By Costas J. Papachristou
A musical revolution
We hear it from teachers, friends and psychotherapists: follow yourself ! But it isn’t often that we follow our self in real life. Either because we don’t really know it, or because we consciously sacrifice our freedom in favor of social conventions that allow us to be accepted as members of a society. The escape from the false world of conventions to the true freedom experienced through love is the central theme in Richard Wagner's most interesting work, both musically and philosophically.
Perhaps the most important opera ever created, the music drama “Tristan und Isolde” is a work too complex to fit in a brief analysis. The orchestral Prelude of the first act is regarded as a revolution that broke the rules of classical harmony – although one should not overlook the prophetic quartets by Mozart, dedicated to Joseph Haydn (especially the so-called “Dissonant” quartet, K.465, and the quartet K.428 where the “Tristan” theme itself can be heard!), as well as the harmonically adventurous piano preludes by Chopin.
The “Tristan” Prelude is a real masterpiece of contrapuntal writing that surpasses even that of Bach (as Leonard Bernstein remarks in an analysis of the work, the ingenuity of the produced musical effect is almost hair raising)! At the climax of the music's dramatic tension an incredibly complex harmonic “edifice” is built with musical themes introduced in succession, in such a way that each new “voice” enriches rather than undermines the delicate harmonic balance of the other voices. Thus Bernstein’s remark proves anything but a figure of speech!
The symbols behind the drama
Wagner’s opera, however, isn’t just beautiful music. “Tristan” is poetry and – above all – philosophy. It symbolizes a dialectic conflict between the symbols of day and night, of light and darkness. And, for the initiated listener, light here is not necessarily “good”, nor is darkness necessarily “bad”: it may be just the opposite. “This light... take this light away!” cries Tristan as he slowly dies...
The day–night dipole symbolizes the opposition between appearance and essence, image and truth, logic and emotion, duty and desire, convention and freedom, honor and love. A love that at its peak abolishes individuality.
By day, Tristan and Isolde live in the hypocritical world of conventions where “honor” is the reward for blind obedience to the rules. She must appear as the faithful wife of King Marke; he, as the faithful defender of the honor of the monarch and uncle of his. The darkness of the night, however, brings to the surface the true selves of the two lovers. There is only Tristan and Isolde and nothing else in the world. And when the conventional honor of Tristan is lost forever, she will choose to follow him to his own, eternally dark world…
The love–death dipole dominates the entire opera. This time the concepts are in conjunction, as opposed to the completely disjunctive “light–dark”. Love and death are inseparable companions where the latter is a moral prerequisite for the former (an idea that the modern Greek philosopher Dimitris Liantinis persistently pursued in his writings and lectures).
How much Schopenhauer is there in “Tristan” ?
Is love – this supreme experience of happiness – an unseen partner of death? For some philosophers this is a sacred and eternal truth, which constitutes the main theme in the music drama of a composer whose superficially arrogant nature concealed the existential pain of a deep connoisseur of Schopenhauer's thinking.
Schopenhauer’s influence on the philosophical conception of “Tristan” has been extensively discussed. We should, however, approach the issue with a degree of skepticism. According to Schopenhauer, death redeems the world from the sufferings of love. In “Tristan” the exact opposite happens: death redeems love from the world's compromises!
In the former case love is the victimizer. By pushing man into an endless process of reproduction it is responsible for perpetuating the pain and misery of life. Thus, man’s only redemption from earthly suffering is death.
In the latter case love is a victim of human conventions, especially those related to the sense of honor and the social codes that derive from it. Death functions here as a vehicle of escape from the imposing world of conventions into a world of freedom, in which the two lovers gain the opportunity to experience their own, unique truth. The poison that transmutes into a love potion symbolizes precisely the redemption of the passion of love through death, since only through death can passion acquire eternal life.
After all, love is not a gift offered to us: we are gifts offered to love! Even if we well know how much this offer costs...
* This article is a translated version of a brief musical / philosophical analysis of Wagner's musical drama "Tristan und Isolde", published in 2022 in the Greek journal Klik.
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