Redemption Revalued in Tristan und Isolde: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche

R.J.A. KILBOURN Redemption Revalued in Tristan und Isolde: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche This discussion of Wagner's Tristan lmd Isolde shares with the previous three papers the recognition of Wagner's propensity to invert and even subvert his materials: formally, logically, musically, and ideologically. And yet, in a seeming contradiction, the ultimate movement of Tristan is one of completion and resolution, in terms of the redemption Wagner sought to embody in the crucial conjunction of love and death. My aim is to address this apparent formal and thematic disjunction (on the basis of Wagner's professed intentions, rather than any specific production), through a close look at the opera's final tableau, Isolde's Verkliirung, or 'transfiguration' (Bailey, 41-43). In this final scene, the aesthetic and musical problem of the representation of death and its redemptive potential is inseparable from Wagner's peculiar relation to the philosophical assumptions underpinning this prototypically 'modern' work. This reading of the closing scene will tum on the irony of its being informed by one of the key moments in the Synoptic Gospels: the spectacle of Christ's 'transfiguration' (Trites, 13). Isolde's transfiguration provides a focus for a consideration ofWagner's high estimation of ArthurSchopenhauer, and Wagner's own veneration by the young Friedrich Nietzsche, exemplified in his first book, dedicated to Wagner, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). According to Bryan Magee, Wagner was much less interested in Schopenhauer's epistemology than in his ontology, ethics, and aesthetics, in particular: the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, and such notions as the independent nothingness of the phenomenal world, the inevitability within it of frustration, suffering and death, the ultimate reality of the metaphysical will, the noumenal identity of everything, the tragedy of individuation and the desire to return to an all-embracing oneness, death as our redemption from the nullity of the phenomenal world, and therefore a denial of the will to live as the supreme achievement of individual consciousness; compassion as the basis of all morality, the noumenal significance - above all other things in our life in this phenomenal world - of the arts and of sex, and the unique status among the arts of music as the direct expression of the metaphysical will. (Magee, ))8) Begirming in 1876, Nietzsche broke away from both Schopenhauer and Wagner and began transforming into the radically anti-metaphysical UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 4, FALL 1998 782 R.J.A. KILBOURN thinker of the later works (Magee, 189-225).' Nevertheless, as he implies in Ecce Homo (1888), one of his last and strangest books, Nietzsche, who rejected especially the Schopenhauer in Wagner, could never give up on Tristan: 'to this day I am still looking for a work that equals the dangerous fascination and the gruesome ['schauerlich'] and sweet infinity of Tristan - and look in all the arts in vain. ... This work is emphatically Wagner's non plus ultra' (250). Jill Scott's interpretation (see above) of the rhythm of day and night imagery throughout the opera implies an obviously negative valuation of temporal life as a basis of individual conscious human existence. For Wagner in 1855, 'there is no other consciousness except that which is personal and individual' (letter 187). In Schopenhauerian terms, the 'tragedy' ofhuman life is that we are subject to the embodied individuation of the phenomenal world and therefore not one with the truly objective noumenon - Kant's term for the transcendent realm beyond subjective hum.an experience. Between ourselves and the noumenal is the barrier of the phenomenal world of 'mere appearance,' what Schopenhauer calls the world as 'representation,' or Vorstellul1g (Magee, 109). This specialized use of 'representation' can create confusion in a context where aesthetic representation or 'presentation' (figuration, staging, etc) is also in question. The latter is used here in terms of the Kantian Darstellung, as a translation of Aristotelian mimesis. The Schopenhauerian denial of the will to live valorizes death as the means of 'returning' permanently to noumenal oneness. For Schopenhauer in general, for Wagner in Tristan, and for Nietzsche before 1876, death is redemptive in this sense of a release or liberation (ErWsung) from life, and is therefore positively valued. The early Nietzsche...