Tristan und Isolde

• 1. Introduction

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  Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner's music drama in three acts catalogued as WWV 90, stands apart from nearly everything else in the operatic tradition. Its opening chord, struck in the prelude of 1859, has fascinated and troubled musicians ever since. That single dissonant cluster, now called the Tristan chord, does not resolve to consonance the way any well-behaved harmonic move should. It resolves instead to another dissonant chord, leaving the listener suspended in longing, caught between tension and release. The cadences first sounded in that prelude are not resolved until the final pages of act three.

  What drives an opera toward four hours of unfinished harmonic sentences? What made Wagner abandon his giant Ring cycle midway through to write this work instead? Why did more than seventy rehearsals in Vienna still fail to produce a single performance? And how did a piece that critics once called an act of indecency become one of the most celebrated achievements in the history of Western music? Those questions open into a story that touches medieval romance, forbidden love, Schopenhauer's philosophy, Buddhist metaphysics, a warrant for Wagner's arrest, and the strange fates of the singers who first brought the work to life.

• 2. Exile and Inspiration

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  A warrant for Wagner's arrest issued after the failed May Revolution of 1849 forced him out of his position conducting the Dresden Opera. He left his wife, Minna, behind in Dresden and fled to Zurich. It was there, in 1852, that he met Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk trader who became Wagner's financial patron for several years.

  Wesendonck's wife, Mathilde, became deeply attached to Wagner. The precise nature of their relationship remains uncertain, but its emotional intensity was unmistakable. Wagner himself wrote to Franz Liszt on the 16th of December 1854 about the work forming in his mind: "Never in my life having enjoyed the true happiness of love I shall erect a memorial to this loveliest of all dreams in which, from the first to the last, love shall, for once, find utter repletion. I have devised in my mind a Tristan und Isolde, the simplest, yet most full-blooded musical conception imaginable, and with the 'black flag' that waves at the end I shall cover myself over -- to die."

  In October 1854, Wagner had read Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, and the encounter shook him. He wrote of finding himself in a "serious mood created by Schopenhauer, which was trying to find ecstatic expression." It was that mood, he said, that produced the conception of Tristan. By the end of 1854, he had sketched all three acts. But only in August 1857 did he devote himself entirely to the work, setting his Ring cycle aside to do so. On the 20th of August he began the prose sketch, and by the 18th of September the libretto was complete.

  During the months of composition in Zurich, Wagner had moved into a cottage built on the grounds of Wesendonck's villa. One September evening that year, he read the finished poem of Tristan to a small audience that included Mathilde, his wife Minna, and Cosima von Bülow, who would later become his second wife. In November 1857, he set five of Mathilde's own poems to music, known today as the Wesendonck Lieder. He called two of them -- "Im Treibhaus" and "Träume" -- studies for Tristan itself. The love duet of act two draws on a motif from "Träume"; the prelude to act three grows from a theme in "Im Treibhaus".

  The domestic crisis came in April 1858, when Minna intercepted a note from Wagner to Mathilde and accused them both of infidelity. Wagner persuaded Minna, who had a heart condition, to rest at a spa while Otto Wesendonck took Mathilde to Italy. In that interval Wagner began the composition sketch of act two. When Minna returned in July and tensions remained unresolved, Wagner departed on the 17th of August 1858, leaving both women behind. He later called his last days in Zurich "a veritable Hell." Minna wrote to Mathilde before departing for Dresden: "I must tell you with a bleeding heart that you have succeeded in separating my husband from me after nearly twenty-two years of marriage."

  Wagner finished act two during eight months of exile in Venice, living in the Palazzo Giustinian. In March 1859, fearing extradition to Saxony, he moved to Lucerne and there completed act three in August 1859. The path to performance, however, had barely begun.

• 3. The Unperformable Opera

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  In 1857, a representative of Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, invited Wagner to stage his operas in Rio de Janeiro. Wagner told Liszt he was seriously considering the city as the site of Tristan's premiere. He sent the emperor bound copies of his earlier operas as a gesture of interest. Nothing came of it. He then considered Strasbourg, where the Grand Duchess of Baden had expressed interest. That plan also collapsed. His thoughts turned to Paris, then widely regarded as the centre of the operatic world, but a disastrous staging of his earlier opera Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra soured that prospect. In 1861 he offered the work to the Karlsruhe opera.

  When Wagner visited the Vienna Court Opera to audition possible singers, the Vienna management proposed staging it themselves. The tenor Alois Ander was engaged to sing Tristan but proved incapable of learning the role. Attempts to mount the production in Dresden, Weimar, and Prague all failed. Despite more than seventy rehearsals held between 1862 and 1864, Vienna could not stage the opera, and Tristan und Isolde acquired the reputation of being unperformable.

  Relief came from an unexpected direction. King Ludwig II of Bavaria became Wagner's patron, granting him a generous stipend and backing his artistic plans. With those resources, a production finally became possible at the Nationaltheater in Munich. Hans von Bülow was chosen to conduct, a choice carrying its own charged subtext: Wagner was by then conducting an affair with von Bülow's wife, Cosima.

  The premiere planned for the 15th of May 1865 had to be postponed because the soprano singing Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, had lost her voice to hoarseness. The opera finally premiered on the 10th of June 1865, with Malvina's husband Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld singing Tristan opposite her Isolde.

  On the 21st of July 1865, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld died suddenly, having sung the role only four times. Speculation immediately arose that the physical demands of the part had killed him. The role's toll did not end there. Felix Mottl died in 1911 after collapsing while conducting the second act. Joseph Keilberth died in 1968 under identical circumstances. Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld sank into a deep depression after her husband's death and never sang again, though she lived for another thirty-eight years.

• 4. Harmony Suspended

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  Harold C. Schonberg wrote that the opening chords of Tristan were "to the last half of the nineteenth century what Eroica and Ninth Symphonies had been to the first half -- a breakaway, a new concept." He added that in Tristan "harmonic relations are pushed to their breaking point, and twentieth century scholars see in the opera the beginnings of atonality."

  The Tristan chord is of great significance because it does not resolve to a consonant harmony. Instead it moves to another dissonant chord, deferring any sense of arrival. Wagner builds on this throughout the opera with harmonic suspension, using prolonged unfinished cadences to create an unbroken sensation of yearning. Suspension had existed as a compositional device since before the Renaissance, but Wagner was among the first composers to extend it across an entire work rather than deploying it within individual passages.

  Another distinct feature is the frequent use of two consecutive chords each containing a tritone, neither of which is a diminished seventh chord. The opera is also notable for an unusual freedom in orchestral colour, polyphony, and chromaticism not found to the same degree in Wagner's earlier works.

  Wagner himself preferred not to call Tristan an opera at all. He used the term Handlung, German for "plot" or "action", to distinguish its structure of continuous narrative flow -- what he called "endless melody" -- from the conventional opera of his time, which consisted of recitatives punctuated by showpiece arias, a form he regarded with great disdain.

  The full cadential resolution the prelude initiates does not arrive until after Isolde sings the passage called the "Liebestod," the Love-Death, at the opera's close. One particularly dramatic instance of deferred resolution occurs at the end of the act two love duet, where the musical tension builds toward an expected climax only to be shattered by Kurwenal's urgent cry "Rette Dich, Tristan!" -- "Save yourself, Tristan!" -- as King Marke and his men arrive to find the lovers together.

• 5. Schopenhauer and the Night

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  Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation argues that an underlying force called the Will drives all human existence, producing endless striving and suffering from which there is no permanent escape. Music, in Schopenhauer's view, was the highest art because it expressed the Will directly rather than representing it through images or concepts. Wagner found this framework not merely philosophically compelling but personally urgent.

  In Tristan, Wagner gives music a dominance he had not given it in earlier works, and he wrote some of the music before completing the libretto, reversing his usual method. The unresolved harmonic tension and extreme chromaticism that characterize the score embody the Schopenhauerian Will: a force inherently restless, never fully satisfied, driving all human desire toward a cycle of longing and suffering. Only at the opera's end, when Isolde undergoes what Wagner called "Verklärung," or Transfiguration, does the musical tension finally resolve.

  Wagner encodes this philosophy into the opera's central metaphor of Day and Night. Day represents the external world of social obligations, courtly duty, and constraint, requiring Tristan and Isolde to deny their feelings. Night represents an inner world of truth and authentic desire where those constraints fall away. But Night is also linked to death, because true fulfillment, in Schopenhauer's framework, can only lie beyond the physical world. Wagner implicitly aligns Day with what Schopenhauer called phenomenon, the world as it appears to us, and Night with noumenon, the underlying reality beneath appearances.

  When Tristan and Isolde drink the potion in act one and do not die, their eyes are opened, in the opera's own terms, to the illusions of material Day and to the higher insight of Night. In act two, Tristan celebrates the potion's effect in a passage that declares: "Oh hail the potion! Hail to the draft! / Hail to its magic's magnificent craft! / Through the gates of Death, to me it flowed, / wide and open, for me it showed, / that which I've only dreamed to have sight, / the wondrous realm of Night!"

  In the act two love duet, the Liebesnacht, the two lovers dedicate themselves to eternal Night and yearn together for what they call a transcendental "Love-Death" as the ultimate consummation of their love, singing: "Tristan you, I Isolde, no longer Tristan! / You Isolde, Tristan I, no longer Isolde! / Without naming, without separating, / newly perceiving, newly igniting; / endless, eternal, one-consciousness."

  The closing Liebestod carries this metaphysics to its conclusion. Isolde sinks unconscious into a state of bliss, a condition scholars have associated with the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, though the source notes that both Schopenhauer and Wagner at the time understood Nirvana as implying a state of non-being rather than its actual meaning. The German word for breath, Atem, shares an etymological root with the Sanskrit Atman, meaning soul or eternal self, and those linguistic threads run through the final aria's imagery of dissolution into a world-breath.

• 6. Spiritual Sources

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  In 1855, well before the opera was finished, Wagner's attention had turned to Indian religion. He read Eugène Burnouf's Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism and Hindu texts published in Adolf Holtzmann's Indian Sagas. These readings fed not only Tristan but two other operatic conceptions: Die Sieger, based on the life of the Buddhist monk Anananda, and Parsifal, built on the Holy Grail quest from Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval poem Parzival.

  Wagner had been drawn to the Orient even before his encounter with Schopenhauer. In an 1852 letter to his friend August Röckel, he called the Persian Sufi poet Hafez "the greatest of all poets." Schopenhauer's discussion of German Christian mystics, among them Meister Eckhart, deepened this interest further.

  The themes of Tristan resonate across several mystical traditions simultaneously. The lovers' relentless pursuit of an idealized love that transcends earthly existence parallels the Christian mystical concept of unio mystica, the soul's union with the divine. It also parallels the Sufi concept of fana, the annihilation of the self in the universal presence of the divine.

  Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote of the moment when Tristan and Isolde drink the potion: "...as Tristan and Isolde have already renounced psychologically both love as lust and the fear of death, when they drink, and live, and again look upon each other, the veil of maya has fallen." In Indian religions, maya signifies the illusory world of appearances that conceals the true nature of spiritual reality, a concept Schopenhauer's "phenomenon" closely parallels.

  Wagner scholar John Pohanka has written that Wagner's music and drama invoke transformative experiences in some listeners that are comparable to mystical experiences. British scholar George Ainslie Hight, writing in 1912, characterized Wagner's apparent pessimism as belonging to an ancient current running through the Vedanta philosophy, the poetry of Hafiz, medieval mysticism, and the early Christian church alike, calling it "the common basis of all religions."

• 7. Critical Storm and Legacy

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  The 5th of July 1865 edition of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung opened its verdict without mercy, calling the opera "the glorification of sensual pleasure" and declaring that Wagner "makes sensuality itself the true subject of his drama," concluding that its staging "amounts to an act of indecency." In 1868, the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that Tristan's prelude "reminds one of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel." When it reached London's Drury Lane Theatre in 1882, a critic for The Era expressed hope that such works "will not become popular."

  Mark Twain heard the opera at Bayreuth and recorded his sense of bewilderment: "I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned." Clara Schumann called it "the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life."

  Richard Strauss began in a similar vein, saying Wagner's music "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of its hideous discords." But Strauss converted. In 1892 he wrote to Cosima Wagner: "I have conducted my first Tristan. It was the most wonderful day of my life." In 1935 he wrote to his librettist Joseph Gregor that Tristan was "the end of all romanticism, as it brings into focus the longing of the entire 19th century."

  Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his youth had been among Wagner's most fervent admirers, described his reaction to Tristan's prelude in an 1868 letter to his friend Erwin Rohde: "I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is atwitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture." Even after his famous break with Wagner, Nietzsche called Tristan "the real opus metaphysicum of all art" and wrote: "Even now I am still in search of a work that exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan -- I have sought in vain, in every art."

  Giuseppe Verdi, near the end of his life, said he "stood in wonder and terror" before the work. Bruno Walter heard his first Tristan in 1889 as a student in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House and wrote: "Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun."

  Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht of 1899 was described by Aaron Copland as "clearly inspired by Tristan," moving into a realm where harmonic dissonance no longer required orderly resolution. Alban Berg paid explicit homage to Tristan in his Lyric Suite and his opera Lulu. Claude Debussy, deeply influenced by Wagner and by Tristan in particular, later distanced himself, and many consider his 1902 opera Pelléas et Mélisande a French counterpoint to Wagner's work. T. S. Eliot quoted Tristan in The Waste Land in 1922. James Joyce made numerous references to it in Finnegans Wake, published in 1939. The line "three quarks for Muster Mark!" refers to King Marke, sung by seagulls. Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky's Mild und Lise of 1972, which itself quoted Tristan, on Kid A in 2000.