Night and Light in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht: Inversion and Transfiguration

JILL SCOTT Night and Light in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht: Inversion and Transfiguration Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is an opera obsessed with the great dramatic dialectic and operatic imperative of love and death, eros and thanatos, though it is no less dominated by the opposition of night and light, which figures as a unifying leitmotif throughout the literature of German Romanticism.l There is no consensus among scholars regarding the status of Wagner's Tristan as either wholly Romantic, as Thomas Mann thought, or as an lend to all Romanticism,' as in the eyes of Richard Strauss (Borchmeyer, 261; Prlifer, 290). My question is not whether Wagner's Tristan is a truly Romantic work of art, but rather how the composer appropriates Romantic tropes to his own ends, just as he filters the dialectic tensions of Gottfried's medieval Tristan epic. I hope also to demonstrate that, while Wagner sets up a world of already inverted oppositions such as dark and bright, death and life, dissonance and harmony, these polarities eventually collapse into an 'optics of transfiguration,' parallelling Tristan and Isolde's Liebestod. Before I proceed to the analysis of Wagner's use of night and light imagery, I would first like to consider what is meant by these terms in this particular context. The mythic cult of night, often described as a 'metaphysics of night' characteristic of Romanticism, has multiple sources, the most obvious of which is the break from the Enlightenment with its drive to clarify and demystify, literally to shed light upon ,the rational aspects of 1 The imagery of night and light is to be found in almost every Romantic writer, notably in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (1799) and in Joseph von Eichendorff's poem ,Der Einsiedler' (1837), as well as in the works ofLudwig Tieck, Achim von Amim, and Clemens Brentano, to name only a few. In fact, night imagery was so overused that it eventually inspired an anonymous parody of the Romantic night-fetish in a novel entitled Nnchtwachen von Bonaventura (1804), also a veiled critique ofthewholesale acceptance ofFichte'5 specula tive system, a major influence for Navalis, Tieck, and Schlegel. Among the English Romantics, Keats is noted for his concentration on light and dark imagery, although there is little reason to believe that he was directly influenced by any particular German Romantic thinker (see Klotz). The origins of night imagery in Romanticism are more widespread than a mere revolt against Enlightenment thought. Ernst Robert Curtius comments upon the opposition of dark and light in the MinnesGllger tradition and in the medieval genre of the Alba, a night song that warns of the evil of the morning greyness. He also points to two other possible sources for Romantic night imagery in the Spanish mystics and in the Petrarchan tradition (Borchmeyer, 263). UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 671 NUMBER 4, FALL 1998 NIGHT AND LIGHT IN WAGNER AND NOVALIS 775 human nature. In his essay entitled Die Christenheit oder Europa, the influential early Romantic poet Georg Friedrich Phillip von Hardenberg, better knownby his pen name, Novalis, wrote: 'Because of its mathematical obedience and its freedom, light became the darling [of Enlightenment thinkers]. They rejoiced more that it allowed itself to be broken than that it played with colours, and so they named their greatest project after it, Enlightenment' ('Das Licht war wegen seines mathematischen Gehorsams und seiner Freiheit ihr Liebling geworden. Sie freuten sich, daB es sich eher zerbrechen lieB, als daB es mit Farben gespielt hatte, und so benannten sie nach ihm ihr groBes Geschaft, Aufklarung' [quoted in Borchmeyer, 262]).2 Also well versed in the hard sciences, Novalis takes Goethe's Treatise on Optics (Beytriige zur Optik)3 as his point of departure, interpreting light as nothing more than a physical phenomenon, which therefore contributes little to a greater understanding of the soul, one's inner spirit. Night on the other hand represents an alternate world, a distant land linked to the earthmother Isis, and is above all an intoxicating womb-like refuge from the exigencies of day. Just as OUf ears get used to the dissonance in the Tristan chord, so too...