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Page 30
"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"
Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of
another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music"; and
though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner,
the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and
who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately
after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away
from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to
babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does
not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the
"Matthew" Passion--for it is not--but that it speaks to each of us in
the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world,
of oneself, of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer
loveliness of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical
doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner
calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being,
and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a
thing of life? For one does not have to think what Wagner means: so
direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the
meaning without thinking of the words that convey it. Nietzsche is
right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that
Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make
it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion
bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for
long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive
generations as they arise.
"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen stupendous
appeals in music to the emotional side of man's nature; it stands with
the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem,
rather than with "Don Giovanni," or "Fidelio," or "Tannh�user;" like
the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are
pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main
object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an
overwhelming emotion. That emotion is the passion of love--the
elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man;
and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in
his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex
attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannh�user or Venus as completely
as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannh�user, we know, would have it
that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the
spirit. That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring
of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not
consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly
love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner
had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we
commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannh�user knew; but
by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual
love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram,
and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a
way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and
listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner
selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions
expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity,
naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no
idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are
generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only ourselves
reflected on the stage--ourselves as we are under the spell of
Wagner's music and of his drama. For "Tristan" seems to me the most
wonderful of Wagner's dramas, far more wonderful than "Parsifal," far
more wonderful than "Tannh�user." There is no stroke in it that is not
inevitable, none that does not immensely and immediately tell; and,
despite its literary quality, one fancies it could not fail to make
some measure of its effect were it played without the music. Think of
the first act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind is fresh,
and charged with the bitterness of the salt sea; and Isolda sits
there consumed with burning anger and hate of the man she loves, whose
life she spared because she loved him, and who now rewards her by
carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be the wife of his
king. It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the first time in
"The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the same passion. But the
truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew
it long before Wagner; and the whole of this first act turns on it.
Isolda sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her, and begs
him to drink the cup of peace with her. Tristan sees precisely what
she means, and, loving her, drinks the proffered poison as an
atonement for the wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to
himself in winning her, for ambition's sake, as King Mark's bride
instead of taking her as his own. But the moment her hatred is
satisfied Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her
love a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks
also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with nothing
but death before them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their
exalted state passion comes over them like a flood; in the first rush
of passion, honour, shame, friendship seem mere names of illusions,
and love is the only real thing in life; and finally, the death
draught being no death draught, but a slight infusion of cantharides,
the two passionately cling to each other, vaguely wondering what all
the noise is about, while the ship reaches land and all the people
shout and the trumpets blow. What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared
with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with
such instant and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second
act. Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle
each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer
night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark
breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the
mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of
the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change is completed
in the next act, where we have the scene laid before Tristan's
deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea in the
distance (it should shine like burnished steel); and here Tristan lies
dying of the wound he received from Melot in the previous scene, while
a melody from the shepherd's pipe, the saddest melody ever heard,
floats melancholy and wearily through the hot, close, breathless air.
Kurvenal, his servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had
cured him before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with
joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters.
This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after some
other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the
death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of
"Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning
to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is
wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair,
has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera--failed to see that
two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find
Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining
themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of
bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight,
and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this
world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain
would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is
forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing--not honour,
shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of
all, life--is to be considered in comparison with their love; their
love is the love that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is
as much their enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than
the sword of Melot.
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