by Susan Sontag
When lovers unite in opera, what they do, mainly, is utter the same words; they speak together, as one. Their words unite, rhyme, to the same music. Wagner’s libretto for Tristan und Isolde carries out this formal principle more literally and insistently than any other opera: the lovers return to echo each other’s words throughout. Their fullest exchange, in the garden of Act II, has them voluptuously repeating their words back to each other, competing in their expressions of desire to unite, to die, and their denunciations of light and day. Of course their texts are not identical—and neither, for all their desire to merge, even to exchange identities, are the two lovers. Tristan is given a more complex awareness. And having sung with Isolde of the bliss of their deathbound yearning in Act II, Tristan expresses another relation to death in the last act, in the form of a soliloquy in which he separates himself from Isolde, cursing love. It had been Tristan alone in Act II who dwelled ecstatically on the potion that flowed through him, that he drank with endless delight. Now in Act III the fluids he invokes are all bitter: “Liebestränen” (lovers’ tears) and the accursed potion, which he now proclaims in his delirious unraveling of the story’s deepest layer of emotion that he himself brewed.
THE CHARACTERISTIC, plot-generating situation in Wagner’s op eras is one that has gone on too long, and is infused with the anguished longing to terminate. (“Unending melody”—Wagner’s phrase for his distinctive musical line—is one formal equivalent of this essential subject of prolongation, of excruciation.) Blood flows unceasingly from Amfortas’s wound, but he can’t die. Meanwhile, his father, Titurel, the former Grail king, who already lies in his tomb, is being kept alive by the Grail ceremony. And ageless Kundry, painfully revived in each act, wants nothing more than to go back to sleep. Wagner turns the legend of Tristan and Isolde into an earlier, secular version of the longings expressed in Parsifal—with Tristan taking the lead. The Tristan of Act III is a proto-Amfortas: a suffering man who wants to die but can’t until, finally, he can. Men are given a more developed death wish than women. (Kundry, whose longing for extinction seems even stronger than Amfortas’s, is the exception.) Isolde tries to die only in Act I, when, with Tristan, she drinks the potion she believes to be poison, while Tristan actively provokes his death in all three acts, succeeding at the end by tearing the bandages from his wound when he is told that Isolde is approaching. Isolde even has a moment in Act II of doubt (or common sense), when she evokes “dies süsse Wörtlein: und” (this sweet little word: and), as in Tristan and Isolde. But won’t dying separate them? she asks. No, he answers.
Viewed from the narrowing and even more excruciating perspective of the last act, the opera is (or becomes) mostly Tristan’s story. Viewed more inclusively, as the story of both, Wagner’s version of the old Celtic legend has an arbitrariness in its dénouement that makes it closer in feeling to the traditional Japanese tragedy of the double suicide—the voluntary death of lovers whose situation is not entirely hopeless—than to, say, Romeo and Juliet. (And Wagner’s depiction of love as tormentingly painful, consciousness-dissolving yearning recalls sentiments in the love poetry of Heian Japan.) His Tristan and Isolde are not, as in Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem, star-crossed lovers thwarted by the standard obstacles: that the man has slain a close relative of the woman’s; that the woman is betrothed to an older male relative of the man’s to whom loyalty is owed. Wagner requires something beyond these objective impediments, whose importance signifies that the lovers are members of a society, a world. The world-transcending obstacle is, then, the very nature of love—an emotion always in excess of its object; insatiable. The eroticism that Wagner exalts is one that has to self-destruct.
When Marke arrives at the end, it is not to grasp for the first time the claims of this passion and now to wish, when it’s too late, as Capulets and Montagues do, that he had been more understanding. Having learned from Brangäne that the lovers were compelled by a love-philter to betray him, Marke (who functions as Tristan’s father, and in some early versions of the story is his father) has decided to release Isolde from her vow and let the lovers marry. But union is not what Tristan and Isolde want, what they ever wanted. They want the lights turned off. Isolde’s last words—the last words of the opera—are a description of losing consciousness: “ertrinken, versinken/unbewusst höchste Lust!” (drowning, sinking/unconscious supreme bliss!). The music overflows. Consciousness drowns.
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE is about being overcome, destroyed by feeling—and not only about extreme experience but intended to be one. That Wagner equates being satisfied or inspired with being overwhelmed is a typically Romantic idea of art, art that not only is about excess (Tristan and Isolde overwhelmed by their passion) but employs, in an almost homeopathic spirit, extravagant and outsized means, such as unusual bulk or duration. The element of ordeal for the audience in all this, even of risk, seemed only appropriate. A good performance of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner had predicted to Mathilde Wesendonk while composing the last act, is “bound to drive people mad.” One of Wagner’s favorite notions about his work was that only the strong could immerse themselves in it with impunity. When the first Tristan, the tenor Ludwig Schnorr, fell ill after the first performances in Munich in 1865, both he and Wagner worried that it would be said that he had been laid low by the role’s unprecedented exertions and intensities; and when Schnorr unexpectedly died a few weeks later, Wagner (and not only Wagner) felt that perhaps the opera had killed him.
Wagner was hardly the first composer to associate the lethal, at least metaphorically, with the lyrical. But previous notions of the lethal lyrical had focused on the singer. To the librettist with whom he was working on I Puritani, Bellini wrote, “Grave on your mind in adamantine letters: A musical drama must make people weep, shudder, and die through the singing.” The great singers were those who could provoke audiences to an ecstasy bordering on delirium, a standard that was set by Farinelli, Pacchierotti, and other celebrated castrati of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the first divas in the modern sense, whose voices made people swoon and weep and feel that they were being driven out of their senses, and whose appearance and extravagantly artificial manner were erotically captivating to both sexes. Napoleon declared, in praise of his favorite singer, that he felt he was going mad when he heard Crescentini sing. It is this longing to have one’s normal consciousness ravished by the singer’s art that is preserved in an irrepressible phenomenon usually dismissed as an oddity or aberration of the opera world: diva worship. The distinctively high-pitched adulation surrounding several sopranos (and a tenor or two) in every generation affirms this much-prized experience as granted by the voice, not merely the charms of celebrity and glamour.
Wagner opens a new chapter in this operatic tradition of creating beauty that is erotically troubling, soul-piercing—the difference being that the intensity has been heightened by becoming, as it were, diffused. Though borne by the singer’s voice, lyricism does not climax in the experience of the voice. Rather than being specifically, corporeally, identified with the singer’s voice as it floats above the music, it has become a property of the music as a whole, in which the voice is embedded. (This is what is sometimes called the symphonism of Wagner’s operas.)
Audiences have relished being excited, disturbed, troubled by the beauty of voices—their sweetness, their velocity. But there was, at least initially, considerable resistance to a dérèglement du sens produced by music as such. What the voice did seemed superhuman and as a display of virtuosity was, in itself, admirable. The sound produced by the castrati suggested something disembodied—the words “seraphic” and “heavenly” were often used to describe these voices, though the singers themselves were clearly objects of erotic fantasy as well. Wagner’s maddening lyricism had nothing seraphic about it, whatever the spiritual messages and “higher” feelings being urged on us by the words; if anything, it seemed to come from “below,” and, like the potion in the opera, to invite repressed feelings to flow forth. Berlioz de
scribed the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, where no voices yet sing, as one long “groaning and moaning.” Renouncing all the effects (and relief) of velocity, Wagner had chosen to slow down sequences of deep feeling that then either became enthralling or seemed unbearably oppressive. The Viennese music critic and leader of the anti-Wagnerians, Eduard Hanslick, said that the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde “reminds me of the Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.” Parsifal, he said, made him seasick. “There are no longer any real modulations but rather a perpetually undulating process of modulation so that the listener loses all sense of a definite tonality. We feel as though we were on the high seas, with no firm ground under our feet.” Yes. We are.
The new emotional, as distinct from lyrical, intensity that Wagner brought into opera owes most to the way he both amplifies and makes excruciatingly intimate (despite the epic settings) the distinctive mix of feelings depicted: lust, tenderness, grief, pity, euphoria, world-weariness. Wagner utterly transforms feelings that are staples in opera’s long tradition of representing exalted sentiments, such as the association of love and death. Hearts wounded by love, death that is preferable to separation from the beloved or the loss of love—this is the common coin of lovers’ plaints, of lovers’ ecstasies—long before Wagner, long before what we call Romanticism. Wagner, in Tristan und Isolde and elsewhere, made these old hyperboles of opera, understood to be expressive exaggerations, shatteringly literal. To speak nakedly and with unprecedented insistence about feeling, to be overwhelmingly intimate with audiences—Wagner’s sensualism, his emotionalism, were experienced as invasive—was new territory for art in the mid-nineteenth century, and it seems inevitable that such shamelessness (as it was then judged by many) be attached to the permissions given by opera’s rich, unabashed commitment to heightened states of feeling. “But for the opera I could never have written Leaves of Grass,” Whitman told a disciple late in life (though he meant Italian opera, not Wagner). The treatment of time is one of Wagner’s principal innovations: the extending of duration as a means of intensifying emotion. But the depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable are combined, in his greatest work, with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of emotion. It is this delicacy that may finally convince us that we are indeed in the presence of that rarest of achievements in art, the reinvention of sublimity.
Bruno Walter once said to Thomas Mann, as they were walking home after Walter had conducted a performance of Tristan und Isolde, “That isn’t even music any longer.” Meaning, it is more than music. Wagner thought he was offering some kind of transforming experience or idea that transcended mere art. (Of course, he considered his works much more than mere operas.) But such claims seem mainly like an idea of art, a peculiarly modern idea of art, in which there is a great deal of expressed impatience with art. When artists aren’t trying to subvert the art-status of what they do (saying, for instance, that it is really life), they often claim to be doing something more than art. (Religion? Therapy?) Wagner is an important part of this modern story of the inflation and coarsening of expectations about art, which has produced so many great works of art, among them Tristan und Isolde.
IT WAS OBSERVED from the beginning that listening to Wagner had an effect similar to consuming a psychotropic drug: opium, said Baudelaire; alcohol, said Nietzsche. And, as with all disinhibiting drugs, sometimes there were violent side effects. In the early years of Tristan und Isolde occasionally someone had to be evacuated from the theatre, fainting or vomiting, in the course of the performance. It is perhaps as hard now to imagine the impact on early audiences of Wagner, particularly of this opera, and the scandal which became part of that impact (I mean, of course, aesthetic scandal, leaving aside the issue of Wagner’s repugnant political views), as it is to imagine the fainting and spasms of tears produced by the voice of Farinelli. But the scandal was immense, as was the passion with which he was defended—and the incalculable influence of his work. No artist of the nineteenth century was to be more influential.
Though Wagner was the first composer people boasted of not just admiring passionately but being addicted to, there have been others since. And the enchantments of addiction in art are now rarely viewed as anything but positive. In the era of rock ‘n’ roll and of Philip Glass and John Adams, it seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to be a narcotic. We live in the time of the triumph of the “theatrocracy” that Nietzsche deplored, in which we can find many descendants of Wagner’s favorite dramatic form, the pseudo-spiritual pageant of redemption. And Wagner’s characteristic means (the garrulous, soft-focus libretto; the exacerbated length; the organized repetitiveness) and themes (the praise of mindlessness, the featuring of the pathos of heroes and rulers) are those of some of the most enchanting spectacles of our own day.
Wagner’s adaptations of the myths of the European and specifically the Germanic past (both Christian and pagan) do not involve belief. But they do involve ideas. Wagner was highly literate, and reflective in a literary way; he knew his sources. The creators of Einstein on the Beach made it clear that they knew nothing about Einstein, and thought they didn’t have to. The emblems and bric-a-brac of heroic mythologies of the past that litter the work of the modern Wagnerians only express an even more generic pathos, and a generalized striving for effect. It is firmly thought that neither the creator nor the audience need have any information (knowledge, particularly historical knowledge, is considered to have a baleful effect on creativity and on feeling—the last and most tenacious of the clichés of Romanticism). The Gesamtkunstwerk becomes a vehicle for moods—such as paranoia, placidity—that have floated free from specific emotional situations, and for non-knowing as such. And the aptness of these antiliterary, emotionally remote modern redemption-pageants may have confirmed a less troubled way of reacting to Wagner’s highly literary, fervent ones. The smarmy, redeeming higher values that Wagner thought his work expressed have been definitively discredited (that much we owe the historic connection of Wagnerian ideology to Nazism). Few puzzle anymore, as did generations of Wagner lovers and Wagner fearers, about what Wagner’s operas mean. Now Wagner is just enjoyed … as a drug.
“His pathos topples every taste.” Nietzsche’s acerbic remark about Wagner seems, a hundred years after it was made, truer than ever. But is there anyone left even to be ambivalent about Wagner now, in the way that Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Mann were? If not, then indeed much has been lost. I should think that feeling ambivalence (the opposite of being indifferent—you have to be seduced) is still the optimal mood for experiencing how authentically sublime a work Tristan und Isolde really is, and how strange and troubling.
[1987]
An Ecstasy of Lament
ALL ART, it has been said, aspires to the condition of music. And all arts made with music—but, more than any other, opera—aspire to the experience of ecstasy.
Originally, opera’s ecstasies were provided by the singers. Stories—well-known intrigues from classical mythology, ancient history, and Renaissance epic—were dignified pretexts. The music, often glorious, was a platform. Whatever the pleasures afforded by the other elements (music, dance, poetry, scenography), opera was above all a vehicle for a unique reach of the human voice. This was something much more potent than “beautiful singing.” What was released by the dramatic and musical occasion of opera was a substance experienced as sublime, virtually trans-human (in part because it was often transgendered), and so erotically affecting as to constitute a species of ravishment. (Think of the swoons and delirium that Farinelli and the other legendary castrati of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provoked among men and women both—echoed, in diminuendo, by the adulation offered the great bel canto singers of our own century.) The model register was soaring, feminine; the gender line was arbitrary (men sang women’s parts), and opera aroused emotions, excesses of reaction identified as feminine.
A more civically responsible idea of the ec
stasies delivered by opera emerged when the devoted audience expanded from its aristocratic core to a much larger public, and attendance at “opera houses” became a ritual of urban bourgeois life. Opera experienced as preeminently a vehicle for the voice declined in favor of opera as the most inspiring, irresistible form of drama. Singing was a heroic rather than an uncanny enterprise, which furthered the “progressive” idea that the work of the voice and the work of music were at parity. It is about this time that opera began to reflect the nationalist projects of the European nineteenth century. The enthusiasm produced in opera houses fed on something the audience brought to the occasion: tribal self-congratulation. Being construed as an achievement of a national culture resulted in evitably in a certain normalization of opera ecstasies: sexual roles were locked into place; stories chosen (historical or folkloric) were constructed around the contrasts of feminine and masculine traits, vocal and characterological. The model responses of audiences became less outrageously feminine: invigoration, inspiration, exaltation.
It was precisely the composer with the largest ambition for opera, Richard Wagner, who, in addition to bringing this second idea of what opera can be—the apotheosis of a collective spirit—to its greatest, most solemn conclusion, also ushered in the third, or modern, idea of what opera can be: an isolating, ecstatic commotion of feeling aroused not by the sublime feats of a human voice but by exhausting, relentlessly ecstatic music. The voice rides the music; the music, rather than an independent ideal of vocal virtuosity, makes ever more difficult (initially felt to be impossible) demands on the voice. Music, Wagner’s music, depicts the very condition of being flooded by feeling that the uncanny voice once provoked in audiences. The consequence was to weaken the authority of sharply contrasting feminine and masculine styles of emotional reaction—both on the opera stage (for all the masculinist pretensions of Wagnerian ideology) and in the minds of the opera public. But how could reinstating the goal of providing an immoderate, ravishing experience not entail a re-feminizing (in terms of the cultural stereotypes) of the most acute pleasure taken in opera?