Tristan and Isolde, the actual opus metaphysicum of all art.
Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations
But I am still looking for a work with as dangerous a fascination, with as terrible and sweet an infinity as Tristan, – I look through all the arts in vain.
Nietzsche, ‘Why I am so clever’, Ecce homo
Friedrich Nietzsche’s comments on Tristan und Isolde foreground two elements of its fascination: the intimation of philosophical depths not usually associated with opera, and the ‘terrible and sweet infinity’ of its musical-poetic language. Wagner himself would certainly have agreed also about the work’s singularity: on the day of the second performance he proclaimed in a letter to King Ludwig II that ‘nothing similar of this kind can be compared with our Tristan, as it will reverberate and resound today’. As if to underscore the assertion, he supplemented the conventional date of 13 June 1865 with another time-reckoning: ‘the second day of Tristan’.1 Almost a century and a half into the Age of Tristan, almost everyone would agree on the unparalleled intensity and impact of this particular opera, though some might also attempt to resist the vortex of its attraction with distancing tactics made possible by postmodern approaches to the past.
The singular position of Tristan und Isolde in Western culture also presents challenges for an opera handbook. We set out with the presupposition that a work as extraordinary and influential as Tristan would require a variety of strategies: providing information, of course, but also making sources available in English and – especially – interpreting the opera. The next section, for example, posed the first challenge: a musical synopsis of Tristan und Isolde, unlike the overview of a conventional number opera, might be as arduous to read as it would be to write. Indeed, tracking Tristan’s narrow complex of themes might – to borrow a phrase from Vladimir Nabokov – prove as difficult as ‘looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick’.2 In the event, I decided to provide a translation of Wagner’s own prose synopsis (the first in English, to my knowledge), which will enable beginners to familiarize themselves with the plot, and experienced listeners to spot the nascent libretto or to note details that Wagner later changed in the process of versification and composition.
The genesis of the opera has been recounted many times in the standard literature and also in recent monographs by Roger Scruton and Eric Chafe.3 For this handbook John Deathridge chose to focus on two salient but often-overlooked ‘facts’ of this rich complex: the economic constraints that compelled Wagner to produce the score on something resembling an assembly-line schedule (without possibility of revision), and the opera’s relationship to the Wesendonck Lieder, and thus to a fascinating but often misunderstood nexus of biography and cultural practices. The libretto has also frequently been discussed, usually in the form of a comparison with its Middle High German source, Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, but its significance for the opera remains largely unexplored. The libretto chapter attempts to rectify this neglect, making a case for it as a literary text in its own right, one that also engages in a highly sophisticated intertextual dialogue with major texts and genres of German literary culture.
Three chapters pursue diverse approaches to understanding Tristan und Isolde as a music-drama. Joseph Kerman’s rigorous ‘close reading’ focuses on the Prelude to Act I and the resonances of its initial measures at crucial points of the ensuing action. Thomas Grey suggests ways in which Tristan might be interpreted through structural oppositions – between the visible and invisible, what is heard and what is silent – which are foregrounded through acousmatic effects at the beginning of each act, and lead to a conflation of sensory perceptions in the Act II love-duet that is resolved only with Isolde’s death. Jürgen Maehder examines Wagner’s use of timbre and innovations in compositional technique that underlie his creation of a ‘knowing orchestra’, capable not only of elucidating the inner life of the protagonists with a music of presentiment and recollection, but also of providing instrumental sounds with a history of their own.
The last chapters are devoted to the extraordinary reception history of Tristan und Isolde. Steven Huebner pursues its musical traces, especially the ‘Tristan’ chord, from Wagner’s own Meistersinger to later Romantic music and modernism, simultaneously examining the methodological problems involved in identifying and interpreting those traces. Even though the opera lacks the political, historical, and religious dimensions so appealing to theatre directors of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal, Stewart Spencer’s history reveals that Tristan has nonetheless stimulated a wide variety of interpretative responses, ranging from the realism of early stagings to abstract, symbolist, and mythic revisions in the twentieth century, and even the alienated domesticity of recent productions. The bibliography aims to give readers access to basic areas of Tristan scholarship, from studies of the medieval myth to presentations of the opera’s genesis, controversial elements such as the ‘Tristan’ chord and the Prelude, secondary literature on the opera in general, and studies of its performance and reception history.
Two chapters have appeared previously in the following publications: Chapter 1 in John Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 117–32; Chapter 3 in Joseph Kerman, Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 335–49. I would like to conclude with warm thanks to my collaborator-friends for their co-operation and patience.