Immortal Tristan and Isolde

A thousand-year-old story continues to haunt our music and our culture 

Above photo: John William Waterhouse’s Tristan and Isolde with the Potion (1916)

By Paul J. Horsley

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde tells a straightforward tale with surprising economy of means. Yet its musical-dramatic design is fantastically complex, and its historical impact—not just on music but on literature, art, and cinema—has been so profound that we are, in many ways, still assessing it. The Philadelphia Orchestra, which in 1934 presented the first complete Tristan heard in the United States, performs the opera in concert this June, with Music and Artistic Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and internationally renowned soloists, including Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme.

Tristan exerted enormous influence on its contemporaries, although it wasn’t until several years after its 1865 premiere in Munich that it began to gather steam—with performances in Berlin (1876), London (1882), Vienna (1883), and in 1886, New York, Prague, and Bayreuth. Initially, many music critics reacted negatively to it. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of July 5, 1865, called it “the glorification of sensual pleasure, tricked out with every titillating device … an act of indecency.” 

Philosophers, in contrast, have been inclined to describe Tristan in high-flown, even hyperbolic terms. Friedrich Nietzsche called it “the real opus metaphysicum of all art … overpowering in its simple grandeur” and even after his celebrated break with Wagner in the late 1870s he acknowledged the opera’s legacy: “I am still in search of a work that exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan. I have sought in vain, in every art form.” 

Tristan remains one of the most psychologically dense dramatic works that has ever graced the stage. It “transcends its scenario of a conventional love story to offer a profound meditation on the nature of the material world, and on the mysteries of human existence itself,” as scholar Barry Millington writes. Yet it tells a fundamentally human tale. A nobleman and a beautiful princess fall in love—rather inconveniently, as they are en route to the woman’s arranged wedding to the nobleman’s uncle. The sudden passion that strikes Tristan and Isolde on board a ship is so intense that it leads to extravagant declarations of eternal love, even death-wishes. (Perhaps the love-potion that Brangäne, her maid, administers acts as an accelerant to an already-existing flame: “less a maker of uncontrollable passion,” writes Henry Krehbiel, “than a drink which causes the lovers to forget duty, honor, and the respect due to the laws of society.”) 

Nevertheless, in Wagner’s world a love this ferocious brings a “sweet suffering” that can only be extinguished, or apotheosized, through death. King Marke arrives to forgive the couple and permit them to marry, but he is too late. Tristan succumbs to Melot’s sword, and Isolde sings her “Liebestod.”

Wagner has structured the opera with great clarity, even simplicity. Its three weighty acts are organized symmetrically: The first is devoted to Isolde, the third to Tristan, and the second to the union of the two. Moreover, the primary action is in the hands of three almost-matching pairs of characters: Tristan and his attendant, Kurwenal; Isolde and Brangäne; and Marke and his disgruntled courtier, Melot. 

If the story seems elemental, even archetypal, it is partly because it dates back to a foundational 12th-century tale, Tristan and Iseult, aspects of which can be traced to even earlier Irish tales such as The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne. And if a tale of warring families and star-crossed lovers feels familiar, it might be because the author of a well-known 16th-century tragedy was obviously familiar with the medieval tale. Some believe Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is an intentional nod to the Tristan stories. 

Tristan was the fruit of Wagner’s longstanding fascination with medieval legends, folk tales, and ancient heroes of Norse and Celtic mythology, which found expression in such figures as Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Siegfried. “As was usual when a legend seized his imagination,” writes biographer Curt von Westernhagen, “Wagner was closely identifying himself with its hero.” There is little doubt that the composer placed himself, psychologically speaking, in the middle of his own opera. Penniless, unhappy in marriage, and on the verge of nervous collapse, Wagner had fallen under the dazzling spell of Mathilde Wesendonck—who together with her husband, Otto, supported the composer financially during this period. Meanwhile, his wife, Minna, was understandably perturbed, as Richard and Mathilde carried on a somewhat public (if possibly never consummated) affair.

With pressures mounting on all sides, Wagner was nearing a personal and an artistic crossroads. In 1857 he famously broke off from composing Siegfried, the third of his Ring of the Nibelung operas, not returning until more than a decade later, after having completed both Tristan (1857–59) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1862–67).

The pause was sparked, in part, by tumultuous events in Wagner’s life during the 1850s, including years of political exile. But one cannot underestimate the extent to which this was also an artistic crisis. The harmonic, dramatic, and philosophical innovations of Tristan represented a fundamental shift not just in Wagner’s musico-dramatic style but in the tonal landscape of Western music. When he resumed the Ring in 1868, it is no exaggeration to say that he was a composer transformed. “One can see that he would not have been able to write [Götterdämmerung] without first having mastered the harmonies of Tristan and the counterpoint of Die Meistersinger,” von Westernhagen writes.

The innovations of Tristan were not purely musical or dramatic: They were also philosophical and, perhaps just as significantly, sexual. The composer’s immersion in Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea beginning in 1854 exerted a formidable impact on the composer’s libretto for Tristan. Schopenhauer’s concepts, influenced by Buddhist thought, maintained that by denying our “will” we relinquish individuality and begin learning empathy—losing ourselves in a virtuous state of selflessness.

Schopenhauer also believed that music was the supreme art form, and that the sound world can guide us through situations in which words fail. “There are limits to what can be even symbolically represented on the stage,” writes Robert Gutman of what we might call Tristan’s sex scenes, “and the music must tell the full tale to the audience, too often led astray by the unruffled attitudes of soprano and tenor … singing at one another while decorously seated on a papier-mâché bench.”

Regardless of how one stages the scene in Act II where Marke and his men interrupt the couple in flagrante delicto, the music indicates all too clearly the effect that the intrusion has on the lovers.

Considering the formidable resources that Wagner corralled for Tristan, the year 1865 stands as a pivot-point in the history of music. It would be another half-century before Arnold Schoenberg emancipated the 12 notes of the chromatic scale to treat them as co-equals. But when Schoenberg stated that his efforts to systematize atonality were an attempt to “break the barriers of a past aesthetic,” Tristan was certainly one of the works he had in mind. It had, as much as any other composition, signaled the impending breakdown of traditional tonality.

Among the more disruptive early examples of the “post-Tristan era” were Schoenberg’s song cycle Gurrelieder (1900–11) and his monodrama for soprano Erwartung (1909). The latter is a sort of miniature Tristan, complete with a compact love-death finale. The Tristan effect can also be traced through works by Mahler, Webern, Debussy, and Berg (Lyric Suite, 1925–26), among others. There is also self-conscious and at times satirical use of the Tristan chord in composers as diverse as Britten and Peter Schickele, Bernard Herrmann and Radiohead.

The enervating power of Tristan is found in literature, too. Thomas Mann’s 1903 novella Tristan takes place in a sanatorium, where the fragile Gabriele (Isolde) is recovering from a tracheal illness. Fellow resident Detlev Spinell (Tristan) is a flighty writer who bonds with Gabriele over a love of the arts, much to the chagrin of her bourgeois husband, Anton (Marke). In Willa Cather’s vivid 1904 short story A Wagner Matinee, a young man living in Boston invites his aging aunt for a visit; as Aunt Georgina listens to a Boston Symphony all-Wagner concert, she melts into an emotional heap from the sense of loss: from a memory of the life she gave up.

Tristan has had an impact on the art world, as well. The early “conceptual” set and costume designs of Secession artist Alfred Roller, created for the 1903 Viennese production that Mahler conducted, helped push operatic production into an era of stylized abstraction, which ultimately reflected the art of the period.

Tristan has also eked into cinema. In Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s surrealist L’Âge d’or (1930), a couple flouts taboo by making passionate love in awkward places—each time to music of Tristan—only to be suppressed by society, government, religion. In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, extended passages of the opera fit neatly into an end-of-the-world scenario: There is love and there is hate, and there will be death. “Human insistence on suffering is bringing about its own destruction,” writes OperaWire’s David Salazar of this savvy film, adding that this “could not be more in line with the thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer.”

Paul Horsley is performing arts editor of the Independent in Kansas City. Before that he was music and dance critic for the Kansas City Star and program annotator and musicologist for The Philadelphia Orchestra.