The Music of Love
BY Joshua Kosman
An acquaintance once recounted her first chance encounter, as a curious tweener, with the
music of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. “It made me feel all kinds of things I’d never felt before,” she told me, adding, “I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be feeling them, either.”
She wasn’t wrong. Listeners making their first encounter with Tristan, and even practiced aficionados, will find it a work suffused to an unprecedented degree with tingly eroticism. Many operas take love as their subject matter, and many of those conceive it as an emotion rooted in physical attraction. How else can we understand the magnetic lightning bolt that crackles on their first meeting between, say, Mimì and Rodolfo in Puccini’s La Bohème or between Sophie and Octavian in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier?
But Tristan is perhaps the purest distillation of sexual urgency ever brought to life on the operatic stage. This is music of love, of eros, of pure physical desire—categories that in Wagner’s world can overlap almost to the point of identity. Little wonder that it opened my friend’s young consciousness to an entirely new realm of sensation.
It’s worth noting, though, how much of the opera’s subject matter is conveyed through a purely musical vein. Tristan runs a seat-numbing four and a half hours (counting intermissions), and yet to a first approximation, nothing much actually happens. Act I, filled in characteristic Wagnerian fashion with explanatory exposition, drives toward the drinking of the love potion. The title characters’ one night of passionate and illicit rapture—illicit because Isolde is betrothed to King Marke, who is not only Tristan’s liege lord but also his uncle—occupies Act II, and their respective deaths and transfigurations take up Act III. Of plot twists there are none, unless you find yourself as surprised as the lovers themselves when their tryst is interrupted.
The stripped-down, primal contours of the tale are a result of Wagner’s decision to ruthlessly pare away extraneous elements of the source material in writing his own libretto. As with so many of his mature works, Wagner drew the premise for Tristan from medieval literature. The story of two doomed lovers and their forbidden passion derives from an ancient Celtic legend that found a variety of literary expressions throughout the thirteen and fourteen centuries, but Wagner encountered it in an early thirteenth-century version by the poet Gottfried von Strassburg. In its original form, the story contained several other characters and a wealth of chivalric conflict.
The traces of that tale live on to some extent in Isolde’s Act I narrative, a virtuosic outburst of rage and wounded pride that recounts how their paths first crossed. Tristan had killed a knight named Morold, Isolde’s betrothed, in the course of a battle in which he had also received a grievous wound. Isolde encountered Tristan going by the pseudonym Tantris (a Clark Kent-level disguise that would scarcely fool a first-grader, but let it pass) and nursed him back to health. On finally recognizing the identity of her patient through a bit of forensic sleuthing—she matched a chip in his sword to a splinter left in Morold’s corpse—Isolde moved to kill him with his own sword.
But Tristan’s look of pitiful pleading, combined with a burst of emotional tenderness on Isolde’s part, led her to spare him. In other words, the enchanted love potion that the two title characters drink near the end of Act I doesn’t so much create a new bond as free them to express the passion that already exists, mystically and inexplicably, between them. Before the curtain even goes up, love is already in the air.
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When Wagner began work on Tristan in 1857, he had been immersed for nearly a decade in the task of creating his massive four-opera opus, Der Ring des Nibelungen. He had completed all four libretti, writing them in reverse order from Götterdämmerung through Das Rheingold, and then composing the scores of Rheingold and Die Walküre. But halfway through composing Siegfried, the third opera in the cycle, he set the project aside for what would ultimately become a 12-year hiatus.
In the mid-1850s, two major events took place in Wagner’s life that prompted him to shift his attention. One was a romantic fixation on the poet Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a prosperous silk merchant who had offered the composer extensive financial support. A group of five settings of her poems that Wagner composed in 1857–58, now known as the Wesendonck-Lieder, represents one of his few mature compositions not intended for the opera house. Whether there was ever an affair between them worthy of the name, or whether Mathilde even returned the composer’s ardor, is unknown; but the plight of a hero in love with another man’s wife must surely have struck a chord.
The deeper and more formative development, though, was Wagner’s discovery in 1854 of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), in particular his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer’s central ideas—that the world as we experience it reflects our own perception rather than transcendent reality, and that the gap between what we can know and what truly exists is the source of human suffering—had a profound and lifelong effect on Wagner, who came to regard the philosopher as his one true forerunner. (Just days before his death, according to a diary entry by his wife Cosima, Wagner had a dream in which he drew Schopenhauer’s attention to a beautiful flock of starlings. Schopenhauer, alas, had already noticed them.)
As the British philosopher Bryan Magee notes in The Tristan Chord, his richly illuminating 2000 study of the links between philosophy and Wagnerian opera, Schopenhauer identified three paths by which humanity could attain the transcendence denied us in the everyday world: through love, through art, and through religion. And as if taking marching orders from his influential predecessor, Wagner devoted the remainder of his creative life—in addition to completing the Ring—to a series of operas that can be seen in a certain light as a Schopenhauer trilogy.
First came Tristan, in all its exultant eroticism. After that, Wagner turned his attention to matters of art and esthetics in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only mature comedy, in which he grafted elements of romance onto a manifesto about artistic tradition, innovation, and (unfortunately) nationalism. Finally, Parsifal represented Wagner’s attempt to engage operatically with a range of religious myths and morality, drawing on Christian, Buddhist, and pagan traditions.
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If Tristan had its roots partly in German philosophy, the essence of Wagner’s achievement lay in its musical innovation—an achievement that is often misunderstood. A common piece of conventional wisdom is that the score of Tristan represented a new and more expansive view of the rules of tonal harmony, the system that had governed Western classical music for some 250 years, and that this expansion was encapsulated in the so-called “Tristan chord,” the eerie stack of four notes that appears at the beginning of the opera and returns at key dramatic junctures throughout.
This is close to the truth but not entirely accurate. The function of the Tristan chord is not to stand outside of traditional tonality. (In The Oxford History of Western Music, his mammoth six-volume survey, the late UC Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin wittily demonstrated the point by splicing the Tristan chord effortlessly into a Mozart piano piece.) Rather, it maximizes the pattern of harmonic tension and release that lies at the foundation of all tonal music.
When we sing “Shave and a haircut—two bits,” the last notes in the tune embody this pattern in its most elemental form. “Two” creates a feeling of tension for the listener, and “bits” resolves it. That’s tonal music in a nutshell; everything else, from Bach to Taylor Swift, is an elaboration on this simple truth.
What Wagner accomplished in Tristan had little to do with loosening or weakening that system (that task was begun later by Franz Liszt and carried on by Arnold Schoenberg). Instead, he used his compositional virtuosity to extend the listener’s wait from harmonic tension to resolution to unprecedented and almost excruciating lengths. What “Shave and a haircut” does in a second, Tristan stretches over a period of more than four hours.
The process begins with the orchestral prelude, the music that so unnerved my friend all those years ago. Again and again, Wagner creates moments of tension, promises resolution, then pulls the rug out from under the listener. Each false resolution creates a new level of tension, over and over as the music crests, falls, and rises again—an uncannily accurate rendering in sound of the ever-renewing pull of love in both its physical and personal aspects. It isn’t until the closing moments of the opera, when the Tristan chord finally resolves with cheeky simplicity into a radiant B-major chord, that the listener feels any sort of release from the struggle and longing of what’s come before. It happens as Tristan and Isolde are at last transported to the realm of the transcendent, exactly as Schopenhauer promised.
Perhaps my friend was right to be wary of the feelings stirred up by Wagner’s music. (If so, she wouldn’t be alone—history is full of testimonies from great artists and thinkers who found themselves profoundly shaken by the piece, for better or worse.) Sex, love, and desire represent dangerous knowledge, and Wagner gives them to us unvarnished.
But I don’t think so. I would argue that the yearning depicted in the music of Tristan is central to our lives and worth exploring in full. It is one of the things that makes us, to borrow a phrase from Wagner’s follower-turned-antagonist Friedrich Nietzsche, “human, all too human.”
Joshua Kosman is the former classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.