An image from Bill Viola's Tristan Project (2006).
Wagner wrote to Liszt in 1854: "Since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception; with the ‘black flag’ which flutters at the end, I shall then cover myself over, in order—to die." The most staggering of Wagner's operas stemmed from that dark cluster of emotions — an agonizing awareness both of the extreme intoxication of unrestrained desire and of the unattainability of the love ideal toward which that desire strives. The letter was written in the early throes of Wagner's immersion in the world-renouncing, self-obliterating philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which influenced him greatly and which he also adapted toward his own ends. Tristan may show love veering toward disaster, but it is at the same time one of the most openly erotic works of the nineteenth century.
The love triangle of Tristan — the Irish princess Isolde, betrothed to King Mark of Cornwall, falls in love with Mark's nephew Tristan — famously mirrors Wagner's own personal situation at the time he set to work on the opera. He and his wife, Minna, were living on the Zurich estate of the merchant Otto Wesendonck, who had become the composer's patron. Wesendonck's wife, Mathilde, became enmeshed in an affair with the composer that probably never progressed to the point of sexual congress. Chris Walton, in his book Richard Wagner's Zurich: The Muse of Place, points out that the familiar portrait of Wagner as a rascal preying on his benefactor doesn't quite do justice to the complexity of the situation. Otto tended toward what Walton calls a "strange mesh of latently incestuous relationships," and Mathilde was a woman of independent and creative spirit. The Wagner-Wesendonck triangle, or more precisely quadrangle, led to a crisis in the Wagner marriage, with the composer fleeing to Venice in 1858, as he was working on the second act of the opera. These events perhaps contributed to the extraordinary intensity of the score that came forth, although various biographers have entertained the suspicion that Wagner staged the crisis in order to create a suitable atmosphere for his work.
The chivalric romance of Tristan and Isolde, also known as Tristram and Iseult (British) and Tristan and Yseult (French), is of obscure origin, originating in fragmentary twelfth-century texts that echo earlier oral versions. The story appears to arise from Celtic tradition, with the names of the principal characters being of British origin, but elements of it resemble Persian and Arabic legends, suggesting very deep cultural roots. The earliest texts appear in Anglo-Norman and Middle High German; the unfinished thirteenth-century version by Gottfried von Strassburg formed Wagner's principal source. Tristan narratives multiplied and spread in the centuries that followed; a particularly influential telling was that of Thomas Malory in his Morte d'Arthur (1485). The earliest versions make only glancing mention of King Arthur and his knights, but the story was eventually absorbed into the Arthurian tradition, with the adulterous affair of Tristan and Isolde resembling that of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. Wagner follows Gottfried in omitting mention of Arthur and the Round Table altogether. He also simplifies the denouement of the legend by cutting out Isolde of the White Hands, whom Tristan marries after his affair with the Irish Isolde causes him to be banished from Cornwall to Brittany. The "black flag" in Wagner's 1854 letter refers to the climax of the old tragedy: Tristan is dying of a poison that only the Irish sorceress can cure, and is awaiting the ship bearing her. If the approaching ship flies a white sail, she is on board; if not, the sail is black. Isolde of the White Hands espies a ship showing the white signal, but out of jealousy she tells the bed-ridden Tristan otherwise, whereupon he dies in a state of grief.
Rogelio de Egusquiza, "Death of Tristan und Isolde," 1910.
At the beginning of Chapter 2 of Wagnerism I spent a little time talking about the famously ambiguous beginning of Tristan, with its "Tristan chord" that quivers in the air unresolved. Here two conductors, Antonia Pappano and Asher Fisch, offer their perspectives on the opening music.
Here is all of Act I, in a performance by the Sydney Symphony under David Robertson:
At the beginning of Act , we see Isolde and her attendant Brangäne on board Tristan's ship, being taken from Ireland to King Mark's castle in Cornwall. From the masthead, a sailor sings sings a ditty about "my Irish maid" — "westwards strays the glance, eastward strikes the ship" (10:52). Isolde makes her imperious entrance: "Who dares to mock me?" (11:55). In a raging monologue, "Entartet Geschlecht," (13:00), she denounces her own "degenerate race" that has lost its once mighty magical powers, which should now be used to summon storms and wreck the cursed ship on which she is sailing. The sailor sings again, and Isolde's gaze falls on Tristan — "Death-devoted head, death-devoted heart" (17:55). There follow scornful lines that Virginia Woolf quotes in The Voyage Out, about Tristan winning a "corpse-like bride for his master." Brangäne is sent to summon Tristan to Isolde's cabin; Tristan demurs. Back in the cabin, Isolde reveals the deeper roots of her rage, beyond the constriction of the marriage pact. It turns out that Tristan once slew Isolde's fiancé Morold, and that she later cured a mortally wounded knight named Tantris, only to discover that he was the hated Tristan. She was on the point of killing him when she stopped her short — "He looked me in the eyes" (30:32). The aching, upward-rising chromatic line here, already heard in the preludes, signals that unacknowledged love dwells beneath this rage. But Isolde is determined to make an end of it. She orders Brangäne to prepare a death potion, which both she and Tristan will drink. Brangäne, horrified at the prospect, serves up a love potion instead. At 1:07:50, the drinking of the potion occurs, over an intensified reiteration of the opening phrase and Tristan chord. It is this moment, not the ending of the opera, that Wagner named the Liebestod, or love-death. The potion goes to work. The two are already lost in ecstasy by the time the ship reaches shore and an ironic shouts of "Hail King Mark!" come from the chorus (1:13:04). The oblivious Tristan asks, "Which king?" (1:13:55).
Act II is set in a garden at Mark's castle, where Isolde is awaiting a nighttime assignation with Tristan. King Mark and his retinue are going off on a hunting expedition, or so it seems. The music begins with a hurtling orchestral gesture, plunging us into the middle of the action. It’s like a cinematic cut followed by a zooming in — very different from the hovering stasis of the Act I prelude. A signal has been arranged: the extinguishing of a torch will inform Tristan that it is safe to approach. Isolde listens to the fading sounds of the hunting party's horns and impatiently tells Brangäne to put out the torch. She says that Frau Minne, the personification of love, wills the night to come so that she can shine more brightly there: a line that Wagner dramatizes by having the entire string section play tremolo at high volume. And then she proceeds to put out the torch herself.
Kirsten Flagstad in Furtwängler's Tristan (Pristine).
The extended Liebesnacht or love-night unfolds, proceeding from a frenzy of ecstatic greeting ("Tristan!I Isolde!") to serene bliss ("O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe") to sensual intimacy ("Lausch Geliebter") and finally to the majestic melody of "So starben wir" (46:05), which is heard again at the end of the opera. Periodically, Brangäne's voice floats in with a warning — "Hab' acht!" — that all is not safe and danger lurks. At the height of the climactic duet (54:25), Mark and company burst in, having received a tip from Tristan's seeming friend Melot. Mark collapses in grief; Tristan refuses to explain what has happened, retreating into gnomic utterances ("What you ask, you can never know"). He proceeds to describe the "wonder realm of night" (1:10:46), the world of death, out of which he was born, and to which he is destined to return. Isolde pledges to follow him there. In a skirmish with Melot, who also loves Isolde, Tristan is fatally wounded.
In Act III, set in Brittany, the dying Tristan is experiencing extreme pain and hallucinations. The prelude establishes a mood of paralyzing gloom, which Furtwängler captured to shiver-inducing effect on his great studio recording.
We are at Tristan's castle on the Brittany coast. A shepherd is watching out for Isolde's ship; we hear his lonely song on the English horn, in a kind of mirror image of the sailor's song in Act I. Kurwenal, Tristan's loyal attendant, asks the shepherd whether he says anything, and there comes the answer that T. S. Eliot quoted in The Waste Land : "Öd' und leer das Meer" ("Empty and waste the sea," 11:17). The wounded and delirious Tristan awakens, asking, "Where am I?" An extraordinary solo scene ensues, with occasional interjections from Kurwenal, in which Tristan longs for the, hallucinates Isolde's approach, and plunges back into yet deeper despair. No singer has caught the psychological turmoil of this scene more acutely than the great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers:
Finally, the ship is sighted: Isolde is coming ashore to cure her beloved. But when Tristan rises from his bed he tears off his bandages, letting his wounds bleed anew; he has no desire to live longer in a world where his love is forbidden. Isolde arrives only to see him die. A second ship arrives with Mark, Brangäne, and Melot. The latter fights with Kurwenal; both die. Mark laments the slaughter — "All dead!" Isolde sings her final monologue and sinks down lifeless at Tristan's side.
