Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde (review)

Any degree of hyperbole with which one might speak of Tristan und Isolde will already have been exceeded. Thus Arthur Groos’s editorial Introduction to the new Cambridge Opera Handbook opens with Nietzsche’s celebrated dictum, ‘Tristan und Isolde, the actual opus metaphysicum of all art’, and soon quotes Wagner dating a letter to Ludwig II ‘the second day of Tristan’ (13 June 1865). A new calendar has begun, the air of another planet almost upon us. Yet it is often difficult to know what to say beyond apparently truthful yet breathless panegyrics, including those that fall, like Nietzsche’s, into reverse. (Adorno managed both at once, his dialectics less negative than those for the Ring.) Gross’s handbook quite properly grasps the nettle by proposing different standpoints from which to view the work: scholarly anamorphosis, one might say, though the danger remains of considering all as equal, when music and metaphysics seem persistently in this particular case to trump all other concerns.

‘A musical synopsis,’ writes Groos, would, ‘unlike the overview of a conventional number opera’, most likely be ‘as arduous to read as it would be to write.’ Instead, therefore, we have the editor’s own translation—the first, so far as he is aware, or I am—of Wagner’s complete prose draft from 1857. This is very useful, especially when so finely rendered into English, though the lack of some form of musical ‘synopsis’ or outline remains felt. What strikes most upon rereading the sketch is its considerable length, for a plot in which not very much ultimately would ‘happen’, and the greater prominence accorded not just to the exterior world of the day, but to that world viewed in frankly political fashion. Such discrepancies fascinate the scholar and the Tristan devotee, yet the unwitting reader might be misled as much as by more obvious differences in plot. A few editorial notes would have assisted.

I cannot help but wonder whether many stage directors would prefer the work envisaged in the sketch to Wagner’s final exaltation of metaphysics. Christ of Loy, directing Tristan in 2009 for Covent Garden, declared that he could not ‘really equate the couple’s position as outsiders with a Schopenhauerian denial of the world’. Ironically—unknowingly, I suspect—that inability seems to have led Loy to stage the second act as ‘opera’, rather as Wagner, quoted in Thomas Grey’s chapter, acknowledged he could have written it (p. 70): ‘against a brilliant court ball, “during which the illicit lovers could lose themselves . . .where their discovery would generate a suitably scandalous impression and the whole apparatus that goes with that”’. Instead, in Tristan as music drama, ‘almost nothing but music occurs in this act’.

Stewart Spencer’s informative account of Tristan’s production history, extending as far as Claus Guth’s 2008 Villa Wesendonck production for Zurich, shows that few stagings have been brave enough to take the composer-conductor- director at his word. (Not that that is necessarily Spencer’s intention.) The much-maligned Cosima came closer than many, at least in intent. Her tentative suspicion of Wagner’s realism appears surprisingly progressive, presaging directors such as Adolphe Appia and Alfred Roller and perhaps coming closer to Wagner’s metaphysical conception than he had himself as director. The Prosaentwurf had drawn to a close, Götterdämmerung-like, with the words, ‘The bystanders are profoundly moved’, before concluding, ‘Marke blesses them’. However, in 1859, summarizing the work’s concerns for Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner omitted not only King Marke’s forgiveness, but also Tristan’s agonies at Kareol. True action, the Handlung of his own description, had been irreversibly transferred to the noumenal world: ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’ (‘Tristan und Isolde: Vorspiel’, in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Richard Sternfeld and Hans von Wolzogen, 16 vols. in 10 (Leipzig, 1912–14), xii. 346).

That, at least, is my reading, against which one should note that, even in...