Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas / A Biographical Study of the Man and an Explanation of His Work

by W. J. Henderson

Another element of the classic tragedy preserved in this work is that of the inevitable doom of the unhappy pair. They are victims of Fate from the outset, and Wagner has kept the prophecy of death constantly before our minds by making it appear to the lovers themselves as the only avenue of escape from their misfortunes. Furthermore, this forethought of death develops in the second act into a conviction and a passionate desire. The exclamations "Let me die" ("Lass' mich sterben") of the lovers are not mere bursts of sensual rhapsodising, but are expressions of their souls' yearning for the plunge into oblivion at the moment of perfect ecstasy. For both dread the turning of the light of day upon them; both foresee a future of separation and misery.

The pessimism of this second act is the feature of Wagner's drama which has aroused the largest amount of discussion. Its peculiarly illogical deduction from a turbulent, passionate, soul-consuming love like that of Tristan and Isolde has frequently called forth unfavourable comment. Yet we are bound to admit that in his treatment of this element of his work the master has been dramatically ingenious. In summarising the story I have indicated his poetic treatment of the cessation of the desire for life and the yearning for death. That he has made it poetic is not to be denied, but it is not consistent. If the lovers had sworn renunciation and had suffered from the enforcement of their vow, there would have been consistency in their desire to die. But in the midst of unbridled indulgence in their passion they would have wished to live, unless there had been surfeit and the subsequent moral reaction. But of this we have no hint. The yearning for death, however, is an outcome of Wagner's absorption of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. This writer was a subjective realist and regarded extant phenomena as the products of the will—that is, the world exists because man wishes to think so. The highest ethical destiny of man is the nullification of the will by the practice of an asceticism which shall remove from him all desire for the objects of sense. These, then, being but creations of the will, shall disappear, and the will, the only reality, shall quietly renounce itself and vanish into the infinite. The doctrine is closely allied to that of the Buddhist Nirvana. Wagner's endeavour to reconcile it with the dramatic ideas of "Tristan und Isolde" was not successful. Asceticism and adultery are not companions. But from the Schopenhauerian pessimism he drew the long-continued harping upon night and death, which is considerably more poetical than the thoughts of the philosopher. In the second act the music of the duet breathes all the pulsing and the languors of consuming passion, and the score effectually masks the dramatic ineffectiveness of the dialogue.

Otherwise the second act is a wonderful conception. In no other part of Wagner's writings is his perfect command of his own union of the arts tributary to the drama more beautifully demonstrated. The picture, the action, the music, combine to create a poetic effect upon the mind of the auditor. The dramatic instincts of Wagner led him to centralise in one meeting of the lovers all the long-drawn passion of the old legend. In the drama we have but one meeting, which brings about the catastrophe. And whatever we may think of the undramatic character of the Schopenhauerian pessimism, which, as I have written elsewhere, is dragged into the story by the neck, it affords ground for a poetic dialogue rich in mysticism and not shocking in suggestion of mere fleshly desire. The dwarf Melot of the legend becomes the faithless friend of Tristan in the drama. He is merely a sketch, for his one action is but a piece of mechanism in the movement of the story.

The substitution of a long harangue for a swift blow of the sword has caused the proverbial finger of scorn to be pointed at King Mark, who comes upon the stage in this act to discover his bride in the arms of his knight. But he is certainly a vast improvement on the Mark of the legend, who was constantly hesitating, who even saw the guilty pair asleep in the forest, but refused to believe because the naked sword lay between them. This Mark at least does not suspect and confide in turns, send them away and then take them back. The long speech explains certain points which are the best defence of Mark's "sermonising," as it is often called. It tells us that he wed a second time only because his court and his people demanded it, and because Tristan himself declared that he would leave Cornwall unless the King yielded. The fact that it was a political marriage, and that the King was old and weary and not prone to emotional flashes, may serve to explain why he talks instead of slaying Tristan on the spot. At any rate Wagner's conception of the voluntary release of the embrace of life by the guilty lovers is carried out, for when Mark does not cut him down, Tristan throws himself upon Melot's sword.

Miss Weston, who makes much of the authority of the old legends and of resemblances in the folk-lore or mythology of antiquity, regrets that the death of Tristan in the third act is less touching than in the legend, where, deceived by Isolde of the White Hand and believing himself forsaken by his own Isolde, he silently turns his face to the wall and breathes out his life with the name of the loved one on his lips. And she furthermore repeats the criticism of Gaston Paris that the final speech of Isolde contains more philosophy than poetry, a weak criticism as one reading of the text will show. Mr. Krehbiel more aptly notes that the elimination of the second Isolde removes from the character of Tristan a stain which was placed upon it by his loveless second marriage, and saves us the shock of seeing the wife and the mistress in contest about his dying couch. Furthermore, the musical treatment of the act is to my mind the most convincing piece of dramatic writing in the literature of the lyric stage. I say this without forgetting the wonders of the first and second acts. There are certain similarities in the musical plans of the three acts. Each begins with a passage intended to create an atmosphere: the first, with the sailor's song floating down from aloft; the second, with the music of the hunt dying away under the black arches of the forest; and the third with the shepherd's pipe wailing the heart-wrecking song of the empty sea. Nothing in the lyric drama excels the potency of the combined scene, action, text, and music at the opening of the second act except the astonishing effect of the preliminary measures of the third.

And then follows a succession of those emotional waves, mounting in foaming crests of tone and sinking in throbbing refluxes, which no other composer ever wrote as Wagner did. Tristan's fevered mind, yearning for the ship, waxes and wanes in crescendi and diminuendi of passion till the suffering and sympathising spectator fancies that his nature will endure no more. And then at the apex of one of the awful upward flights of delirium comes that tremendous climax made by the changing of the melody of the shepherd's pipe. The ship is sighted. Now comes a period of vehement action, ending with the frenzied man's tearing off the bandage, and sinking into Isolde's arms to breathe out his life. Another burst of action follows this crisis, and then the stillness of death itself prevails while the musical finale of the work, the wonderful "Liebestod," falls upon the audience "like the sound of a great Amen." There is nothing in the old legend to suggest the astounding effects which Wagner has heaped up in this last act. It is all the inspiration of a master genius working without trammels in a field created by its own powers.

III.—The Musical Exposition

Let us turn now to a brief examination of the musical structure of "Tristan und Isolde." It is not practicable to make this examination exhaustive, nor would it be profitable. For those who desire to detect each motive of the score as it passes them in the general panorama of tone there are many handbooks. The present writer does not believe that the dramatic influence of Wagner's music upon the auditor is dependent on the latter's full acquaintance with the terminology of the significant themes. That a certain intellectual pleasure is added to the hearing of one of these dramas by a recognition of the identity of the motives is not to be denied, and that their dramatic purport should always be clear to the hearer's mind is beyond dispute; but it should never be the purpose of an auditor to concentrate his attention on the themes. Learn their meaning from the text. Then let them alone, and they will do their work.

In "Tristan und Isolde" we come upon the Wagnerian system worked out to its end. Indeed, the composer went even further. In a letter to Francis Villot in Paris in 1860, afterward published under the title of "Music of the Future," the poet-composer said of "Tristan und Isolde":

"Upon that work I consent to your making the severest claims deducible from my theoretic premises; not because I formed it on my system, for every theory was clean forgotten by me; but since here I moved with fullest freedom and the most utter disregard of every theoretic scruple, to such an extent that during the working out I myself was aware how far I had outstripped my system."