There is something primal, something of the rankness of nature, of life’s odor and hum, and life’s fierce passions in this music—music before which all other pictures of love made by poet, painter, and composer pale. It is one of the most complex scores in existence; yet it is built upon but one musical motive. Because of its epical quality Tristan and Isolde may be compared to the works of the Greek dramatists, to the Divine Comedy, to Hamlet, and to Faust.
Its weltering symphonic mass is as the surge and thunder of tropical seas. It seems almost incomprehensible for a single human brain to have conceived and carried to fruition such a magnificent composition. In it are the pains, pleasures, and consoling philosophies of life. Hamlet and Faust are its spiritual brethren. The doubting, brooding spirit of these two dreamers are united to the pessimistic, knightly nature of Tristan. He is human, all too human; as Nietzsche phrased it—but he is also the human glorified.
He has grafted upon his mediæval soul the modern spirit, which we are pleased to believe Schopenhauer typified in his profoundly pessimistic philosophy. But this spirit is as old as Himalaya’s hills. Saka-Munyi sang of the pains of love centuries ago; and the bliss-stricken pair, Tristan and Isolde, dive down to death, groping as they sink, for the problems of life, love, and mortality. Death and Love is the eternal dualism chanted by Wagner in this drama. And has the theme ever been chanted so enthrallingly?
No one of Wagner’s works enchains the imagination as does this glowing picture of love and despair. From the first beautiful prelude to Isolde’s exquisite death-song—one of those songs the world will not willingly let perish—we are as in a hypnotic trance. The action is psychologic rather than theatric. We are permitted to view two burning souls; we analyze, rejoice and suffer in their psychical adventures. This is not the drama of romantic wooing and the clash of swords; all conventions of music and drama are set aside, are denied. There is a love philter, but it is not the philter which arouses the fatal love; the love is implicit in the lovers before the curtain lifts.
We are given a night scene of magical beauty—yet how different from the usual banal operatic assignation. In an old-time, Old-World forest a man and a woman have revealed their souls; sobbing in the distance is the soft horn music of the kingly hunt. Now it is love against the world, the relentless instinct that mocks at conventional gyves. Was ever such an enchanting romance sung? The very moonlight seems melodious. After the storm and stress of the first act this scene recalls Heine’s This is the Fairy Wood of Old. Wagner’s philosophy should concern us but little; his music is his metaphysic; its beauty and dramatic significance are worth tomes of his theories. There is the superb web and woof of this tonal tapestry, the most eloquent orchestra that ever stormed or sighed; there is every accent and nuance of human speech, faithfully reproduced; and above all there hovers the imagination of the poet-composer. These thematic nuggets, these motives of love and death, which paint the lives of his men and women—are they not wonderfully conceived, wonderfully developed? Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing thralls.
And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. It is music that would have been loved by that “fierce and splendid old man,” Walter Savage Landor, by Shelley, by Byron and Walt Whitman—the latter once confessed to me his love for Wagner; “it makes my old bones sweeter,” he said—but it would not have been admired by Wordsworth or Tennyson. Swinburne adores Wagner almost as much as he adores the sea, and he sings the praise of both with an absence of reserve that recalls the mot of Vauvenargues: “To praise moderately is always a sign of mediocrity.”
Yet in Tristan and Isolde are the seeds of the morbid, the hysterical, and the sublimely erotic—hall marks of most great modern works of art. And there is, too, the Katharsis of Aristotle, the purification by pity and terror. This dominating tragic principle places the drama within the category of the classic.
Ernest Newman, in his Study of Wagner, an epoch-making work in musical criticism, puts the question in its exact bearings. Wagner is a great musical-dramatist—his dramas alone could not stand on their legs, so otiose are they. His poetry, quâ poetry, is second-rate; but as “words for music,” words that fly well in the wind of his inspiration, they are unique. This composer was harassed all his life long by the word “drama.” He believed that a perfect union of music and drama could be effected—vain dream—and wasted much valuable time and good white paper trying to prove his thesis. To the end his musical ruled his dramatic instincts; he was always the composer. Tristan and Isolde is the most signal instance of this. Its Greek-like severity of form in the book, its paucity of incident, were so many barriers removed for the poet-composer who, hampered by the awful weight of material in the Ring, had to write ineffectual music at times.
Newman thinks that the last scene of Act II of Isolde and Tristan is an anti-climax. From a theatric viewpoint, yes; but not so if Wagner the composer be considered. If he had dropped the curtain on the infatuated pair—as he does in Act I of Die Walküre—a whole skein of the moving story would have been missing. The action is pulled up with a jerk by Melot’s entrance; yet what follows is worth a volume of plays with the conventional thrilling “curtain.” Think of the drama without Marke’s speech, without that compassion and love which Isolde and Tristan exhibit, oblivious to all about them! Besides, the scene needs a quieter, withal more tragic, note than the endings of Acts I and III. Suppose that the King, Tristan’s uncle, had been like that other monarch sung of by Heinrich Heine:—
Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.