Let's talk Tristan und Isolde.....................

Itullian said:

Is there any DVD out there that has Isolde holding Tristan in her arms as she dies as Wagner intended?

The ones I've seen are awful.

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I would doubt that there is. It became fashionable at some point to have Isolde "transfigure" in such a way as to leave us in doubt as to what has happened to her, indeed as to whether she even dies. It is just one of many de-Wagnerizations of Wagner we have had to learn to tolerate.

Wagner is sometimes accused of creating characters who are not fully "human," but he would have been shocked at such an accusation. Frequently we encounter in his writings the phrase "the fully human." He never intended or even imagined, in making his dramatic figures "larger than life," that they should not in every way act as real people would act.

Isolde dies. She dies for love, yes - just as did Iseult, her medieval prototype - and in her love she holds her lover's body as she dies, and sinks down upon it at last. And what does Wagner tell us happens then? The kindly Marke, who has come too late to offer forgiveness to the pair and bless their union, raises his hands in blessing over them. When have we ever seen that? When will we ever see Wagner's deeply, heartbreakingly human understanding and sympathy for the human beings he created and loved brought before us in the theater?

Having recently contributed the following to the thread "The Greatest Opera Ever Written," I think I'll import it to this one in case there's anything in it of interest to anyone here.

Whether it's actually the greatest opera - with respect to everything that the complex art of opera can be - Tristan is, I think, the greatest single achievement in the entire history of music. There may be more perfect operas; but certain rare achievements in art are so immense, so stunning and awe-inspiring, as to make mere perfection seem irrelevant. I think immediately of Shakespeare and King Lear, of the late quartets of Beethoven, and of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

For its unimaginable expansion of the possibilities of the language of Western music, for its daring plunge deep into aspects of human experience no musical work had ever explored before, for its sheer intensity and visceral impact, this is the work above all others that, no matter how long and well we've known it - and perhaps all the more the better we know it - leaves us feeling that it could not possibly exist, that no human being could ever have dreamed of such a thing.

So much of what has happened since 1859, in music and even beyond music, has been what it is because of this singular work. Wagner may have equalled or surpassed it in one respect or another in subsequent works - the broad humanity of Meistersinger, the spiritual profundity of Parsifal - but when all is said and done it is Tristan which confronts us with an unaccountable eruption of genius without any parallel, which like a volcanic eruption changed the landscape of Western culture forever, for better or for worse.

Tristan went beyond anything even Wagner himself suspected opera, even music itself, could be. It astonished him even as he wrote it. If we have any idea of what we're hearing, it can hardly astonish us less.

AC Douglas said:

Uh-oh. Here comes another quibble - well, a bit more than a quibble, actually, as it contradicts directly your above. It's an article I wrote for S&F in 2004 titled "Isolde's Liebestod - Or Is It?" which article asks the question:

=== Begin Quote ===
At music-drama's close, should we take it that Isolde is dead or not? To ninety-nine percent of those who know this work, even to those who consider they know it well, the question would seem absurd. Of course she's dead!, would be the astonished response. Isn't her closing apostrophe called the Liebestod?
=== End Quote ===

and answers it all in the negative.

The article is way too long to republish here but for those interested can be read at URL http://www.soundsandfury.com/soundsandfury/2004/08/isoldes_iliebes.html.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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I've read your article, It strikes me as an extended rationalization, a theory in search of evidence. You argue that "death" and "transfiguration" are somehow incompatible. But on the level of unconscious mythic symbolism, death can mean transformation. And even on a more literal level, if Isolde can die for love she can experience transfiguration before the moment of literal death. There's no incompatibility here. Marke blessing a dead Tristan and a still-breathing Isolde is poetically absurd. Tristan and Isolde sought the impossible in life - the "death"of the day world and a perfect union of their souls in the land of "night." Reality, however, has the last word - or rather, the last gesture, as the inhabitants of the day world stand about, transfixed by Isolde's vision of union with Tristan, and Marke punctuates the end with a solemn farewell to all the pain of people who were caught up in lives that were unbearable to them. "Union" was an illusion; the only union possible was death, and now the lovers have achieved it. Whatever else this story is - whatever the exultation along the way, whatever the "transfiguration" at the end - it is still a very human tragedy.

It was with Tristan that Wagner's youthful dream of "redemption by love" was revealed to be the phantom that it must ever be. The fate of Tristan and Isolde signaled the advent of a new realism in Wagner's outlook on life, a realism which compelled him to alter the course of his magnum opus, the Ring; there love brings disaster, and with the destruction of the world Wagner tells us that redemption must be looked for beyond the realm of passion and desire. Enter Parsifal.

AC Douglas said:

Not "incompatible" but two different states. When Isolde undergoes her Verklärung her bodily self, now an empty shell, doesn't disappear but simply appears to any and all onlookers to be merely ordinarily dead. My argument is that her death is nothing of the sort, but appearance like all other appearances of Day is false and merely makes it seem so.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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I'm afraid this doesn't make sense to me. Isolde in the end is simply dead or alive. In either case "transfiguration" is something only she experiences; the others can't comprehend her visions. There is nothing in Wagner's stage directions to indicate that she is still living; Marke segnet die Leichen - "Mark blesses the corpses," plural.

My question is: what purpose is served by having her live on? None that I can see. What would she do next? Go home and fix Mark some venison and mead? Or be confined to a turret as insane and fed bread and water through a cat door? Her death makes every kind of sense, philosophically and poetically. In Wagner spiritual states are represented by physical states; when someone dies, something - some principle, some stage in the evolution or consciousness of humanity - is left behind. In his mythic world, nothing less than death will do. Senta doesn't swim to shore; Elisabeth doesn't join a convent; Elsa doesn't moon over lost love; Kundry doesn't become Mary Magdalene to Parsifal's Jesus. If we strip Isolde of her death we render Tristan's death merely pathetic and absurd, not a "tranfiguration" for Isolde but a terrible grief to be carried for the rest of her days. The "union" the pair longed for must, in poetic justice and in mercy, be consummated, but in the only way it can be. To leave a mentally deranged Isolde to cope with the "day world" is to leave the whole story nothing but a daydream turned nightmare, a cruel, superficial irony rather than a tragic one.

After all that the man and the woman have been through, let them rest in peace, "she by him and he by her."

AC Douglas said:

If there is a real tragedy in Tristan und Isolde it is that Tristan's death really IS "pathetic" by itself, a misunderstanding by him - he who ironically was Isolde's "teacher" in this whole business as I point out in my S&F article - about death and its nature in the eternal union of two lovers. As always with Wagner, it is Isolde, the female, who finally understands everything and understands just what death in this context actually means, and it is she who makes the eternal union with her Tristan possible for them both by her Verklärung and by so doing lifts the music-drama above the level of mere tragedy and into the realm of the radiantly transcendent.

As to W's stage directions, there may be no direct statement that Isolde is still living, but, then, there's none that directly indicate she's ordinarily dead either. Hence, the ambiguity I note in my article.

Oh, and as to those "Leichen" Marke blesses, there are some half-dozen or so of them scattered about the scene here and there.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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No, AC! No, no, no, no, no! And did I say "no"?

1. A "pathetic misunderstanding" is not a tragedy.

2. There is no indication that Isolde "understands" anything. Her last words before her vision of his transfiguration are to chide Tristan for dying without her. That leaves only her dying song to express an "understanding" of the situation, which it plainly does not. It is in fact quite meaningless except as a poetic verbalization of her hallucinations.

3. How often in Wagner does the woman "understand" everything? Senta? Elisabeth? Elsa? Eva? Kundry? Only Brunnhilde, to some extent - but even about her you admit that her eulogy of siegfried as a "hero" rings false. And does she ever really understand that "love" does not bring "redemption"?

4. Isolde does not make "the eternal union with her Tristan possible for them," with her Verklaerung or with anything else. Nothing can make it possible, because there is no such thing as eternal union. That is the point. Union was a dream they shared, as so many lovers share it, only to learn how unreal it is. Death together is their only possible "union."

5. Tragedy is not "mere." And this tragedy is the death, not of two people only, but of the notion that the realm of the "radiantly transcendent" you speak of can be reached through passion. This is the lesson Wagner took from Schopenhauer and quite consciously embodied here. All his operas, beginning with this one, expose or renounce that fantasy. Tristan, as I've said, was Wagner's final, exhaustive tribute to the ideals and longings of his youth, now viewed as sweet illusions. He wanted it to drain passion dry, to be a monument to the thing he now knew could never be attained. It's insight that brings dignity to suffering, and which raises mere pathos to tragedy. The insight is not Isolde's, but Wagner's.

6. Wagner's directions are unambiguous: "Mark blesses the corpses." To suggest, as you do, that he was referring to various now irrelevant dead bodies scattered around the stage is, as you know perfectly well, ludicrous. Wagner never committed an aesthetic crime like that.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

AC Douglas said:

No, no, no, no, no, no!

To respond in numbered order:

1: I didn't write "pathetic misunderstanding". I wrote that Tristan's ordinary death by his own doing made his death pathetic and in itself tragic as it was a result of his misunderstanding of the nature of death in the matter of a lover's eternal union with his or her beloved, as the case may be.

2: Forget the words. LISTEN TO THE MUSIC!

3: Yes, all of them but especially Brünnhilde. B was NOT looking to redeem anything but ultimately understood that the ring had to be returned to the Rhine in order to make everything right again and in the Ring that's understanding everything.

4: Of course eternal union exists and is possible for lovers in Wagner's universe(s). If you don't grasp that, then you don't grasp the essence of the Wagnerian mythological ethos, Schopenhauer or no Schopenhauer.

5: You are of course free to imagine anything you wish, but in NO WAY is Tristan "Wagner's final, exhaustive tribute to the ideals and longings of his youth, now viewed as sweet illusions." Tristan is W's affirmation that although those "ideals and longings of his youth" were (and probably still are) denied him personally they are nevertheless real, achievable possibilities. Ergo, Tristan und Isolde.

6: Nothing "ludicrous" about it. It is, I'm fairly certain, just what W intended to be understood by that stage direction, ambiguous as it is.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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I am very surprised that anyone who has studied the life of Wagner, his intellectual development, the revolutionary influence of Schopenhauer on his worldview, his own constant testimony to it, the profound alteration in the meaning of his own Ring cycle after Tristan, and the renunciation, embodied explicitly in every one of his works after Siegfried, of precisely the notion of the redeeming power of erotic love, could actually believe in the reality of any sort of mystical union of Tristan and Isolde outside of Isolde's imaginings.

Tristan represented the transitional moment in Wagner's thinking and work. It is simultaneously a celebration of eros - which the young Wagner regarded as a redemptive force for the individual and society - and a renunciation of it in the post-Schopenhauer recognition of sexual passion as the quintessential representation of the ever-striving and never-satisfied "will" which must be overcome (and is, in Parsifal). The ultimate mythic symbol for the extinction of the "will" is death - total oblivion. And this is the union - the only union - which Tristan and Isolde attain. For Tristan and Isolde actually to be shown to achieve some kind of fabulous "mystic union" - as opposed to such occurring only in the mind of Isolde - the pair would at least have to be shown to die together. But Wagner renounces, specifically denies them and us, that symbolism: Tristan dies without Isolde, and she, devastated, goes off into a mental world of her own. In no way can this disastrous irony be read as a mystic union. Do you actually suppose the dead Tristan is waiting in some sort of celestial vestibule for Isolde to catch up with him? (And, btw, I have listened to the music. A million times. It nowhere says that Isolde has attained "understanding." In which bar and modulation is that message contained?)

To quote you, "you are of course free to imagine anything you wish." If you must have a "happily ever after" view of the story, you must need to have it for some reason I haven't yet seen an argument for. But your last point, I fear, remains beyond any credibility. The whole idea of Marke "blessing" - by what procedure, exactly? Leaving the lovers and running about sprinkling holy water? - a bunch of bodies scattered all over the stage, upstage and down, half of whom are of no dramatic interest when all our focus is properly on the lovers, is utterly risible as a dramatic idea or a bit of stagecraft. At this final moment I'd just echo your advice to listen to the music, and decide where our undivided attention belongs.

AC Douglas said:

You say "Not to be too literal about it" but then go all clinical on me. That simply will not do. This is Wagner cum Schopenhauer, not Grey's Anatomy.

Isolde undergoes a Verklärung the nature of which permits her to all by herself become one consciousness, both Tristan and Isolde residing in the realm of Night. The music tells us that. What happens in the realm of Day thereafter is not our (or Wagner's) concern. Alice doesn't live there anymore.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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The meanings of "death" and "transfiguration" are anything but clear in your explanations.

Tristan has died in a suicidal frenzy, without benefit of any "transfiguration." So he can't have gone to any "realm of Night," unless the realm of Night is simply oblivion (which is in fact the way he describes it to Kurwenal - Urvergessen, complete forgetting). But sheer oblivion would just be ordinary death, in which case Isolde's only way of "uniting" with him would be to die as well. If Isolde does not die, how is it that she becomes "one consciousness" with Tristan who, being stone cold dead, has no consciousness to become "one" with? You could posit that death is not "complete forgetting", and that Tristan has somehow, despite his physical death, retained some sort of consciousness capable of uniting with Isolde's. But then why not have Isolde too die, and follow Tristan's path into the realm of Night? The metaphysics of this are certainly unclear, and having Isolde remain alive seems inconsistent with any explanation.

If Isolde remains alive, she - the human being in the world - is going to have to get on with a life of some sort. You can call the matter "clinical" and say that it's none of "our" concern, but I'm not buying the idea that Wagner would leave a character hanging in such a metaphysical and existential limbo. Wagner's other "eternal femine" figures, from Senta to Kundry, all clearly die. The symbolism is consistent in his work: death is the form "transfiguration" takes in Wagner. Why should Isolde be the exception?

Fundamentally, I think it's a mistake to regard Tristan und Isolde as a myth or fairy tale in which magical and otherwise inexplicable things happen. The characters in this opera are human beings - knight, princess, king, vassal, handmaid - and are not even treated as archetypes. Tristan is really a domestic tragedy, but with a metaphysical overlay courtesy of Wagner-cum-Schopenhauer. There are no magical objects or occurrences, not even the so-called love potion, which doesn't cause the lovers' passion but simply occasions their confession of it. Nothing happens in this opera that hasn't happened and doesn't happen in real life, except for the way Tristan and Isolde use Wagner's/Schopenhauer's philosophical concepts to describe their experience to themselves. In such a context the idea of Isolde's "transfiguration" as anything other than a subjective experience is quite gratuitous. Tristan dies in Isolde's arms; beside herself, she imagines Tristan reviving and rising into the sky, she imagines glorious sensations of pleasure, she imagines herself drowning in them and going unconscious in a state of rapture - and then she dies. The words of her dying song say nothing about embracing Tristan or becoming "one consciousness"; her final words are unbewusst - hoechste Lust! - "unconscious - highest bliss!" For her, unconsciousness, with Tristan unconscious beside her, is the highest bliss she could conceive, and certainly the highest her miserable life would allow her to achieve.

Tristan and Isolde could not bear to live apart in the cruel world of Day. Like all lovers, they dreamed of being "one." But knowing that that was impossible in the Day world, they could only identify oneness with death. And so they wanted to die together - to go to the realm of Night where the pain of being separate bodies and souls, forever separated, would be over - nicht mehr Tristan, nicht mehr Isolde. They got their wish, but Tristan died before he could know it. Isolde remained to complete the fulfillment of their dream. She died to be with him, and her vision of ecstasy was life's final mercy on her, and its final blessing on their love. There would have been no mercy or blessing in forcing her to live on in the world of Day.

Wagner's music, after Isolde's final words, tells us the exact moment at which Isolde gives up her life: the last sounding of the "Tristan chord," a final reminiscence of the suffering of the lovers, which now resolves into perfect consonance and peace. And to the final deep, serene, organ-like chords in the orchestra, King Mark raises his hand gently over their bodies in benediction as the faithful Brangaene kneels beside them. Surely she is weeping silently.

AC Douglas said:

I've already presented my ideas and arguments in my S&F piece which you seem to have skimmed but not really read, Woodduck. In any event, you attempt to present arguments against what I had to say there which arguments at bottom insist that W's metaphysical logic in Tristan is no different from the soap opera logic of Italian opera. We're not reading from the same book here, Woodduck, much less from the same page, and so arguing at cross-purposes.

You, for instance, seem unable to grasp that Tristan is forever barred from the realm of Night as he's, well, dead, you see. Ordinarily dead. Dead dead. It's all over for him. Finished. Kaput. Dead is dead, as I've said, and that's all there is to it. There's nothing beyond that. Yet you insist that's the path Isolde should follow as well in order to be united with Tristan eternally. But there's no Tristan left to be united with be it for a nanosecond or an eternity and the same would hold true for Isolde should she follow Tristan's path.

I think, Woodduck, if you can grasp and accept that and grasp as well that the realm of Night is NOT another way of referring to ordinary death nor is it an abode for the ordinarily dead you and I will at least both be reading from the same book.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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Here is a passage from a book I am now perusing, Death devoted Heart:
Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, by Roger Scruton.

 

"The music that we now know as the Liebestod was first described by
Wagner, when arranging it as the second half of the well-known orchestral
epitome, as Isolde's "Verklärung"-transfiguration. The stage direction
tells us that "Isolde sinkt, wie verklärt, . . . auf Tristans Leiche." And in a
program note Wagner elucidated the music thus:

'what Fate divided in life now springs into transfigured life in death:
the gates of union are thrown open. Over Tristan's body the dying
Isolde receives the blessed fulfillment of ardent longing, eternal
union in measureless space, without barriers, without fetters, inseparable.'

The death of Isolde is also a transfiguration and a renewal, and the entire
work of the music is to imprint this fact upon our innermost emo-
tions. Its success is sufficient dramatic proof that love can be fulfilled in
death, when death is chosen, and that this fulfillment is a genuine redemption."

If the composer has anything to say about the meaning of his work, this should settle the matter.

It has occurred to me, too, that it was Liszt who gave the title "Love-death" to Isolde's dying song - which Wagner had called "Transfiguration," giving the name "Love-death" to the opera's prelude - when he wrote his piano transcription of it. That transcription was published in 1867, not long after Tristan's premiere. Liszt and Wagner were, of course, exceedingly close. I've been unable to find any comment by Wagner on this change of title, but we can be sure that he did comment on it, and since the change was allowed to stand, he obviously did not forbid it. Additionally, the practice of having Isolde remain alive at the conclusion of the opera probably dates back only to the mid-twentieth century; her death was traditionally assumed to be the correct conclusion of the story and, judging from the above facts, that assumption surely dates back all the way to Tristan's earliest performances.

In light of all this - plus all the considerations I've raised in previous posts - I think it's abundantly clear that Wagner intended for Isolde to die, and that death in this opera does in fact represent the "realm of Night" to which Tristan and Isolde have dedicated themselves and which they finally attain. Your view is an interesting one, but in addition to being incoherent and insupportable on evidential grounds it clearly departs from Wagner's own.

That tells me that the fundamental problem of interpreting this work is to grasp the full symbolic meaning of death as the fulfillment of love.

P.S. It would seem that Wagner shares with me the "soap opera logic of Italian opera."

AC Douglas said:

I'm not at all sure why you posted the above, Woodduck. After all, its entirety is common knowledge among Wagnerians among whom you know I number myself, and it's no answer to my S&F piece which attempts to explain the curious fact that in the final authority on all questions relating to this music-drama, the score (music, text, and stage directions), W refuses to declare Isolde dead in the stage directions as he does with all his other heroines in all other such cases in his operas and music-dramas. In your previous attempts to rebut my ideas and arguments in this matter you relied on showing how Isolde not dying would have real-world consequences (what I called your "Italian opera soap opera logic") and that's no rebuttal at all as it has no force within the context of the metaphysical logic of W's Tristan und Isolde.

I don't know where we go with this from here, Woodduck. We seem to have reached something of a Mexican standoff concerning the matter.

--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com/

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It is not possible that you are "not at all sure" why I posted the above. Nevertheless, I will play this game with you. I will tell you so that you will be sure and so that anyone else reading this will be sure, even though everyone else who has followed this thread is already sure. As are you.

Please attend to me carefully.

The question was: Does Isolde die at the end of Tristan und Isolde? That is the question we have been addressing for the last few days. If you look back over this thread, you will see that we have been addressing that question.

The answer to that question, according to you, is "no." The answer, according to almost everyone else, is "yes." My answer is "yes." What is the composer's answer? What is Wagner's answer?

Here is what Wagner wrote:

'what Fate divided in life now springs into transfigured life in death:
the gates of union are thrown open. Over Tristan's body the dying
Isolde receives the blessed fulfillment of ardent longing, eternal
union in measureless space, without barriers, without fetters, inseparable.'


Now before I continue, I must ask whether there is anything unclear about that. Are the words "death" and "dying" in any way unclear? No? Good.

You have said that you don't believe what Wagner says here. Instead you make an assumption based on what he does not say in his stage directions. In those directions he describes what looks like Isolde dying, but he does not use the word "die," which he does in his other operas. This omission you take as proof that Isolde does not die. Wagner does say that at the end she "sinks down onto Tristan's body" and that "Marke blesses the corpses." That isn't good enough for you. You require more proof that Isolde is dead. Without more evidence you refuse to believe it.

Well -

I found you the missing evidence! I brought Wagner himself in here, right in here to this forum, to tell you in clear, unambiguous terms that:

.....................................................:trp: ISOLDE DIES!

Do you see now why I posted what I did? I wanted you to know that the question of whether Isolde dies is one that we no longer need to argue about. I wanted to you to hear it from the composer himself, so that you would know that his omission of the word "dies" from his stage directions does not mean that Isolde does not die, and that we can interpret the directions he does give to mean that she does.

Now, if there is anything else you don't understand about this, please tell me. I am a patient man.