Historical Context of the Opera
Tristan und Isolde is indisputably one of the high water marks of the Western classical canon, and has a unique significance in the history of music, probably influencing (positively or negatively) more subsequent music than any other single work. In the context of other operas written in the middle decades of the 19th century, it represents a truly radical departure from the operatic norms of its era, and was received with a decidedly mixed reaction when it was first heard publicly in 1865 (a full six years after its completion in 1859). It took a further nine years to secure a second performance, but by the end of the 19th century it had secured its reputation as the towering and pivotal masterpiece it is considered today. Despite all this, key aspects of the work remain profoundly mysterious and ambiguous, quite remarkably so for a work of such central importance, and one that has been endlessly dissected by commentators from a wide variety of academic disciplines. These ambiguities at the heart of the piece I think are a key part of its fascination and special aura, a feeling which is still undimmed for contemporary opera audiences now 166 years after its composition.
Like Nietzsche, Wagner realised that the Enlightenment project had precipitated the slow death of Christianity in the West by carving out its foundations, and his philosophical project throughout his life was to find a mythic underpinning and foundation for a post Christian world that could be expressed in his music dramas. Though not a philosopher or intellectual on the level of Nietzsche, he was remarkably prescient and knew instinctively that moral systems that humans actually lived by were not just a list of abstract rules to arbitrarily abide by, but rather best expressed and understood in narrative, which is to say dramatic form. By observing characters with different sets of values in conflict we can see what ethical orientations, modes of living, and decisions lead to what outcomes. This is why the Bible for instance is a series of stories, rather than simply a set of maxims - no amount of commandments would ever be enough to cover the infinite panoply of possibilities that life confronts us with, and nor would we be motivated to memorise and follow a gigantic list of pedantically enumerated rules. Stories however can encode a mode of being that we can imitate and embody ourselves, and so are a less explicit and more sophisticated way of communicating modes of being down the generations. They also have the advantage of being much more memorable to us than a list of rules, because they are so much more interesting and enjoyable for us to pay attention to.
With Christianity in decline, Wagner reached for other Western myths that had emerged from pagan peoples and also the epic narratives of the middle ages and Medieval period, as fertile ground in which to explore his ideas for how to reconstruct a moral and existential basis on which modern man could live. Tristan und Isolde is one such example - it derives from several 12th and 13th century poetic and prose versions that had become popular again in the 19th century, and Wagner had immediately felt drawn to them when he had discovered them for himself.
Wagner’s own pronouncements about his Tristan und Isolde being an unwitting expression of Schopenhauerian philosophy (i.e. that we suffer because we are pushed around by the Will, a sort of philosophically abstracted extension of what we might today call our drives, temptations, and desires, and that by extension true freedom comes from an abnegation of this Will), which he had discovered subsequent to drafting the libretto, is to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. The idea that pursuing love and sex at any cost, even into death, can be squared with the Eastern inspired Schopenhauer’s abnegation of desire (not to mention his famous misogyny and distrust of women) requires a huge set of mental gymnastics that lead everywhere to paradox. Many Wagner biographers point to the unconsummated and forbidden love he had for Mathilde Wesendonck, who was the wife of his patron Otto Wesendonck. The story parallels here are obvious, and there is no question that this love had a huge influence on Wagner’s creation of the work, but to reduce it merely to an expression of his sexual frustration would also be absurdly reductive. In Tristan und Isolde, it is clear that Wagner is seeking to express something extremely personal that he cannot put fully into words (otherwise he would simply have written an essay!) - the opera is his best attempt at expressing this intuition in the language of symbolism and music.
All of Wagner’s operas are both deeply philosophical and psychological, and Tristan und Isolde might be the most philosophical and psychological of all. The action, such as it is, is extremely simple - all three acts lead up to one key piece of action (the accidental drinking of the love potion in Act 1, the discovery of the lovers by Marke in Act 2, and Isolde returning to Tristan in Act 3). The rest of the work’s massive architecture concerns exploring the inner lives of Wagner’s carefully orchestrated cast of characters and the wider philosophical ramifications of what their actions mean.
The Characters
The lovers, Tristan and Isolde start out in total opposition. They each treat the other with disdain, until the fateful love potion is accidentally imbibed. Their publicly stated desires are totally at odds, but Wagner also portrays them as possessing hugely contrasted personalities - Isolde is by turns implacably furious and desperately depressed in the first act, these wild fluctuations set in stark relief by Tristan’s infuriating (to her) level-headed indifference and avoidance. Tristan and Isolde each have a servant to provide a further foil to them - Tristan’s taciturn mannerliness, and later poetic introspection, is contrasted with his devoted servant Kurwenal’s boisterous coarseness. A blokey bloke if ever there was one. Isolde’s affronted idealism is contrasted by her attendant Brangäne’s more pragmatic, worldly outlook. These contrasts are of course superbly characterised in the music. Kurwenal’s music is consistently robustly diatonic, and rhythmically virile for instance, which makes it quite jarringly and comically different from the yearning chromaticism and ambiguous harmony of the music that characterises the lovers. In act two we properly meet the last of the quintet of major characters as King Marke catches the adulterous couple in the act. In this moment, the fervent passion and freeflowing, boundless sensuality of the lovers’ duet comes to a grinding halt, and the most famous musical coitus interruptus ever composed. During Marke’s subsequent monologue to Tristan, in music characterised by painful lucidity and grandeur, the crushing weight of societal norms flaunted, moral codes violated, and above all the deep personal betrayal they have perpetrated, comes fully to bear on the couple.
Themes, Plot, and Message
Once you get behind the conventional love triangle of the plot, what is Tristan und Isolde actually about? Tristan and Isolde are in an impossible situation. They are in love, but their love is forbidden by all conventions of family, country, propriety, and even by their own felt sense of morality. These forces prove to be too strong for them, and results in their deaths, but in spite, or even because of their deaths, they have somehow transcended their suffering, and the end is felt as redemptive, rather than tragic.
You can’t get far in the literature on Wagner without coming across the words Redemption and Transcendence, with great big capital letters. Despite the fact that these abstractions are used so much to discuss the piece, it is perhaps hard to understand what Redemption precisely means in a post Christian worldview. Redemption from what? If sin is a Christian idea that evaporates with Christianity, what do we need redeeming from? What in Wagner’s opinion do we need to transcend? Nevertheless, these ideas undoubtedly persist in Wagner’s operas, and in my opinion are only really experienced fully when his music gives body to the libretto, which on its own necessarily cannot be fully explicit about what is going on metaphysically in the story, but rather just point us in the direction of something that Wagner is trying to understand himself, and also communicate to us.
In Tristan und Isolde, almost uniquely amongst 19th century operas, the unitary God (Christian or not) is tellingly not referred to once. King Marke calls up to the heavens, but only in a negative sense to say that there is no heaven that can redeem his suffering, and that he is in a personal hell. The lovers do refer to ‘Frau Minne’, a sort of female spirit of love, but this seems metaphorically illustrative of their love rather than a pagan goddess they truly worship - i.e. they say they have given themselves to Frau Minne, but they never formally pray to her or pay her homage in any way. In a godless world, Tristan und Isolde can only really appeal to themselves to define their values, and they are bound by conventional language and tropes to express these new ideas and feelings.
The lengthy discussion about Day and Night in the love duet is really about stepping out of the buttoned up strictures of rationality, society, and normal life (Day) and into the boundless world of instinct, intuition, and feelings (Night). The darkness of Night is then further associated with the ultimate abyss, death, as Tristan and Isolde know that their love cannot in fact exist in the cold reality of Day. From the beginning of Act 1, there is a drive towards death in the piece, specifically the mutual death of Tristan and Isolde, as the only way they can be truly united. In Act I, when they still display complete enmity towards one another, Isolde asks Tristan to willingly drink a death potion, to atone for Tristan having killed Morold. Secretly, she also intends to drink the death potion and kill herself: a double suicide. However, unbeknownst to them, Isolde’s servant Brangaene has switched death potion with a love potion, and so instead of dying, the two instead proclaim their desperate love for each other.
Wagner makes it extremely clear from many hints in his text and music that this love already exists strongly for both Tristan und Isolde, but that they cannot admit this love to each other because of their own moral codes, and the society they find themselves in. So for Wagner, the potion does not cause there to be love where there was none before, but rather, it enables them to transcend their moral scruples and shame, and act out what they had previously only fantasised about, but denied to themselves.
I can’t help but be amused by how acute an observer of the anglo-irish psyche Wagner proves himself to be, given that there is hardly a couple in the British isles that did not get together by first imbibing a quantity of mind altering liquid (AKA alcohol) to overcome their embarrassment and switch off their inner monologue of self restraint!
Less flippantly, both Tristan and Isolde fully expect to die, and willingly so, at the end of Act 1. If we are to look at this moment symbolically, it is only because they are willing to die to their old identities and self images, that they are able to be reborn in their identities as lovers.
Then in Act 2, Tristan and Isolde seek to enter the realm of Night together, which is associated with ego death and ultimate oblivion, but only as an ultimate consummation of their love. It’s hard or perhaps impossible to know exactly what this means in a strictly analytical sense and it is perhaps the opera’s central ambiguity, but it’s clearly Wagner’s most important theme as he approaches the subject again and again in different ways.
In Act 3, Tristan is tortured by the endless Day he has to suffer through, and the unquenchable yearning that Tristan feels for Isolde. Their indissoluble love that shines for him still and that he feels is the realest part of him, means that neither his wound can heal, nor can he die, until he is reunited with Isolde. Fascinatingly, in a passage that marks the climax of his narrative arc, Wagner presages the psychoanalytic movement by 40 years: it is only when Tristan has gone back to his earliest traumas, the memories of learning of the deaths of his parents, and come to the realisation and fully taken on the responsibility that it was he himself who has concocted his own predicament (“The terrible draught, I myself brewed it!”), that he can die to his identity as a victim and sufferer, and find Isolde again. Symbolically this moment of realisation is the event that allows Isolde’s return in the drama. Wagner’s music in this Act conjures both a bleakness and searing suffering unmatched in the rest of his oeuvre, and is the place where Wagner is most unbeholden to anything previously composed by himself or others.
One might summarise the central idea of the opera by saying that the blazing ideal of Tristan and Isolde’s love cannot exist during the Day (that is in the lucid realm of normal life with its rules and strictures) and so it is only in dying together to the limitations of this life that the ideal of their love can truly live. But in what sense can their love, which is a surely a relational thing between the two of them, truly exist if both of their consciousnesses have evaporated, and either simply ceased to exist as the atheist materialist might have it, or dissolved into unity with everything, as an Eastern mystic might see it, and which Isolde’s words during the final scene strongly suggest is her felt experience of what is happening to her in that moment? That is left unexplained in the text by Wagner, yet the overwhelming potency of Isolde’s final scene (known as the Liebestod or Love-Death) which is experienced as an extraordinarily satisfying and moving conclusion of the dramatic and musical tensions in opera, is an intuitive and deeply felt indication that something real and true has been expressed by Wagner, however mysteriously.
Wagner as Dramatist
Above I have expressed my scepticism that the meaning of this opera can be reduced to a neat formula or philosophy. Wagner’s works deal with true symbols, which mean that they are truly the artist’s best attempt at expressing what he has to express, as opposed to the artificial symbolism of lesser creators, where the symbol is calculated merely to arbitrarily ‘stand in’ for something else, without also itself deeply expressing the qualities of the thing that is trying to be expressed.
In this production I have as far as possible tried to remain true to the story that Wagner intended to tell. This means telling the story as vividly and clearly as possible, but also honouring the ambiguities in the piece, and not trying to give trite answers to what are insoluble mysteries. Tristan und Isolde is to me Wagner’s best attempt to express something that is in essence inexpressible using language alone - the ambiguities in the text are fulfilled in the music, which is itself a language that communicates things in a way that we can’t express in analytical terms.
Of the great operatic composers, Wagner is only matched in the slowness of his dramatic pacing by Handel at his most extreme. He brings the pregnant pause to a level never before seen on the operatic stage and perhaps not since. In alternating slow with very rapid action, this sets up massive contrasts in the huge arcs of his acts, but by occasionally straining his audience’s attention right to the edge of (dare we say it?) boredom, I think Wagner is also deliberately allowing us to reflect on the material in real time, and so then also enter a state of self reflection. I feel certain also that it was Wagner’s intention that his works would resonate differently for each audience member, and so the many layered ambiguities of plot and symbol allow each audience member to complete the work internally by experiencing it then and reflecting on it. What can seem interminable on a first listen, can become fascinating with increased familiarity, and as one’s relationship with the work deepens, this world of private meanings and resonances can be elaborated within, as new musical and emotional links are noticed in the incredibly intricate web that he creates his works out of.
So much has been written about Wagner’s use of Leitmotifs to structure his operas that I will offer only a brief description here for the uninitiated. Wagner characterises every recurring idea in his operas with a musical motif. These musical ideas then return, evolve, recombine with other ideas, and cross pollinate with each other so that he tells the story on the plane of the music simultaneously to the libretto, giving the operas an unusually deep and rich subtext. Although it is a fascinating exercise to trace these patterns through the opera, the effect of it works on a subliminal level, and does not require study to have the effects of this massive technical undergirding to be immediately felt in a visceral way.
The musical language of Tristan und Isolde was radically new in 1859 in its use of unresolved dissonance (and in virtually every other parameter), so aptly depicting the endless yearning of Tristan and Isolde with unflinching insight. The opera famously never fully resolves musically until the last few seconds of its over four hour duration: never before or since had the philosophical meaning of an opera been so deeply allied to very means with which it was expressed musically.
Notes on this Production
In this opera, Wagner makes Isolde’s reticence, anger, and shame the focus of Act 1. She is furious at Tristan because he killed Morold and then tricked her into healing his wound whilst in disguise as ‘Tantris’, and also because she feels humiliated that he does not appear to return the feelings of love she feels for him, and has instead come to claim her for returning the love she feels, and instead has chosen to claim her as a bride for his uncle.
But I think there is another potent wellspring of her anger and shame - namely, the fact that she has fallen in love with her betrothed’s killer. This makes her a war bride, an understandably very controversial but not unstudied phenomenon, whereby a woman can genuinely fall in love with the warrior who killed her previous husband (and often also her children with that man). If we think about it in coldly evolutionary terms, the ability to be brutally pragmatic and accept the new circumstances in which a war bride finds herself in, could be biologically extremely beneficial in comparison to the alternatives. Given the bloody history of the human race, some have suggested that our ancestors are more likely to have been those women who in times of tribal warfare most fully managed to move on and made the most of their situations. What Wagner brilliantly illustrates in my opinion is that this massive shift in allegiance likely wouldn’t come without some seriously intense inner conflict and strife, and Isolde’s outward fury at Tristan is mirrored by an equally intense self disgust at what she perceives to be a moral weakness in herself, and a betrayal of her first love for Morold. In the first act she is tormented by the young sailor’s song - in this production he becomes an internal reminder of the voice of that first love, haunting her thoughts and causing immense inner turmoil.
It has often been remarked that the drama virtually pauses during this massive Love duet of Act 2, which is at risk of devolving first into philosophising and then at times even into grammarless word salad. Many famous productions have left it essentially unstaged, allowing the music to do its potent work. But to me this misses the point of this crucial central panel of the opera. Tristan and Isolde are at this point living outside of all the normative practises of their society: in the pursual of their overweening passion for one another, Tristan and Isolde are committing adultery, betraying a best friend, a King, an uncle, a husband, and putting the entire kingdom in jeopardy. They know this, but they have to make the case to themselves and each other that the depth of their feelings justifies it.
Freed from their past identities, In the love duet I think we see Tristan and Isolde constructing together their own personal mythology, which must include definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, a cosmology, and also a symbolic language to express the inexpressible. This also implies requiring a set of rituals by which they can embody, remember, keep track of, and share this mythology with each other. Man can not live without rituals, a fact that Wagner was keenly aware of. The death potion that turns out to be a love potion is one of the most important parts of their shared mythology, as it precipitated the moment when they could first admit their love to themselves and each other, which they experience as a moment of seeing things clearly for the first time, and their previous identities being merely dreams or illusions.
To sustain this private world of meanings, rituals and symbols, it stands to reason that they would gather these from half remembered traditions and myths that they assemble together, as well as moments from their own short history together. I felt the love potion was central to this, as a sort of drink of communion for them and so they continue to reenact the moment with each other. Each has become the centre of gravity for the other as they endlessly spiral in towards each other, dramatically and musically. This feeling of yearning and falling towards the other is something that perhaps could never be consummated as fully physically as the depth of their feelings require of them.
The unbridled flow of adjectives and abstract nouns in their love music that might unkindly be termed ‘word salad’ is a reflection of the still unbounded and ill defined realm that Tristan und Isolde find themselves in: they are desperate to articulate and communicate to each other thoughts and feelings for which they have no clear language for. In this Tristan und Isolde are not accidentally doing what Wagner himself was doing in all his works - as discussed above, in his post-Christian worldview, Wagner spent his entire career trying to construct from the foundations a mythology by which he and other Europeans might live.
Without wanting to say too much, in the design of the opera, I sought with my designer Caitlin Abbott to mirror the transformations of the plot in the costumes and the set designs. Just as Tristan carries his history inescapably with him as he transforms his identity throughout the opera, so the items that create the boat in Act 1 cling to him and accompany his journey, until he is carrying the full weight of his history about him in Act 3.
In Act 3, Tristan has suffered a complete breakdown of identity - he can no longer return either to the model of honour and knightly devotion that he acted out in his life prior to drinking the love potion in the realm of ‘Day’, nor, deprived of Isolde, can he be the unbounded lover in the realm of ‘Night’. In the full arc of the story, he almost dies three times (twice willingly) before his final death at the end of Act 3. Tristan lives in a sort of limbo in Act 3, unable to be released of his inner torment until he is reunited with Isolde, to whom he has cleaved himself spiritually. Mirroring Act 1, we are at sea again, as he awaits her on a jetty, looking out to sea with Kurwenal, the two of them waiting and hoping.
In the final moments of the opera, Isolde is clearly having a moment of profound revelation, expressed in the terms she knows, and she asks her surviving friends King Marke and Brangane a series of questions - do they not see it to? For years I have wanted to see it staged in a way that makes it clear that she is trying to express something vital and revelatory and immediate (rather than epic and abstracted and philosophical), and so it has been a pleasure to work with this wonderfully talented cast to bring the drama to this conclusion.