WAGNERâS TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
A SHORT GUIDE TO A GREAT OPERA
The opera and its composer
Whoâs who and whatâs what
The interval: talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
Within less than five weeks of his accession to the throne of Bavaria, King Ludwig, later known as âthe Mad Kingâ, came to the rescue of Wagner who was then in dire straits financially. After they met in May 1864, they planned the realisation of their dreams. The first of these was the staging, just over a year later, of Tristan und Isolde, the opera which Wagner had completed six years earlier but had not yet succeeded in getting premièred.
It has been said that Tristan is âan opera intoxicated by passion almost to the point of depravityâ, so much so that Duchess Sophie, the Kingâs cousin and future fiancĂŠe, was not allowed to attend. Wagnerâs first wife Minna complained that the passion in it is almost indecent; she, we shall see, had good reason to complain. Not surprisingly, its theme of sexual love leading to death was adored by the decadent writers, including Frenchmen such as Baudelaire, who might otherwise have been expected to have loathed all things German.
Puccini declared, âEnough of this music! Weâre only mandolinists, amateurs: woe to him who gets caught by it! This tremendous music destroys one and renders one incapable of composing any more!â The great conductor Bruno Walter, then a boy, hearing it for the first time, declared, âNever before had my soul been so deluged with floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss, never had I been transported from reality by such heavenly glory.â1
This opera, love having nowhere else âbeen shown in such grandeur or elaborated to such psychological and metaphysical depthsâ, is one of the pivotal works in the development of music. Its âincessant modulations, the constant wavering of tonalityâ, had an immense influence. It has been suggested that its âterrific erotic power poisoned the minds of the composers of the succeeding generations.â Put another way, Tristan has been described as âthe moment when modern music began.â
Tristan was based principally on the epic by Gottfried von Strassburg dating from 1210, which itself was based on earlier traditions. Wagner blended this outstanding poem with his somewhat eccentric (at least by modern tenets) philosophical views as articulated by both himself and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788â1860).
Wagner was living in Zurich. During the summer of 1857, he was in the middle of composing Siegfried when he broke off to work on Act 1 of his Tristan. He may have felt it had commercial potential, and he needed the money. Although he told his fellow composer (and future father-in-law) Liszt in 1854, âI have planned in my head a Tristan and Isoldeâ, the inspiration for it can be traced back to the arrival in Zurich four years earlier of the affluent Wesendoncks,2 âMerchant and wife, from New York.â âWith her artistic gifts and enthusiasms,â Mathilde Wesendonck (1828â1902) entered into the intellectual life of Zurich. She was a little more than fifteen years younger than Wagner.
Both husband and wife soon became great friends and supporters of Wagner. Otto Wesendonck provided finance; Mathilde became his confidante and provided him with the inspiration which his then wife, Minna, who was sometimes high on opium, and was âan illiterate, unimaginative woman, whose mind, such as it was, was all foreground without perspectiveâ, was incapable of providing.3 Wagnerâs friendship with Mathilde gave rise to gossip; and Minna, understandably (although not to Wagner) became increasingly suspicious and jealous of her.
Wagner required an artistic confidante, rather than sex; and Minna was totally unsuitable. As his leading biographer Ernest Newman put it, âDuring the gestation of a big work, the temperature of Wagnerâs whole being was raisedâ and led him to âidealise the woman who, at the moment, seemed to harmonise most perfectly with his inner world.â When that work was finished, âthe scales gradually fell from his eyes, and he came to see the woman not as an ideal but as an ordinary reality.â The woman of the moment, now, was Mathilde.4
Early in 1857, the Wagners were invited to move into a cottage on a piece of land next to the grand residence overlooking Lake Zurich which Otto was having built on land which he had acquired to stop its redevelopment as a mental institution. Around Easter, the Wagners moved into their quarters, known as the âAsylâ (âSanctuaryâ); four months later, the Wesendoncks took up residence.
The first complete musical draft of Tristan was composed during that autumn. The score of Tristan Act 1 was finished on 3 April 1858. Four days later, Minna intercepted a letter from Wagner which enclosed the sketch of the Prelude, and, as he described it, communicated the feelings he felt at the time. The letter, though it began âJust out of Bedâ, was actually largely about Goetheâs Faust. As Newman observed, âanything less like a love-letter in the common acceptance of the term could hardly be imagined.â Nevertheless, Minna seems to have been determined to misinterpret it.
She went ballistic. She showed the letter to Mathilde who told Otto. They apparently remained totally calm and went off on holiday. They regarded Minnaâs mental state as the issue, and would have preferred the Wagners to remain in the cottage. But it became clear to Wagner that Minnaâs instability was an impediment to his art. By mid-August, the only way forward for Wagner and his art was for him to leave. He made his way to Venice. He spent the next twelve months living in the Palazzo Giustiniani, where he composed Act 2. He was still a political exile as a consequence of his involvement in the revolution in Dresden some ten years earlier, and in March 1859 he was ordered to leave Venice. He finished Tristan in the Schweizerhof Hotel in Lucerne, on 6 August. It had taken no more than two years to complete.
The score was rejected by opera houses in Dresden, Paris, Karlsruhe, Vienna, Hanover and Leipzig. Vienna eventually accepted it in 1862, but, after 77 rehearsals, the production was cancelled. One Berlin newspaper described the work as an art work of the future (the title of one of Wagnerâs publications), because it was unperformable at present.
The outlook seemed bleak until King Ludwig came to the rescue. In the December after they met, Wagner included the Prelude and Liebestod of Tristan in a concert which he put on for the King.
The lead-up to the full performance, scheduled for summer 1865, was punctuated by a series of incidents. On the day of the first rehearsal, Cosima, Lisztâs daughter and the wife of the distinguished court conductor Hans von BĂźlow,5 gave birth to Wagnerâs daughter Isolde. Then there was an argument about accommodation for the orchestra: BĂźlow wanted the removal of 30 seats to make more space. He was overheard asking the southerners angrily, âWhat does it matter whether we have 30 Schweinhunde more or less?â This infuriated the Munich press and people. Next, on the day of the première, the bailiffs arrived to enforce an old debt due from Wagner, and he had to be bailed out by the Treasury. Later that day, it was found that the Isolde had lost her voice, so the performance had to be postponed, until 10 June. When it finally took place, Wagner was delighted with it. A further three performances were staged. But nine years passed before a second theatre dared attempt the work, in Weimar.
All the brouhaha around the première was followed by real tragedy. Wagner had found the ideal Tristan and Isolde in the burly 29-year-old Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who he had heard as Lohengrin, and his wife Malvina. On 21 July, Schnorr died. Indeed, the opera has been beset by tragedy: two well-known conductors, Felix Mottl (1856â1911) and Josef Keilberth (1908â1968), collapsed when conducting performances, and died.
It may be hard for us today to realise how novel Tristan seemed at the time. A final full rehearsal, in effect a private performance, had been held to which 600 guests were invited. The reaction of an intelligent listener to Act 2 probably sums up the audienceâs reaction. âThe singing consists of nothing but screaming and shrieking; the singers storm, rage and roar while the orchestra accompanies them with the most outrageous discords.â6
Even today, Tristan can sound untypical in a number of respects. It is not made up of separate arias, traditional choruses and so on â after all, people do not speak in arias â but of a seamless strand of music through each act.
The typical opera goer is conditioned to singers taking the lead, accompanied and underpinned by the orchestra. In Tristan, there is no intention to have some âbest tuneâ, and some, although not all, of the music is in the nature of speech-song. For Wagner, the voice has become just another prominent instrument in the overall sound created within a completely integrated Gesamskunstwerk (âart-workâ),7 in which âwords, stage setting, visible action and music all come together in closest harmony toward the central dramatic purpose.â There are relics of traditional opera, such as the chorus of the sailors; but sailors do tend to talk or shout to each other at the same time, so a chorus of them is realistic.8
Tristan has the least action on stage of all Wagnerâs works. Wagner was greatly influenced by Greek drama, in which most of the action takes place off the stage and is âreportedâ. As each act lasts for about an hour and a quarter, there can be what one leading musicologist has called âundeniable moments of ennuiâ.
Also, the obscure language of Wagnerâs poetry and philosophy may seem confusing and even counter-intuitive: the lovers yearn for âNightâ, âEndless nightâ, âDeathâ and âDarknessâ, and seem to reject the âDayâ, and âLightâ. However, this longing is wholly consistent with notions as expressed, for example, by Novalis,9 âthe prophet of the Romantic schoolâ. He wrote, âa marriage that gives us a companion for the Night is also a union concluded unto Death. In Death is love most sweet; for the lover, Death is a bridal night, a secret full of sweet mysteries.â
The Night became âone of the mightiest symbols of the Romantic movementâ, and Tristan was called by its composer a âRomantic Operaâ. However, at the end of Act 2 and during the soliloquies of Act 3, when his poem ventures into the territory of Schopenhauerian philosophy, understanding Wagnerâs poem becomes more challenging.
It is best to avoid dwelling on the philosophical aspects and to let the intoxicating power of the Tristan music surge over you, as would a symphony in a concert hall. Indeed, the Liebestod is really a symphonic piece, âa drama in the Beethovenian senseâ and can be performed without actors or vocal parts. Tristan is an orchestral opera. In that sense, its words are inessential.10 Wagner advised Nietzsche, âTake your glasses off! You must hear nothing but the opera!â And he wrote to Mathilde, âI have never written anything like it before â you will be amazed whe...