WATER, BLOOD, HEALING BALM, magic potions—fluids play a decisive role in this mythology.
Wagner’s stories are often launched from a water-world. An arrival by water and a departure by water frame the plots of The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin. The Ring saga begins literally in the water, below the Rhine’s surface (to end, four operas later, with a cosmic duet of water and fire). Wagner’s most delirious exploration of fluidity, Tristan und Isolde, begins and ends with journeys over water. Act I takes place on a noble vessel commanded by Tristan that is taking the Irish princess Isolde, who is affianced to Tristan’s uncle, King Marke, to Cornwall. Preceding this journey was an earlier sea voyage, when Tristan, grievously wounded, had set off alone in a frail skiff for Ireland, in hopes of being ministered to by Isolde, renowned for her healing arts. Since the foe who wounded him and whom he killed was Isolde’s fiancé, he could not say who he was. (Solitary people with mysterious or disguised identities—Lohengrin, the Dutchman, the wounded Tristan at the Irish court—usually arrive by water.) Act III takes place on a rampart overlooking the sea, where Tristan, re-wounded mortally at the end of Act II, waits for a boat to arrive bearing Isolde, who has been summoned not as his lover but as his once successful healer. But as she appears Tristan dies, and she follows him in death. Journeys over water are associated in Wagner’s mythology with a redemption that
does not happen, as in Lohengrin, or happens in terms other than those originally sought, as in Tristan und Isolde, which has almost everybody die, either senselessly or beatifically.
Parsifal, like Tristan und Isolde, is very much a story of fluids. However, in this last of Wagner’s thirteen operas, what is defined as redemption—finding someone who will heal, and succeed, the wounded king Amfortas—does take place, and in the hoped-for terms. A virgin, this time male, a holy fool, appears as foretold. Perhaps this fulfillment of expectations makes it inevitable that the water-world is largely excluded from the opera. A majestic outdoors, the forest, and a vast sanctified indoors, the Grail Hall, are its two positive locations (the negative ones, Klingsor’s domain, being a castle tower and a garden of dangerous flowers). To be sure, Act I has water just offstage: a lake to which the wounded king is brought for his hydrotherapy, and a spring where Kundry procures water to revive the fainting Parsifal after brutally announcing to him his mother’s death; and in Act III, there is water for a consecration, for a baptism. But the main story of fluids is about blood: the unstanchable hemorrhaging of the wound in Amfortas’s side, Christ’s blood that should stream in the Grail chalice. Amfortas’s essential duty as king of the Grail knights, which is to make Christ’s blood appear in the chalice on a regular basis, for the knights’ eucharistic meal, has become agony for him to perform—weakened as he is by this wound, inflicted by Klingsor with the very spear that pierced Jesus’ side while He hung on the Cross. The plot of Parsifal could be summarized as the search, eventually successful, for a replacement for someone who is having trouble making a fluid appear.
SEVERAL KINDS OF FLUID enter the body in Wagner’s stories, but in only one form does fluid leave it, blood, and this in male bodies only. Women have bloodless deaths: usually they simply expire abruptly (Elsa, Elisabeth, Isolde, Kundry), or they immolate themselves, in water (Senta) or in fire (Brunnhilde). Only men bleed—bleed to death. (Therefore, it doesn’t seem too fanciful to regard semen as subsumed, metaphorically, under blood.) Though Wagner makes the prostrate, punctured, hemorrhaging male body the result of some epic combat,
there is usually an erotic wound behind the one inflicted by spear and sword. Love as experienced by men, in both Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, is tantamount to a wound. Isolde had healed Tristan, but Tristan had fallen in love with Isolde; Wagner’s way of signaling the emotional necessity of a new physical wound is to make it, shockingly, virtually self-inflicted. (Tristan drops his sword at the end of Act II and lets the treacherous Melot run him through.) Amfortas had already been seduced by Kundry; Klingsor’s spear just made that wound literal.
In Wagner’s misogynistic logic, a woman, who characteristically doubles as healer and seducer, is often the true slayer. This figure, of whom Isolde is a positive version, appears in Parsifal with both the negativity and the eroticism made far more explicit. The person who flies in, early in Act I, bearing a vial of precious medicinal balm for the stricken king—it can relieve but not cure him—is the same person who caused the King’s wound. Wagner makes Kundry systematically dual: in her service role, a bringer of fluids; in her seducer’s alter ego, a taker of them.
Seduction is eloquence; service is mute. After the failure of Kundry’s maximal eloquence, her attempt to seduce Parsifal in Act II, she is represented as having nothing left to say. “Dienen! Dienen!” (To serve! To serve!) are the only words she is allowed in all of Act III. In contrast, Isolde, who is characterized first as a healing woman, one who successfully administered balm (the background of the opera’s story), and then as a focus of desire, becomes more and more eloquent. It is with Isolde’s rush of ecstatic words that Wagner concludes the opera.
THE FLUID ADMINISTERED by Isolde in her role as healer is in the past. In the story Wagner has chosen to tell, the fluid she offers Tristan is what they both believe to be a lethal poison. Instead, it is a disinhibitor, which makes them—just as the boat is about to land—con—fess their love for each other.
A fluid-that-changes-everything is essential to the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde that has been circulating through the veins of European
culture for more than seven centuries. In the fullest account, from the thirteenth century, Gottfried von Strassburg’s novel-length verse epic Tristan, it is a love-philter concocted by Isolde’s mother (also named Isolde, and the healing woman in the original tale) for her daughter and King Marke to drink on their wedding night which, during the voyage, an ignorant servant offers to Marke’s nephew and the bride-to-be as wine. Wagner’s version turns accidental calamity into necessity. “Der Liebestrank,” the draught of love that Brangäne, Isolde’s servant, has deliberately substituted for the poison, does not make Tristan and Isolde feel their own feelings—they already feel them, are being martyred by them. It simply makes it impossible for them to go on not acknowledging their love.
The love-potion is treated in a comic register in another opera, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (1832), which opens with the well-to-do heroine reading to a group of peasants a reduction of the Celtic legend to a tale of conventionally unrequited love with a happy ending. Handsome Tristan procures from a “saggio incantatore” (a wise sorcerer) a “certo elisir d’amor” (a certain elixir of love); no sooner has the beautiful but indifferent Isolde taken a sip than a matching love is created—instantly. “Cambiata in un istante / quella beltà crudele / fu di Tristano amante / visse Tristan fedel.” (Changed in an instant / that unkind beauty / became Tristan’s true love / and lived faithful to him.) The drink that makes someone fall in love belongs to the same family of potions, spells, and charms that transforms princes into frogs and mermaids into princesses: it is the instant metamorphosis of fairy tales. Mere fairy tales. Donizetti’s buffa realism has no place for magic: the fluid sold by an itinerant quack to the opera’s hero to woo the woman he thinks (wrongly) doesn’t love him is actually Bordeaux. Instead of what is given as wine being really a magic potion, what is fobbed off as a magic potion is just wine—the inevitable, comic deflation of the fantasy.
Its tragic dissolution is Wagner’s, a quarter of a century later: a potion that, rather than making something possible, heightens impossibility, loosening the tie to life. The fluid that Brangäne gives the hapless pair does not just reveal (and therefore unleash) a feeling. It undoes a
world. Love subtracts them instantly, totally, from civil society, from normal ties and obligations, casting them into a vertiginous solitariness (rather than a romantic solitude à deux) that brings on an inexorable darkening of consciousness. Where are we? asks Isolde at the beginning of the opera. Where am I? she asks Tristan at the end of Act I, after they have drunk the potion, as the boat lands in Cornwall. The king is here, someone says. What king? asks Tristan. And Tristan does not know where he is when he awakens in Act III. What herds? what castle? what peasants? he asks, as his loyal retainer Kurwenal explains that he has been brought home to Brittany, his own kingdom, that he is lying on the rampart of his own castle. Love is an anti-gnosis, a deknowing. Each act begins with a tormented, paralyzing, anguished waiting by one for the other, followed by the longed-for arrival—and concluding with other, unanticipated arrivals, which are not only disruptive but, to the lovers, barely comprehensible. What duty? What shame?
Passion means an exalted passivity. Act I opens with Isolde on a couch, her face buried in the cushions (Wagner’s stage direction), and Act III has Tristan in a coma at the beginning and supine throughout. As in Parsifal, there is a great deal of lying down and many fervent appeals for the surcease of oblivion. If the opera ended after its first two acts, one could regard this pull of the horizontal in Tristan und Isolde, the paeans to night, the dark, the equating of pleasure with oblivion and of death with pleasure, as a most extravagant way of describing the voluptuous loss of consciousness in orgasm. Whatever is being said or being done on the stage, the music of the Act II encounter is a thrillingly unequivocal rendering of an ideal copulation. (Thomas Mann was not wrong when he spoke of the opera’s “lascivious desire for bed.”) But Act III makes it clear that the eroticism is more means than end, a platform for the propaganda against lucidity; that the deepest subject is the surrender of consciousness as such.
Already the emotional logic of the words of the Act II duet is a sequence of annihilating—and nihilistic—mental operations. The lovers do not simply unite, generically, as in the unsurpassably elegant formula of Gottfried von Strassburg’s medieval German Tristan:
A man, a woman; a woman, a man;
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.
Imbued with the elaborate understanding of solitude and the exploration of extremes of feeling that seem the most original achievements of the Romantic movements in the arts of the last century, Wagner is able to go much further:
TRISTAN: Tristandu, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan!
ISOLDE: Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde!
(TRISTAN: Tristan you, I Isolde, no more Tristan!
ISOLDE: You Isolde, Tristan I, no more Isolde!)
When the world is thought to be so easily negated by the pressure of extreme feeling (the still regnant mythology of the self we owe to the nineteenth-century writers and composers), the feeling self expands to fill the empty space: “Selbst dann bin ich die Welt” (I myself am the world), Tristan and Isolde had already sung in unison. The inevitable next move is the elimination of the self, gender, individuality. “Ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen” (no names, no parting), they sing together … “endlos, ewig, einhewusst” (ever, unendingly, one consciousness). For one self to seek to fuse with another is, in the absence of the world, to seek the annihilation of both.
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 described 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]