery can no longer be invested with a metaphysical dimension in the way that Wagner was able to do. Even so, Tristan und Isolde contains more than a mere disquisition on marital infidelity: it examines our longings for something different, for the sanctity of absolute love and self-surrender. Wagner’s attempt to give this longing a voice through the medium of his quasi-religious approach to art has lost little of its fascination, even though the emphasis must now lie on the element of “art” rather than on “religion.” In other words, we allow the longing for the absolute to affect us on an aesthetic level and are less drawn to this theme than to a work of art that allows us to experience for ourselves archetypal scenes that no longer have any real place in today’s enlightened society.
It is not unimportant, of course, that in Tristan und Isolde two such existential aspects of our lives as love and death are at stake and revealed in all their nakedness with a rawness found in few other stage works. But it is sufficient to know their essential stages: the love potion is used in act 1 to fuel the dramatic action, followed by the impassioned night of love in act 2 and, in act 3, by the hero’s slow and painful death as a consequence of his unbridled passion and by the transfiguration of self-sacrificial love in the form of the culminating apotheosis.
The love potion that Brangäne serves up instead of the poison that the lovers are expecting is not what Thomas Mann described as a “mere device for liberating a passion that already exists (in fact the lovers might as well be drinking plain water).”53 It also has a number of important functions in terms of the listener’s perception of the action, for we no longer need to follow and understand the complex tale that until now has prevented Tristan and Isolde from falling into each other’s arms but can instead embrace a myth for which “absolute passion” is a given. Yet it is also a myth that ends in disaster or, at best, in disillusionment and which is therefore far from being timeless. In short, it is both an ancient, primeval myth and at the same time a myth for today, one that all listeners carry around within them.
This is enough for us to be able to follow the work, which ultimately is not about logically intelligible processes or even a rigorous juxtaposition of events. Taken to its extreme limits, this implies that the individual elements that make up the plot—the folly of love, its fulfillment, and its inevitable torment—could be presented to us in a different order in keeping with the law of bricolage that Claude Lévi-Strauss has imputed to most mythological narratives: what matters is not the way in which the individual structural elements follow on from one another but that they occur at all. In the case of Tristan und Isolde, this means that we are not held in a state of breathless suspense by the unfolding action, because far too little happens for this to be a viable possibility. No, we are fascinated, rather, by Wagner’s magnificent ability to tease the subtlest of moods from an altogether extreme relationship. He himself stressed that while working on the subject he plunged “into the inner depths of mental processes,” where “life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, hang on nothing but the inner stirrings of the soul.”54 In his edition of Wagner’s collected writings, Julius Kapp argued prosaically but aptly that Wagner’s language is marked by a “brevity restricted to a few key words,” thereby taking him “to the very limit of what is dramatically permissible” and frequently appealing “more to his listeners’ presentiment and feelings than to their intellect.”55
This is true of all operas, of course, and yet a comparison between Tristan und Isolde and Wagner’s other stage works reveals just how extreme his approach has become in this particular case. It is no accident that the French symbolists made such great play of the libretto of Tristan und Isolde, finding in it an ideal model for the poésie pure that implies a type of verse based on the actual sounds of the language. Stéphane Mallarmé’s poems, for example, are concerned with the magic of language and its sonorities rather than objects and concepts. Of course, Wagner’s libretto cannot avoid recounting the action of the drama, but the words are clearly not intended to bridge the gap between action and music. Rather, they form an alliance with the music that is unusual and novel even for a musician as fond of experimentation as Wagner was.
Mallarmé even dubbed Wagner a “poète français” and sought to create a kind of poetry that would be “not unlike the multiplicity of cries in an orchestration.”56 For his part, Wagner entrusts his “cries” to a real orchestra, but for whole stretches of the work he merges poem and music, voices and orchestral sounds to create a single entity. When a willing listener hears the phrases “Ohne Wähnen sanftes Sehnen, ohne Bangen süß Verlangen; ohne Schmachten hold Umnachten” (Without illusion, gentle yearning; without fear, sweet desire; without pining, lovely dusk enfolding us), he or she may find it hard to distinguish between words and music but will surrender instead to the flood of a single all-encompassing sensation such as an infant might experience when hearing a lullaby.
It is no accident that Mallarmé’s “Hommage” to Wagner refers to “hiéroglyphes,”57 “divine symbols” in the sense understood by Friedrich Schlegel. Such hieroglyphic symbols are not deciphered in the manner of a script but require a “particular interpretation through the medium of art.”58 When, at the end of act 2, Tristan replies to Marke’s remonstrations, “My king, that I cannot say; and what you ask, you can never discover,” this is entirely in keeping with Wagner’s tendency to privilege the unspoken and inexpressible, which he does not least through the medium of music: “In truth the greatness of a poet is mostly to be measured by what he leaves unsaid, letting us say to ourselves in silence the thing that is unspeakable,” Wagner wrote in “Music of the Future.” “It is the musician who makes what has been kept silent ring out aloud, and the unmistakable form of his sounding silence is his endless melody.”59 In the private diary that he kept for Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner likewise referred to the “profound art of resonant silence” found in act 2 of Tristan und Isolde.60
By describing the work simply as a “Handlung” (action), Wagner made it abundantly clear that the term “musical drama” that he used, albeit reluctantly, elsewhere was no longer possible here: what matters
is not the dramatic construction but events that transcend the meager onstage action and raise that action to a level at which acting and being acted upon merge to create an “action” that cannot be reduced to a single concept but tends, rather, to follow the flood of musical sounds. Ernst Bloch felt that he was in the presence of a “tremendous adagio into which almost nothing antithetical penetrates from the outside such that Tristan or Isolde could even become aware of it as conflict, catastrophe.”61
Bloch compares this “profoundly inward dreaming,” which he experiences as “our own,” with a different kind of unconsciousness, namely, that of the Ring, which he attacks with some virulence in his early Spirit of Utopia: “The music here goes almost completely over into vacuity and dismal animality. Any prospect within this work that could lead out of the narrowness of personhood does so only by serving up a world of cardboard, greasepaint, and irredeemable heroic posturing.”62 But by taking as its subject the “metadramatic lyricism of redemption,”63 Tristan und Isolde makes up for an objectification lacking any historical, philosophical, or metaphysical dimension.
In this, Bloch reveals himself as a true romantic—very much in the spirit of Wagner himself, for Wagner, too, asks whether existence has any meaning: within an apparently meaningless world, is there anything that might offer us redemption and provide “ultimate assurance and a place of refuge within our fragile existence”?64 For the romantics, such a haven was conceivable only in art, and even then it could exist only in the form of a paradox: the infinite—the philosophical sign of “redemption”—can be demonstrated only in confrontation with the finite. And it was here that music came into play. Musical figures are finite, but to the extent that they can be constantly transformed, they tend toward the infinite. Music gives us an inkling of the infinite, but without ever actually attaining it.
Compositions in which the mutability of the musical material is raised to the level of the highest structural principle are particularly well suited to this paradigm. Long before Tristan und Isolde, Wagner had struck out in the direction of what we might call the “liquefaction” of musical processes: by turning his back on rigid traditional structural principles at an early date and using constantly mutating leitmotifs in the Ring, he had prepared for Tristan und Isolde in not unimportant ways, even if Bloch was reluctant to acknowledge this. And yet Bloch’s polemical attack on the Ring is by no means unjustified, for it highlights decisive differences between the Ring and Tristan und Isolde, even if the language that he uses is overemphatic. These are differences of which Wagner, too, was aware. Whereas the constant changes to the Ring’s motifs are so closely bound up with the action that the music may be said to be fettered to the drama, the music can unfold more freely in the later work. As Roger Scruton has observed, “The motives in Tristan are quite unlike the characteristic motives of the Ring cycle, being devoted to the expression of an inner life rather than to the depiction of an epic mythological saga.”65 Not only are there no graphic leitmotifs directly related to the plot, including those associated with the sword, the ring, and Valhalla, but the leitmotif technique found in the Ring is no longer as obvious, having been replaced by a flood of sound that rarely abates and that Wagner hailed as his “endless melody.”
Sebastian Urmoneit has claimed that the two “archetypal motifs of the action” are Eros and Thanatos and that these are reflected in two “basic melodic motifs” from which everything else proceeds, the motifs in question being “the descending chromatic line which, stated at the very beginning, expresses suffering” and “the rising line of the yearning motif that stands in opposition to it.”66 His claim is undoubtedly oversimplistic, and yet the difference between Tristan und Isolde and the Ring is plain to see: in the Ring, “nature,” as depicted in the prelude to Das Rheingold, develops into an increasingly complex “social” structure, whereas the action in Tristan und Isolde is complex from the very outset, a point illustrated by the combination of the motifs associated with suffering and yearning in the opening bars of the work. It remains related, however, to the same simple underlying conflict between desire and abstention and, as such, is entirely in the spirit of the “endless” theme that affects society in its almost proverbial way and produces nothing that is truly new.
This is not to say that Wagner’s “endless melody” ignores the course of the action. Quite the opposite, in fact, for the subtlety of the links between the music and the events that are simultaneously unfolding onstage goes beyond anything achieved in the Ring. We need merely glance at the countless corrections that Wagner made in his composition sketch to Tristan’s melancholy reference to his parents’ fate (“When he sired me and died, she, dying, gave birth to me”) to appreciate the extent to which he struggled to find the right musical expression for every single moment in the action, especially at those points where this expression is hard to grasp not just textually but musically too.67
An entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary is worth quoting in this context: “In the evening R. sang something from Tristan and said, ‘This Tristan has a color all its own, it is mauve, a sort of lilac.’”68 (Proust, for whom Wagner was “a constituent part of his creativity,” wrote À la recherche du temps perdu “in pink.”69) And Tristan und Isolde is all about color and changes of color that are sometimes abrupt but more frequently subtle. Ernst Kurth has provided a technical description of the “iridescent change of color” of many sequences of chords.70 That Wagner uses predominantly rare color mixtures, introducing a note of greater purity only at particular climaxes such as “O sink’ hernieder,” “So starben wir,” and “Mild und leise,” is well illustrated by the opening bars of the prelude, where the motif heard here expresses a complex mixture of feelings in the form of the dulce malum of which we have already spoken.
These mixtures stem from a specific combination of harmony and instrumentation. In order to be able to present them convincingly, Wagner—like every great artist—had his sights fixed firmly on a characteristic polarity. In order to be understood, he used a traditional musical rhetoric that ascribes specific musical idioms to specific human emotions. And in order to say something new, he expanded its range of expression to a degree that even today remains unprecedented. Previously, composers and their audiences had been able to get by with the admittedly naïve view that music reflected specific emotions, whereas the sounds of Tristan und Isolde alerted listeners to emotional states of greater complexity, states of whose existence they had hitherto been unaware. This is not only true of Tristan und Isolde, of course, but also applies to other works by Wagner and to the music of other composers. But in the case of Tristan und Isolde, the listener has a greater chance—or, in the eyes of Wagner’s detractors, runs a greater risk—of being enticed into a web of diffuse emotional and psychological states on which the music alone can impose any sense of order. For, on the one hand, the plot is insufficiently taut to provide a firm support, allowing the music, which might otherwise be mere background music of a kind found in the cinema, to assume control. And on the other hand there are no readily recognizable musical structures such as recitatives and arias that might provide any objective support—even the “poetic-musical periods” that impose a sense of order on the score of the Ring are far less evident here.
It is easy to draw a parallel between the plot of Tristan und Isolde, with its metaphor of Eros and Thanatos, and Freud’s theory of the unconscious, but it would be more profitable to examine the music and see to what extent its irrational nature predisposes it to invite associations with Freud’s id and Schopenhauer’s blind world-will. Wagner knew why, as a composer, he was drawn to Schopenhauer’s worldview and why he was able to write to Mathilde Wesendonck shortly after completing the work:
Just consider my music, with its delicate, oh so delicate, mysteriously flowing humors penetrating the most subtle pores of feeling to reach the very marrow of life, where it overwhelms everything that looks like sagacity and the self-interested powers of self-preservation, sweeping away all that bel
ongs to the delusive madness of personality and leaving behind it only that wondrously sublime sigh with which we confess to our sense of powerlessness—: how shall I be a wise man when it is only in such a state of raving madness that I am altogether at home?71
To achieve this aim, Wagner needed to employ the sort of effects that had previously not existed, since they tested to their very limits existing theories of harmony and instrumentation, and while it makes no sense to dub the composer of Tristan und Isolde the father of atonal music, not least because in the work’s most rhapsodic moments he largely eschews the chromatic writing and enharmonic procedures traditionally associated with the score, we may undoubtedly describe him as the father of new music, inasmuch as he takes to its furthest extreme the textbook, school-based thinking of the time: in the years around 1860 he may not have been the first or only composer to go down this particular road, but he was certainly the most influential.