The reader may at this point be feeling a sense of discomfort about two things in particular that Wagner has been quoted as saying of the inception of Tristan, in that they do not seem quite to add up, or if they do add up it seems not to be to very much. In his autobiography Wagner says that the creation of Tristan was in part a response to his reading of Schopenhauer. But in a letter to Liszt he characterizes Tristan as a simple musical conception. How, the reader may well find himself wondering, can reading the writings of a philosopher give rise to a simple musical conception? If all Wagner means by this is the idea of allowing the music to dominate an opera instead of being confined to a role no more important than that of the words or the stage action, this is not a musical conception but a view about the place of music in opera. In any case, this approach to opera was already the commonest one, and nearly always had been. It is true that the earlier Wagner, the Wagner of Opera and Drama, had complained fiercely about this, and proposed to change it, but is what he is now saying simply that he has been persuaded to drop that idea by reading Schopenhauer? It seems inadequate and implausible, somehow, and could certainly not explain his obvious sense of having perceived, and been set alight by, a new musical possibility. Readers of The World as Will and Representation will find themselves confronting the solution to the problem in that book, though for reasons that are fully understandable, indeed inevitable, only a tiny proportion of Wagner lovers are likely to be among its readers.
Schopenhauer maintained that we human beings are, in the most literal sense, embodiment of the metaphysical will, so that willing, wanting, longing, craving, yearning, are not just things that we do: they are what we are. And music, he said, was also a manifestation of the metaphysical will, its audible and meaningful voice in the empirical world. This means that music directly corresponds to what we ourselves are in our innermost being, an alternative life.
He has several pages of discussion as to the nature of this correspondence, going into some of the technicalities of music and even, at one point, using a printed musical example (The World as Will and Representation, vol. ii, p. 455 – the only musical example I can think of in any of the philosophical writings of the ‘great’ philosophers). The nub of what he has to say is that, as far as we are concerned as listeners, music proceeds by creating certain wants which it then spins out before satisfying. Even the most simple melody, considered as a succession of single notes, makes us want it to close eventually on the tonic, no matter how widely it may range before it does so, and it provokes in us a baffled dissatisfaction if it ends on any note other than that; indeed, the melody has to end not only on that one note but on a strong beat in the rhythm at the same time. If it falls to do both these things together we usually feel something harsher even than dissatisfaction, we feel outright rejection: ‘This can't be the end. It's got to go on. It can't just stop here.’ If the music is more than a simple melody, and has harmony too, the harmony does the same thing: the chords create in us a sense of dissatisfaction followed by a desire for them to resolve, if only eventually, in a certain direction, and only if they do finally resolve on the tonic chord is the longing in us stilled. Schopenhauer sums this up by saying: ‘Music consists generally in a constant succession of chords more or less disquieting, i.e. of chords exciting desire, with chords more or less quieting and satisfying; just as the life of the heart (the will) is a constant succession of greater or less disquietude, through desire or fear, with composure in degrees just as varied’ (The World as Will and Representation, vol. ii, p. 456). Thus music directly corresponds to our inner states, and its movements to the movements of our inner lives.
When we listen to music it is entirely out of our power not to feel these expectations and desires with regard to it: they are involuntary, and our response to the music is determined by the extent to which, and by the ways in which, they are first of all aroused, thus involving our emotions, and then, in the end, satisfied – only, of course, to be aroused again by the immediately following notes or chords. These responses of ours have nothing to do with our knowledge, or our intellects, or our understanding. The great majority of naturally musical people who have never been taught anything about music, and have no idea of even its simplest technicalities – no idea about ‘beats in a bar’, or what ‘the tonic’ is – feel them every bit the same, and every bit as powerfully. Thus music, like life, consists of the perpetual creation and spinning out of longings on which we are stretched as on a rack, unable ever to accept where we are as a resting place, until only the complete cessation of everything – the end of the piece as a whole, or the end of the individual's life – brings with it a cessation of unsatisfiable longing.
At this point in the discussion Schopenhauer gives special attention to a technical device in harmony known as ‘suspension’ – and it was this that lit a beacon in Wagner's head. Suspension does indeed create suspense. In its ordinary use it comes as the penultimate chord of a piece of music, when we have just heard what we thought was going to be the penultimate chord. This is nearly always a discord. I am using the word ‘discord’ here in its technical sense of a chord in tonal music which is not self-sufficient but requires resolution on to a concord – which is what we now confidently expect to happen. But instead of this the discord we have just heard moves to another discord - which only then, and perhaps after sounding extendedly, resolves on the tonic. In that instant when discord moves unexpectedly to discord we feel, figuratively, an intake of breath, a gasp of surprise. The tension we had assumed was about to be stilled is, on the contrary, prolonged, and not just prolonged but screwed up an extra notch. This means that the resolution, when it does come, is all the greater - we so to speak let out our astonished intake of breath in a sigh of heightened satisfaction. And, says Schopenhauer, ‘This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the will which is enhanced through delay.’
Reading this seems to have given Wagner a simple yet utterly astounding musical idea, the idea of composing a whole piece of music, indeed a whole opera, in the way that suspension operates. The music would move all the way through from discord to discord in such a manner that the ear was on tenterhooks throughout for a resolution that did not come. As Schopenhauer had spelt out, this would be a purely musical equivalent of the unassuaged longing, craving, yearning, that is our life, that indeed is us. There could be only one resolution to it, and that would be the final chord that was both the end of the musical score and, in an opera, the end of a protagonist's life. The whole thing would be an objective, correlative, in music, of life in this world.
Our primal, most fundamental craving, thought Wagner, the one that does most to shape our personalities and our lives, is the craving for love. This was an idea he had been at home with all his adult life – back in his Young German days he had believed it. He must, in that case, have taken it to be true of himself. By the time he came to write Tristan he had given powerful voice to it in his work already, especially in The Ring. In The Valkyrie the suffering that is inseparable from human love had found a musical expression so heart-breaking that it had made Wagner ill to compose it. It was self-evident to him that the new opera would have to be about love - a love story between two people for whom the permanent fulfilment and enjoyment of their love was unattainable, impossible, in this world. And thus Tristan and Isolde was conceived. The seed-germ was thoroughgoingly musical. As we have seen, it was to remain ‘only music’ for a period running into years - and yet, as Wagner has told us, he got the essential, inspirational idea for it in response to his reading of Schopenhauer.
The first chord of Tristan, known simply as ‘the Tristan chord’, remains the most famous single chord in the history of music. It contains within itself not one but two dissonances, thus creating within the listener a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution-yet-not-resolution. And so the music proceeds: in every chord-shift something is resolved but not everything; each discord is resolved in such a way that another is preserved or a new one created, so that in every moment the musical ear is being partially satisfied yet at the same time frustrated. And this carries on throughout a whole evening. Only at one point is all discord resolved, and that is on the final chord of the work; and that of course is the end of everything – the characters and our involvement with them, the work and our experience of it, everything. The rest is silence.
Even the reader untrained in music will appreciate that this was a revolutionary composition. Because it consists of almost nothing but what are technically known as discords it has been looked on ever since as the starting point of ‘modern music’. To many contemporaries it seemed to break all existing rules. For hundreds of years tonality had reigned supreme: all music was in keys, either major or minor, and one could say of every chord what key it was in, or, if it was transitional between two keys, how it stood in relation to each. But the Tristan chord was unanalysable. Musicologists have never agreed about how to characterize it: it is typical of the situation that the New Grove Dictionary of Music offers two alternative analyses. It is small wonder that many contemporaries found this music disorienting. One reason why the opera was not staged until five years after the full score was published is that many singers found these weird successions of notes impossible to learn and to remember, while many orchestral players complained that what they were being asked to play was not music: they could not understand it – and these were professional musicians. A projected staging in Vienna was abandoned after no fewer than seventy-seven rehearsals, the work then being pronounced unperformable. It is from that time that the idea dates that Wagner was seriously mad, and also the idea that he was some kind of musical anarchist who, if he were allowed to get his way, would destroy all that was best in the Western musical tradition.
Clearly the work did indeed put the tonal system under threat. And over the ensuing decades the threat materialized. Wagner's own subsequent work pushed tonality to its outermost limits: the last act of his last opera, Parsifal, opens with an orchestral prelude parts of which cannot be allotted to any particular key. At such a point conventional analysis becomes arbitrary: if one insists on parsing each chord in relation to a key then one puts oneself in a position of having to say that the music is changing key in every bar, sometimes more than once in a bar, so that there is no key that a passage is ‘in’; and if one wants to insist nevertheless that it must relate to some underlying key one finds that different musicologists opt for different keys. With Tristan it had been the single chord that defied analysis, that had broken free of tonality and was unanalysable in conventional terms: now with Parsifal it was whole passages. The next step, inevitably, would be whole works. But that would constitute the abandonment of tonality. And of course this was precisely what happened in the generation after Wagner's death. And when it did, the pioneers of atonalism gave the need to go beyond Wagner as the justification of what they were doing.
We have seen that, from The Flying Dutchman onward, all Wagner's works had been essentially musical in their inception; but Tristan and Isolde was quintessentially so. In it the dramatic presentation of human being as such - the fundamentalities of feeling and experiencing and relating – is in itself musical, and in a way that no other medium could encompass. So it is now the music that is the drama. Wagner was fully aware of this, and said of Tristan: ‘This work is more thoroughly musical than anything I have done up to now.’ The most eminent of all writers on Wagner, Ernest Newman, describes it as ‘musical from centre to periphery – so much so that the bulk of the opera would make an organic musical whole if played through by the orchestra without the voices… The musical texture of Tristan is different from that of any other of Wagner's works in that it is almost purely “symphonic”; often he abandons himself to the sheer intoxication of “developing” the mood symbolized by a particular motive for pages at a time, the stage situation meanwhile remaining stabilized… The real drama, as has been already pointed out, is not external but internal, a state of affairs made possible to the musical dramatist only in virtue of the vast superiority of music to speech and to the pictorial arts in range and subtlety and intensity of emotional expression’ (Ernest Newman, Wagner Nights, pp. 215–16).
There can be no question here in anyone's mind of the various arts being brought together on an equal footing. Stage action? For long periods there is scarcely any. Words? Many are repeated cries of distress, the longing, aching, yearning that are being even more piercingly and agonizingly expressed in the orchestra. At such climactic moments as Brangäne's warning from the watchtower, or the culmination of Tristan and Isolde's love-making, the words become melis-matic vehicles for ecstatic sound. Everything in the opera now subserves the music. The drama no longer consists primarily of what is being visually represented on the stage: primarily, it consists in what is being musically represented in the score. It is a drama not of visible action but of invisible inner states, a drama of what is going on inside people, for which a wholly new objective correlative has been found. As Wagner himself said of his creation of Tristan: ‘Here I sank myself with complete confidence into the depths of the soul's inner workings, and then built outwards from this, the world's most intimate and central point, towards external forms. This explains the brevity of the text, which you can see at a glance. For whereas a writer whose subject matter is historical has to use so much circumstantial detail to keep the continuity of his action clear on the surface that it impedes his exposition of more inward themes, I trusted myself to deal solely with these latter. Here life and death and the very existence and significance of the external world appear only as manifestations of the inner workings of the soul. The dramatic action itself is nothing but a response to that inmost soul's requirements, and it reaches the surface only in so far as it is pushed outwards from within.’
What Wagner has developed now is a form of drama in which external, visible reality is represented on the stage while the invisible, intangible inwardness of the same reality is articulated by the music, thus giving unified expression to inner and outer reality at the same time. This reaches beyond anything that even the greatest opera had previously attempted, partly because it is the self-aware instantiation of a whole philosophical understanding of the world. Opera, great opera, had always been a form of drama in which the primary means of expression was the music, but the kind of internality that had been articulated before had been limited to the inner lives of the characters, their feelings and secret thoughts, and what might be called the underlying atmosphere of a scene, or the hidden meaning of a situation. Wagner continues with this, but to it he has added something altogether different. He is now expressing, or thinks he is, the noumenal reality of which the stage characters are themselves phenomena: he is not expressing just the internality of these phenomena, he is expressing the noumenal reality of all phenomena, the noumenal reality of which phenomena as such are manifestations. What one might call the surface of the music is still interrelating with what is happening on the stage, but in its unimaginable depths the music is not an expression of what is happening on the stage at all: both music and stage action are expressions of something else, and of the same something else, the one of its inner nature and the other of its outer. Of these two there is no doubt as to which carries the greater weight.
That this is how Wagner viewed his own work by this time is stated clearly in the later theoretical writings, where he refers to the stage drama in opera as ‘a visible image of the music’. In his essay On the Term Music-Drama published in 1872 he wrote: ‘I would almost like to call my dramas deeds (acts, actions) of music become visible.’ And again: ‘The music sounds, and what it sounds you may see on the stage before you.’ It is as true to say that the stage representation is a support and accompaniment to the musical score as the other way round. Symphonic music, which Beethoven had developed into a self-sufficient means of expressing the most highly personal, and in that sense dramatic, emotional conflicts, has found a new abode in the theatre and become drama in a literal sense; and what that drama is bodying forth is not only human characters but the whole cosmic scheme of things within which humans have their being. It is giving expression to ultimate metaphysical insight, a thoroughly possessed philosophical vision of the totality of what there is – than which, if it is valid, nothing could go deeper. This, I believe, is what Wagner had in mind when he talked of ‘Schopenhauerian philosophy and Parcival as the crowning achievement’. Beyond them there is nowhere left to go in any available categories of human insight or understanding.
Wagner, like Shakespeare, invented few of the stories recounted in his dramas, and few of the main characters. Both men simply helped themselves to these materials ad lib from other people's work, and then treated them with marvellous licence. Our familiarity with the finished products leads us to take them for granted in the form we have them. We forget that, even after Shakespeare had decided to write a play about, shall we say, Macbeth, or Wagner an opera about Tristan and Isolde, it remained completely open to them to go about it in any number of different ways. Macbeth, it so happens, was a historical character, and the story Shakespeare tells about him is quite unlike what occurred in history. Shakespeare does what he likes with both the story and the character, and quite rightly, and nobody would dream of minding. But it does mean that probably no one else would have thought of treating it in anything like the same way.
If you told the story recounted in Tristan and Isolde to a group of students who did not know it, and then said to them: ‘I want you to imagine now that you are going to present this story in a three-act drama, so you need to choose no more than three settings of time and place through which to tell the whole story: which will you choose?’, I find it impossible to believe that any of them would choose the ones Wagner did. His decision in this respect is as unlikely as can be. It is almost the end of the story before the curtain goes up on Act I of the opera.
One reason for this is that Wagner consciously took over from the dramatists of ancient Greece for Tristan, as he had in his first conception of The Ring, their way of beginning the theatrical presentation of a story not with the beginning of the story but, on the contrary, at a point shortly before its climax; and then recounting, in flashback as it were, the events that have led up to this point; and then precipitating the climax. The great strengths of this technique are that it can be a way of holding the audience in high tension while the story is told, and that all the events are understood with full hindsight, which is something Wagner's music has the power of conveying with unique eloquence. Its great danger is that only a little of the story is presented in the form of stage action, nearly all of it coming to the audience through somebody's narrating long chunks of back history – and this can become boring if it is not kept energized and animated. This precisely is the nature of the boredom experienced by many of those who do find Wagner's operas boring: to them it seems that nothing is happening, that the characters are just prosing on endlessly about things that were already in the past when the opera began. These are auditors to whom, alas, the music does not speak, and for whom this form of drama must therefore be the least accessible of any.
When the curtain rises on Tristan and Isolde the two main characters are already in love, but their love is undeclared. They are on board the ship on which Tristan, a Breton knight in the service of King Mark of Cornwall, is bringing Isolde from her native Ireland, where she is princess, to marry Mark and thus unite the two kingdoms. But rather than marry a man she does not love, while living in daily sight of the man she does, she decides to kill both Tristan and herself. At this time she is possessed by overwhelming love-hate for Tristan, the hate being due to the fact that he has killed the man to whom she was formerly betrothed and is now betraying their love by handing her over to someone else. Much of the act is devoted to her expression and explication of this love-hate. She demands that he drink atonement with her before the ship lands, and orders her servant to fetch a drink that is poisoned. The servant, horrified, deliberately fetches the wrong drink, and brings instead a love potion which Isolde's mother had intended Isolde to give to her new husband. Tristan knows what Isolde is up to and drinks willingly. Both of them, believing they are about to die, unloose their tongues and declare their love – and then, of course, do not die. Instead, they are helplessly in one another's arms.
In Act II Isolde is married to Mark, but the marriage has remained unconsummated while she pursues a secret love relationship with Tristan. Melot, a fellow knight and false friend of Tristan, has perceived what is going on and seeks to advance himself by making it known to the king. He takes Mark away on a night hunting trip, knowing that Isolde and Tristan will meet to make love in the king's absence – and then brings him back unexpectedly, catching the two in flagrante delicto. Most of this act is occupied with the love-making of the two, culminating in sexual climax and betrayal – probably the most famous, certainly the longest, ‘love duet’ in opera. In the mêlée in which it disintegrates Tristan deliberately lowers his sword and allows himself to be run through by Melot, but does not die.
In Act III a wounded and unconscious Tristan, hanging between life and death, has been taken back to his native Brittany by a faithful servant who hopes that Isolde will flee her husband and join them. This act consists largely of Tristan's rememberings, ravings, and year-ings. At last Isolde does arrive, whereupon Tristan deliriously tears off his bandages and dies in her arms – after which she dies too. Wagner's heroines are much given to dying from no evident cause other than obedient response to some such stage direction as ‘sinks lifeless to the ground’, and this is a case of it, only here she sinks lifeless on to Tristan's body.
How all these things came about, and why, is recounted by the various characters at such length that to repeat it all here would take up space unnecessarily to our purpose – for although the comparative absence of stage action in most of Wagner's operas easily gives the impression that not much is happening, the stories are in fact being told in unusually full detail. Different portions of them are disclosed in different scenes, often glancingly, and seldom in chronological order, and it is left to audiences to put the pieces together for themselves. I suspect that most members of most audiences never do this, but remain content with a broad picture of what is going on.
For much of the time when Tristan and Isolde are not narrating or recalling they are gasping their longing for one another. The German word for ‘longing’ (Sehnen, with a capital as a noun and a small ‘s’ as a verb) provides the focal concept of the Tristan libretto in the same way as Mitleid (‘compassion’) is the focal concept of the Parsifal libretto; and in each case there is an elaborate substructure underpinning it in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy, for longing is the key concept of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of experience, and compassion the key concept of his ethics. In Act III of Tristan, Tristan's longing for Isolde is literally killing him, and yet is at the same time the only thing keeping him alive. As he himself puts it:
Longing, longing
even in death still longing
not to die of longing.
That which never dies,
longing, now calls out
for the peace of death…
and:
No cure now,
not even sweet death,
can ever free me
from this agony of longing.
Never, no never
shall I find rest.
His wound, figuratively as well as literally, is mortal, and because of it he cannot live, and yet it is also because of it that he cannot die until united with, and released by, Isolde.
The love between Tristan and Isolde is doomed from the beginning because they live in a world which forbids it and cannot allow it to exist. Only by hiding themselves from the rest of the world under cover of darkness can they meet as lovers at all. This leads to many exchanges about their detestation of daylight, and of the external world from which they are withdrawing, with all its false values, and at the same time their devotion to darkness and to night. In full Schopenhauerian consciousness they reject the world, repudiate it, turn their backs on it, in a state of what sometimes seems to be quasi-Buddhistic enlightenment. In one of Tristan's most rapturous utterances he sings:
Now we have become
night's devotees.
Spiteful day
armed with envy
could still delusively keep us separate
but never again deceive us with its illusions.
Its idle pomp
its boastful seeming
are derisory to those whose vision
has been consecrated by night.
The transient flashes
of its flickering light
hoodwink us
no more.
To us who have looked lovingly
on the night of death
and been entrusted
with its deep secret
the day's illusions –
fame and honour
power and profit –
have the glitter of mere
dust in the sunlight
into which it disperses…
Musically this passage is beautiful beyond all power of words to describe, but while being that it is also poeticized Schopenhauer, even to the point about the illusion of separateness existing only in the outer world. Conceptually, the libretto of Tristan is saturated with Schopenhauer in this sort of way, and in the next section we shall consider in particular the relationship of Wagner's imagery of day and night to Schopenhauer's ideas.
The philosopher's conceptions are also articulated in the drama's structure. For instance, each one of its three acts begins by setting the scene for itself with a musico-dramatic rejection of the external world. The first thing we hear each time is the sound of the world's business going on off-stage – the young sailor's song from the rigging in Act I, the hunting horns disappearing into the distance in Act II (I believe somebody once said that Alfred de Vigny's ‘J'aime le son du cor, le soir, au fond des bois’ was the most beautiful single line in all French poetry; here we have it in goose-pimpling musical sound) and the shepherd's pipe in Act III; and then in each case what these sounds represent is rejected: Isolde thinks the sailor is mocking her; her servant Brangäne thinks the horns are not yet safely distant enough; the shepherd is playing the wrong tune; and only then, with a sonic immediacy that startles afresh each time, by contrast with those distant off-stage sounds, the orchestra on this side of the stage floods into the foreground of our space with its articulation of the inner predicament of the characters before us. From then until almost the end of each act we remain with these characters in their inner world; but again, each time, the external world comes crashing in at the end, to catastrophic effect.
This may be an incidental point, but other things too are expressed structurally in Tristan, usually converging on the central act: the first act is motion towards it, the last act motion away from it. Vocally each of the acts is for most of its length a duet: Act I for Brangäne and Isolde, Act II for Isolde and Tristan, Act III for Tristan and his faithful retainer Kurwenal. Dramatically the first act belongs to Isolde and the last to Tristan, in each case with loyal, loving and life-saving support from a devoted servant of the same sex, while the central act consists of the man and the woman creating havoc for themselves and everyone else and destroying themselves with their love. Pictorial representation of all these things together would constitute a triptych, and one could imagine its being so presented visually on a stage.
A moment ago I quoted lines in which day symbolized the external world. The most pervasive imagery in the Tristan libretto is this imagery of day and night, which functions on many levels at once. Day is what keeps the lovers apart, while night and darkness unite them – so much is obvious. But Wagner relates the distinction between day and night to Schopenhauer's division of total reality into the phenomenal and the noumenal realms: the realm of day is the realm of the phenomenal, the realm of night is the realm of the noumenal. We may say that it is night that makes the lovers one, and unites them, but in fact it is in the realm of the noumenal alone that they are literally, that is to say metaphysically, one.
The elements that go to make up this imagery all fit together on Schopenhauerian assumptions. Light can exist only in a space, but it is only in the phenomenal world that space exists, therefore light is a characteristic of the phenomenal world only. So when the lovers are ranting against the awfulness of day and of daylight they are ranting against the world, with its false values; and at the same time they are ranting against what separates them metaphysically as well as physically. So long as they are alive in this world they will be individually separate, kept apart not only by social forces but, at an altogether deeper level than that, by the metaphysics of phenomenal existence. Only death can release them from this phenomenal realm, liberating them from the realm of day into the realm of night. Here there will be no more Tristan, no more Isolde; they will be united in the most literal sense, undifferentiated, nameless, eternal.
And this is what they sing: ‘Let us die and never part – united – nameless – endless – no more Tristan – no more Isolde…’ and so on and so forth. They are singing metaphysics, to some of the most beautiful music that has ever ravished the human ear.
Readers will remember that in Wagner the idea of a man and a woman being united in death, released by their love from the need for any further life in this world, goes back through Tannhäuser to The Flying Dutchman; but previously it had been based on rationally unsupported intuition, whereas now it has behind it the whole magnificent edifice of Kantian-Schopenhauerian philosophy. The systematic imagery with which that has provided Wagner concerning day and night so pervades the work that it would be impossible to reproduce it without reprinting half the libretto. In part of Act II it is both so intensive and so extensive that in the German-speaking world of opera that whole scene has acquired the designation Tagesgespräch, the discussion of day. Here is a brief taste of it:
ISOLDE: |
Was it not the day that lied from within you |
when you came to Ireland |
|
as a suitor |
|
to court me for Mark |
|
and destine her who loved you to death? |
|
TRISTAN: |
The day! The day |
that shone around you, |
|
there where you |
|
in loftiest honour's |
|
brightness and radiance, |
|
removed you, Isolde, from me… |
|
ISOLDE: |
What lies did evil |
day tell you, |
|
that the woman destined for you |
|
as your lover should thus be betrayed by you? |
|
TRISTAN: |
You were haloed |
in sublimest splendour, |
|
the radiance of nobility, |
|
the authority of fame. |
|
Illusion ensnared me |
|
to set my heart on them… |
|
ISOLDE: |
From the light of day |
I wanted to flee |
|
and draw you with me |
|
into the night, |
|
illusions would end there… |
Because Wagner is before all else a musical dramatist, what can be expressed in words is always the least of it. The music in this scene is sublime, and it subserves the drama even down to such details as the changing character of the orchestration - for, as that excellent conductor Sir Charles Mackerras has pointed out, ‘The orchestration is bright and glaring for the vanity and deception of the day, then suddenly it becomes nocturnal and shadowy.’ Thus: ‘The richness of the imagery in Wagner's operas [comes] not only through the motifs but with the detailed orchestral colouration… There is a remarkable passage in Act III where the dazed Tristan ruminates on his past and the tragic circumstances of his birth, from which he derives his name, his love for Isolde, the dichotomy of day and night, and how the day brought sorrow and the night rapture. At this point Wagner brings together the Wound theme, the Day theme, the Potion theme and two sections of the Shepherd's pipe theme, and makes them go together in counterpoint in the most extraordinary way. This in its turn develops into a shrill version of the pipe tune, ascending in crazed anguish while all the other themes go downwards. This is a good illustration of Wagner's skill in using these musical devices for psychological purposes.’
We have seen how, in Act I, Isolde and Tristan determinedly go through with what they believe to be an unspoken suicide pact, and how their decision to die together is foiled only by the wiles of Brangäne. In Act II they again want to die together. They are now openly in love with each other, and are longing for the only true oneness that is permanently available to them, the oneness of the noumenal state to which death will return them. Their shared desire for death is also now open, expressed through repeated exchanges such as:
ISOLDE: |
Let me die now. |
TRISTAN: |
Must I waken? |
ISOLDE: |
Never waken |
TRISTAN: |
With the day must Tristan waken? |
ISOLDE: |
Let the day To death be given! |
or:
ISOLDE: |
So let us die, And never part. |
TRISTAN: |
Die united, heart on heart – |
In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer went out of his way to say that he did not understand how two lovers could want to do this. ‘Every year provides us with one or two cases of the common suicide of two lovers thwarted by external circumstances. But it is inexplicable to me why those who are certain of mutual love and expect to find supreme bliss in its enjoyment, do not withdraw from every connexion by the most extreme steps, and endure every discomfort, rather than give up with their lives a happiness that for them is greater than any other they can conceive’ (vol. ii, p. 532). In a manner that was almost comically typical of him, Wagner, confident that he did indeed understand, sat down while in the middle of working on Tristan to write a letter to Schopenhauer putting him straight on this question. Evidently it was important to him that in an opera that was otherwise so all-pervadingly Schopenhauerian this aspect should be justified to the philosopher himself. He began with the above quotation, and then went on to argue that sexual love is among the ways in which the will can be led not only to self-awareness but to self-denial. For whatever reason, he never finished or sent the letter, but nevertheless considered the matter so important that he kept the unfinished document. It is now to be found published in his collected writings.
There remains, however, another respect in which the libretto of Tristan is at odds with Schopenhauer. It is true, on Schopenhauerian assumptions, that when the lovers die they will cease to exist as individuals in the world of phenomena, and will both be dissolved in the noumenon, which is one and undifferentiated. But for precisely this reason there is no meaningful sense in which they will then be able to be said to be united with one another, no more or less than they will be united with Brangäne, Kurwenal, King Mark, and everybody else who has ever lived. The terms ‘with one another’ have significance or application only in a realm in which there is differentiation. As the lovers themselves keep saying, there is no Tristan, no Isolde, in the realm of night or death: in the noumenal realm, all being is one. On Schopenhauerian assumptions, therefore, there is only one possible if incomplete way in which individuals can, while still in any sense identifiable as individuals, partake literally of the same mode of being, and that is by tapping into their noumenal oneness through compassionate love while still living in the phenomenal world. But this calls for denial of the will in them as individuals. I believe that Wagner had a half-grasp of this while composing Tristan, and was still in process of working his way through to a full grasp of it, for these were still early days in his acquaintance with Schopenhauer's philosophy – hence both his project of arguing to the philosopher himself that denial of the will could be achieved through sexual love, and also his abandonment of the attempt. In the course of time he came to understand that, according to true Schopenhauerian principles, shared being between individuals was possible in this world only, and on the basis of a compassionate love that involved the denial of individual sexuality; and precisely this was to become the central theme of Parsifal.
There are some supremely great works of art in which a particular system of ideas or beliefs has been so completely digested that their authenticity as art is independent of the ideas they express. This makes them able to communicate at the profoundest level to people who do not accept those ideas, indeed to people who consciously and actively reject them. Examples that spring most immediately to mind for someone in the West are likely to be works embodying Christian beliefs – Bach's St Matthew Passion, say, or Dante's Divine Comedy, or Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel, or the very greatest of the Gothic cathedrals. No serious person would suggest that to respond fully to such works of art one needed to be a Christian. Anyone who did would be under a radical misapprehension as to the nature of art. In music, he would be refuted by the fact that some of the finest performances of such works that anyone living has heard have been given by Jewish conductors. It is clear that such works can be central to the lives, and can indeed change the lives, of people who do not share the beliefs they articulate. I assume that all the world's main religions can be said to have produced art of this kind. But the belief-system in question does not need to be religious. Some would argue that there are works in this category that are informed by Marxism – plays by Brecht, perhaps, or poems by Neruda. In the nineteenth century many good composers were nationalists in a way that was reflected in their creative output. The corresponding thing could obviously be said of Shakespeare.
Tristan and Isolde is a work of this kind. Its very conception was Schopenhauerian – indeed, to adapt a phrase from Ernest Newman, it is Schopenhauer from centre to periphery. The fundamental musical conception that was the seed-germ of the whole idea was a response to the reading of Schopenhauer, and from then on everything important about it was informed by Schopenhauer's ideas – the relationship of the music to the other elements in the drama, the central theme of the story, the verbal imagery that dominates the text… it is all Schopenhauer, through and through. Thomas Mann used to say that this interfusion of Wagner and Schopenhauer was the supreme example in the whole of Western culture of a symbiotic relationship between a truly great creative artist and a truly great thinker. I agree with that. But this does not mean that one has even to be familiar with Schopenhauer's ideas, let alone accept them, to experience Tristan as a work of art. On the contrary, it must surely be the case that most of the people who have responded deeply to this work have little idea, if any at all, of Schopenhauer's philosophy. These ideas have been ingested and absorbed into the work itself, which then relates to the audience entirely on its own terms.
Tristan was created from a single, all-dominating impulse which engulfed Wagner and compelled immediate expression. In this respect it was unlike all his other mature operas. These were decades in the making, each one of them: half consciously and half unconsciously, he allowed them to develop subliminally in his mind for year after year before getting down to doing sustained work on them. No doubt this has something to do with their unexampled depth and complexity, and the detailed integration they possess right down to inner orchestral parts that are not individually audible in most performances. By contrast the creation of Tristan took less than six years from the first thought of it in 1854 to the publication of the complete score in 1860 – and Wagner broke off work on another opera to write it.
Because of the long gestation period that his other mature operas required he had them in mind already when he composed Tristan. The libretti of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung had already been published. He had had his first thoughts about The Mastersingers as far back as 1845. Thoughts for a Parsifal came not all that long after thoughts for a Tristan, as we shall see. This means that soon after he embarked on the creation of Tristan near the end of 1854 his entire remaining life's work – the work of three decades but for a year and a bit – was there in his mind in terms of actual projects. It is true that in 1856, again in response to his reading of Schopenhauer, and also the Buddhist literature to which Schopenhauer had led him, he conceived the idea of what he himself thought of as a ‘Buddhist’ opera, to be called Die Sieger (The Conquerors). This haunted his imagination for something like twenty years. But he never wrote it – ‘partly’, says Ernest Newman, ‘because much of the emotional and metaphysical impulse that would have gone to the making of it had been expended on Tristan, partly because, in the late 1870s, he found that a good deal of what he would have to say in connection with it was finding its natural expression in Parsifal’ (Wagner Nights, pp. 204–5). This quotation underlines, incidentally, the extent to which Parsifal is as much Buddhistic as it is Christian. It is both only in the sense that it is Schopenhauerian, perhaps as Schopenhauerian as Tristan and Isolde.
1854, then, was the ultimately decisive year of Wagner's creative life. In it he composed most of the music for both Rhinegold and The Valkyrie, after not having composed any music for more than five years; he discovered Schopenhauer, read The World as Will and Representation for the first time, conceived Tristan and Isolde, and was soon in possession of consciously formed anticipations of all the operas he was to compose throughout the rest of his life. It was his forty-second year. One cannot help thinking of Schopenhauer's dictum that up to the age of forty-two the life of each one of us is like the text of a volume the rest of which consists of commentary: the commentary may be ever so profound, but it does not add to the stock of original material.
Precisely this characteristic of digested wisdom, profound commentary on the nature of things, characterizes Wagner's remaining operas. The white heat of Tristan, that ungovernable excitement, was never again to appear in his work. Wagner's own word for it was ‘ecstasy’, and it marked, among other things, the honeymoon of his love affair with Schopenhauer. That love affair became a marriage which lasted until the end of Wagner's life. And it was a marriage within which passion never died. He continued to the end to reread Schopenhauer with active emotional commitment, and even after the philosopher had become internationally famous the composer was always roused to indignation by the slightest sign of disparagement or neglect of him. Furthermore, the most engrossing to Wagner of his other important reading consisted of books recommended by Schopenhauer, or quoted by the philosopher with evident approval.
To an unusual degree, Schopenhauer is a writer who orients himself towards other writers. His customary way of approaching any important problem is through an examination of what the most interesting writers on it in the past have had to say about it. He quotes this extensively and then evaluates it critically, giving reasons both for what he rejects and for what he retains; and then goes on to make his own contribution to the discussion. He tends to do this across the whole area covered by his writings, and has a range of spontaneous reference that embraces several languages and reaches back not only to the classical worlds of ancient Greece and Rome but to the basic writings of Hinduism and Buddhism. This has the incidental effect of placing his original contribution in an exceptionally rich context, and of doing so in an exceptionally detailed way. It provides his readers with a map of the cultural and intellectual past as seen from the standpoint of what matters most to Schopenhauer. It then seems to come naturally to his more enthusiastic readers to explore this territory for themselves. Thus their discovery of him leads them on to journeys of further discovery of great moment in themselves, in other fields of major importance, and yet the whole experience remains an integrated one.
I have had the experience myself of discovering Schopenhauer with delight, and then following this up by reading widely among the authors he draws on most frequently – and then of finding myself holding most of the same books in my hands again when I examined Wagner's library in Bayreuth. It constitutes an extraordinarily rich landscape of the mind, and one that came to make up most of the landscape of Wagner's mind, at least the foreground of it, and in so far as that could be constituted by books. There was not to be any further change of fundamental attitude on his part. Of course, being the person he was, he continued to read books unconnected with Schopenhauer as well, and to have his enthusiasms among them. He also continued to take up ideas and causes from sources other than books, either from passing intellectual fashions or from the individuals he came into contact with, or from the tide of historical events in his time. He was always intellectually lively. But the essentials of what was to be his lasting ‘philosophy’, still developing though it was, had now been firmly established, and were to have a decisive influence on his remaining operas.