2004

13th October 2004

Is this the most powerful music ever written?

Wagner's Tristan and Isolde has induced sobbing fits, made people pass out and even fear for their lives. Then there are the seven simultaneous orgasms in act two... Tim Ashley on a towering work that has influenced everything from Joyce to Hitchcock 

Friday October 13, 2000

The Guardian 

'I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here," Mark Twain wrote, having just sat through Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. "Sometimes," he added, "I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad." Twain's amazement at the emotions aroused by Wagner's feverish study of adulterous passion is substantiated by accounts of similar goings-on at other early performances. The French composer Emmanuel Chabrier heard it in Munich in 1880 and broke down during the prelude, sobbing uncontrollably. Another composer, Guillaume Lekeu passed out during a performance at Bayreuth. In 1886, the novelist Catulle Mendes - a fervent Wagnerite whose ex-wife Judith Gautier had been the composer's last mistress - issued a health warning: "One has to keep one's distance from this work - or, conquered, suffer with it as much as he who wrote it." 

Delirium accompanied Tristan from the beginning, and still does. Wagner, working on the score in 1858, thought he was unleashing on the world "something fearful" that could lead to derangement, and wrote hysterically that "only mediocre performances can save me! Completely good ones are bound to drive people mad!" Even worse, he came to believe his music could quite literally be lethal. The opera was ushered onto the stage in Munich on 10 June 1865, after several houses had rejected or abandoned it. The tenor who created the role of Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, expired six weeks after the premiere. The actual cause of his death remains unknown, but Wagner was convinced that Schnorr had caught a fatal chill lying on stage during the last performance. The lurid myth that the work itself exerts a dangerous fascination that can kill, eventually formed the basis of Thomas Mann's 1903 novella Tristan: its tubercular heroine, Gabriele Kloeterjahn, suffers a deadly relapse after Wagner's score induces an extreme state of sexual and emotional arousal. 

In addition to the necrotic mythology that surrounded its inception, Tristan also developed the reputation for being the most erotic piece of music ever penned, a belief still shared by many. The American composer Virgil Thomson claimed that Wagner depicted seven simultaneous orgasms in the second act alone, and while Thomas Mann was portraying Gabriele Kloeterjahn's alarming experience, writers of erotica were manipulating the work for their own ends. In 1904, a novel of dubious authorship called The Glimmer of Crime was published in Paris. The hero tells the heroine that hearing Wagner's music "gives me the excessive desire to fuck you to your depths," later adding that Tristan justifies their love "which maintains the mask of fear and in which fucking must have the taste of death." 

The equation of love and sex with death, around which the opera notoriously pivots, is one reason why Tristan und Isolde remains such a uniquely disturbing experience. Wagner was, of course, working within 19th-century cultural and social parameters that frequently demanded that those - particularly women - who broke with social convention and openly expressed desire should come to a sticky end. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are two prime examples, and like them, it is Isolde who sets in motion the work's catastrophic chain of events. Compared with Tolstoy and Flaubert, however, Wagner is extreme. Some have assumed that he portrays the love of Tristan and Isolde as a union of souls capable of transcending the grave, like that of Cathy and Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights, but he goes one step further. His lovers feel a desire for each other so intense that the physical world cannot contain it and its only fulfilment lies in their voluntarily embracing the "supreme pleasure" (the closing words) of the total dissolution of identity, being and life. The Renaissance conceit that called orgasm "the little death" is seemingly pushed to its absolute extreme. 

Interwoven in Tristan - indeed dictating the entirety of its subject and style - are Wagner's complex responses to a legend, a woman and a philosopher. Tristan and Isolde were the iconographic adulterers of medieval literature, driven by uncontrollable desire for each other as a result of having accidentally drunk a love potion, originally intended for Isolde and the man to whom she has been contracted in a forcibly arranged marriage. The tale was Celtic in origin, though by the Middle Ages, versions proliferated in English, French and German, the finest of which, by common consent, is by the 13th century poet Gottfried von Strassburg, which Wagner took as his principal source. Gottfried's version is shot through with a Song-of-Songs-ish religiosity: sex equates with mysticism, the lovers' metaphysical passion, opening on to the divine, is an experience denied the common run of humanity, placing them among a privileged spiritual elite. It's little wonder that Wagner, who once grandly announced that "I am not made like other people," was attracted. 

As early as 1850, he was thinking of a short opera on the subject, which he could write in a year and which he hoped would be a money-spinner. By 1854, however, he was talking of Tristan as a monument to love. In the interim, Wagner had got himself embroiled in a bizarre triadic relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck and her husband Otto, and he had also discovered Schopenhauer. 

Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk merchant, became Wagner's patron, and eventually provided him with a house in Zurich. Wagner, still trapped in his first unhappy marriage, was soon wildly in love with Mathilde. The hapless Otto, in addition to sorting out Wagner's bank balance, was expected to defer to Wagner's superior artistic sensibility, and acknowledge Wagner's attachment to his wife as well. For reasons that have never been fully established, Wagner's relationship with Mathilde stopped short of sex. Like Tristan and Isolde, their desire found no ultimate release in this world. 

Schopenhauer rationalised both Wagner's experience and Tristan und Isolde's denouement. The "gloomy prophet" (as Nietzsche called Schopenhauer) had a quasi-Buddhistic vision of the world as driven by an implacable cosmic energy called Will, which links the phenomenal universe in an eternal flux of cause and effect. Desire and volition are perpetually unsatisfied. The only release lies in the voluntary rejection of the strivings of Will and the dissolution of the self in what Schopenhauer, using eastern terminology, calls Nirvana, and which Wagner, in Tristan, calls "the entirety of the moving breath of the world". 

The fusion of all this produced a work, which still, at times, defies belief. The lovers' unfulfilable passion finds expression in music that hovers in suspended animation between arousal and climax. If music is itself the embodiment of cosmic Will, then it must remain in an unceasing state of flux, perpetually changing and never finding melodic or harmonic resolution. The entire score consists of protracted chromatic dissonances from which neither the characters nor the listener can escape, and the only responses possible are rejection of the work in its entirety or total immersion. 

The end result redefined the parameters of harmonic potential and in so doing, changed the history of music and the course of human thought. With the exception of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, no other single work has exerted such an impact, and all music written in its wake takes it as a point of departure, whether by a process of imitation, assimilation or rejection. Chabrier may have blubbed in Munich in 1880, but his tears were an admission that Tristan und Isolde had completely changed his life. The works of Mahler, Strauss and Debussy are unthinkable without it. The 12-tone system of Schoenberg and Berg is the logical outcome of its harmonic irresolution. The back-to-Bach approach of Weill and Hindemith and the pared-down harmonic simplicity of minimalism are attempts to define a new starting point in opposition to it. Contemporary composers are still grappling with its legacy, while musicologists still argue about its harmonic and tonal structure. 

The influence of Tristan und Isolde extended far beyond that of music. Thomas Mann's entire output is saturated with it. Wagner's text intrudes into the desolate territory of TS Eliot's Waste Land like a memory of a great vision irretrievably lost. Joyce's Finnegans Wake draws on it to re-define language, just as Wagner redefined harmony. Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room circles it as part of the novel's attempt to draw contrasts between actual and idealised experience. Even Hollywood appropriated it, sometimes kitschily, sometimes with tremendous results. In one camp classic, Humoresque, Joan Crawford drowns herself while her violinist lover, played by John Garfield, is performing a transcription of the final scene on the radio. Hitchcock's Vertigo is a take on the entire work, with James Stewart and Kim Novak enacting their own obsessive passion to a Bernard Hermann score that liberally draws on Wagner. None of this has in any way diminished the impact of Tristan und Isolde, which remains one of the most shattering things ever written. All you can do when faced with the opera is sit back, surrender and be amazed. 

6th May 2004

LENSES. I AM LEAVING THEM BEHIND. I LOVE ANNOYING PEOPLE. ANNOYING SOCIETY. ANNOYING THE STUPID PEOPLE. I LOVE BEING THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION, HAVING BLOWS RAINING DOWN ON ME FROM ALL SIDES, AS I SAUNTER ALONG, CONTINUING TO DO WHAT I WANT TO DO, SEE WHO I WANT TO SEE. I GET A THRILL OUT OF IT. A KICK. A RUSH. IT IS A RAUSCH. AN INTOXICATION. I LOVE IT WHEN I AM ATTACKED. IT IS LIKE A DRUG IN MY VEINS. IT HEIGHTENS ALL MY SENSES. TO LIVE IN DANGER, TO LIVE AT WAR. IT IS TO LIVE IN THE GRAND STYLE.