Tristan and Isolde
[Edited for present purposes from a feature
article in ‘The Adelaide Advertiser’, early 1990]
Doomed lovers and the eternal
triangle are universal and enduring themes across dramatic and narrative art
forms in most world cultures. Tristan and Isolde, and
the ‘wronged man’ Marke, are the players in one of
the oldest Western tragic stories outside the Classical tradition. While it
dates from the post-Roman ‘Arthurian’ period in Britain, it may, like the
Homeric stories from Greece, be a story with its roots in remote antiquity,
told and retold and only written down in something like one of its present forms
at a time when reading and writing began to seem as important as bardic chanting and story-telling in the lives of the
Celts. The story is now probably best-known in the remodelled form used by
Richard Wagner in his opera, universally regarded as one of the supreme
art-works in Western music drama, with the status of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Mozart's Don Giovanni.
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The Celtic World
The best operas have a
universal theme, but are generally set in a particular social context. While
such an opera need not be in any sense a documentary, it can be a help to see
its action in some sort of historical perspective.
The pre-literate Celts were
among the most numerous tribes of Europe north of the Alps for hundreds,
perhaps thousands of years, and have been the subject of much archæological research. And of much fantastic speculation,
not least the construction of a pseudo-Druidical cult, involving sedate
Midsummer pre-breakfast song-and-dance drag parties at Stonehenge, a sort of
cucumber-sandwich version of ASTERIX
- The Musical. But the imperialist expansion
of the Romans, under the Caesars, followed after a time by Franco-Roman
cultural imperialism, meant the subjugation of most of the Celts and the
eclipse of their culture over most of Europe.
The half-mythical ‘Arthurian’
period, when the story of Tristan and Isolde is set,
is reckoned to be in about the sixth century, after the Roman Empire had faded
from the scene, before the Germanic tribes had formed loose federations capable
of consistent control over their neighbours in Western Europe, and long before
the Vikings became a major force.
The major enclaves of Celts
were in Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany, with other groups holed up in the
rugged mountains of Scotland and Wales and of continental Europe, under
cultural pressures from the remnants of the Roman Empire, often Romanised
Celts, or from the vigorous, expanding tribes of Germans. There was
considerable traffic across the water, especially as the Saxons began to press
in on the Cornish Celts, many of whom left to join their kin in Brittany,
others doubtless escaping across the sea to Ireland.
It is difficult these days to
form anything like a realistic impression of what life must have been like for
the Celts at that time. One can only say that they still mined tin for export
for the bronze trade, fished, engaged in subsistence farming, lived in
scattered villages under the eye of ruling and priestly classes, had a rich
religious life, later to be increasingly influenced by the spread of Christian
ideas and that, overall, the level of their culture might be thought of as
roughly analogous with that of the Japanese of the period (settled,
pre-literate, pre-Buddhist) or of some of the Bantu tribes in southern Africa
in the middle of last century (settled, pre-literate, pre-Christian).
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Tristan, Isolde
and Marke
The three principals in the
story (although in Wagner's version Marke is on stage
for a comparatively short time) are presented as coming from three different
parts of the Celtic world. The youngish but mature Tristan, the landholder of an estate in Brittany, owes fealty to
his uncle and sometime foster-father, Marke, King of Cornwall, for whom he acts as a champion in Marke's struggle to improve his position against the
hostile Irish king, who claims tribute from him, sending his own nephew and
champion, Morold, to collect it. Tristan engages the
Irish champion in combat and kills him with a blow to the head, chipping his
sword, the chip staying in the wound to be found later by his betrothed (and
cousin), the Irish princess Isolde. Tristan is seriously wounded in the fight and, as
luck would have it, chooses to place himself under the care of Isolde, a renowned healer, who nurses him back to health
using religious formulæ (Christians might refer to
white magic). She is, however young, a formidable woman. (I say ‘as luck would
have it’, because Tristan and Isolde fall in love
with each other, without saying anything about it. And then Isolde
sees that the chip she removed from the head of her betrothed fits the nick in
Tristan's sword: she is in love with her beloved's killer.)
His health restored,
Tristan returns to Cornwall to continue his service to Marke.
His next task, it turns out, is to return to Ireland to collect Isolde and bring her back to Marke
for a political marriage to link the fortunes of Cornish and Irish royalty. He
sails to Ireland, collects Isolde and is almost
within sight of Marke's landing in Cornwall when the
lights go down in the theatre, the conductor enters, the audience settles and
the haunting opening bars of the Prelude
are heard.
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Supporting Roles
But there are five other
characters involved in the story in critical ways:
Brangäne is Isolde's
older, ever-faithful, ever-well-meaning lady-in-waiting, but her part in the
opera is much more important than her part in the story, if that doesn't sound
too strange.
Kurwenal, correspondingly, is Tristan's
older, ever-faithful steward, shield-bearer, bodyguard, the archetypal active,
honest chief retainer.
Melot is a false friend to Tristan,
a time-serving, opportunistic, fawning, empty man attached to Marke's court, on the make for himself, by no means an
asset to his master. Wagner, by the way, has the honesty and courage to write
what one might describe as ‘empty’ music to depict this character, much as he
uses awful music to depict the awful Beckmesser in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
Two ordinary people, the Pilot, in the first act, and the Shepherd, in the third, have
significant minor roles, somehow setting the other characters in the larger
world and marking the passage of real time, rather than leaving them merely
mythic figures frozen in their own little space-time niche.
This is not one of those
operas, like, say, The Marriage of
Figaro, where the physical action is richly complicated and diverting:
there is no mistaken identity, no tricksy letter, no subterfuge, no sub-plot,
no great surprise, no conformity to any arbitrary restrictions of mundane
routine or physical reality. As the story takes its inevitable course, the
developments occur in the minds of the principals and, one might say, in the
minds of the audience. There are very few theatregoers who remain unmoved by Romeo and Juliet, very few whose
view of life and love is not affected by this opera.
The action in the first act is
viewed to some extent through the eyes of the Pilot, in the second those of Brangäne, in the third those of the Shepherd, although we
also find ourselves sharing Kurwenal's aching
anxiety, and through their eyes we are ourselves involved as helpless onlookers
as the tragedy inevitably unfolds to its extraordinary, poignant end.
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Words and Music
In terms of scripted action,
the story is simple enough:
Act I:
Isolde is furious with Tristan for taking her to marry Marke and for avoiding her since the ship left Ireland. She
tells Brangäne
to mix a poisoned drink so she can kill Tristan
and herself before they arrive. Tristan
can avoid her no longer, comes into her quarters, accepts
a drink of wine; Isolde
drinks too. They look at each other, expecting death, and wonderingly call each
others' names. Brangäne
had taken things into her own hands and mixed not a real poisoned potion, but
a reputed love potion.
The contents of the love potion
are irrelevant. They were already in love. Isolde
expected death to release her from her love as well as an alliance she does not
want. That she is still alive means she cannot escape either. Tristan is in
like case. But matters are now worse than they were: they can no longer deny to
each other their love for each other. Tristan and Isolde
are now emotionally, as well as physically, all at sea. The ship is about to
reach the inescapable reality of dry land, but for these two there is now no
possibility, ever again, of experiencing reality, lost as they are in the
limitless sea of their all-consuming emotions.
Act 2:
Isolde is waiting in the dusk, Marke and his
retinue go off hunting, Isolde
orders the pre-arranged signal so that Tristan
can come and spend the night with her. Brangäne thinks they are hunting Isolde. At the end of the act,
the suspicious busybody Melot
returns with the confused Marke to catch Isolde and tries to curry favour with his king by attacking Tristan and dispensing summary justice.
What does Marke
think he is hunting this moonlit night in Cornwall? The question is irrelevant.
One cannot take literally the action or the setting. It is not real night;
Tristan and Isolde are not Romeo and Juliet, real
people falling upon each other with the desperate joy of physical passion.
Rather are they Essential Man and Essential Woman (one might call them Superman
and Superwoman, had the terms not become counterfeit currency) in an unearthly
dialogue on the nature of love.
And we, the onlookers, perceive
it as vitally significant: for most people, love, or its empty husk, is of
central importance in our lives. But how can this act work in the theatre,
given its essential unreality and its lack of action until the very end?
The secret is in the music,
music unlike anything previously imagined, let alone actually heard. In
Wagner's hands, the eddying words of the lovers grow into musical currents in a
sea of emotions that would swamp them while we watched, were they not its
generators. This ‘artistic voyeurism’ might go towards explaining why Wagner
and his music are so comprehensively reviled even today (as witness a seriously
silly suggestion by a Certain Person on ABC television a few years back when The Ring was on, to the effect
that Wagner really wasn't a very nice chap and perhaps one really ought not to
admire his work too much).
Until a generation ago, an
exploration of intense sexual feelings has been absolutely forbidden intellectual
territory. Many in Western society understood that good men only engaged in
non-procreative sex in much the same way as they engaged in sneezing, and that
good women, properly subservient to their husbands, should properly put up with
this connubial hay fever as a regrettable but unavoidable, untidy and
physically and psychically rude hazard of the female condition.
Words can express logical ideas
or emotions, depending upon how they are used. But some Wagnerians find the
text of the second act so extraordinarily compressed as to be almost meaningless without the music. Mastersingers could be performed without the music and would
make a passable play, Tristan
could not. But the opera is about intense, consuming love; love is not
altogether logical and intense love is altogether illogical; music is
quintessentially illogical: one should not expect to find too much logic or
reality in the second-act love duet, the centre-piece of the whole opera.
Act 3:
We find Tristan, seriously wounded, lying feverishly at his half-ruined
castle in Brittany. He and Kurwenal are waiting for Isolde to arrive. The Shepherd keeps watch. At last the ship
is seen but Tristan, losing his
reason, tears off his bandages, only to die in Isolde's arms. Another ship
arrives, with Marke.
Kurwenal,
defending Tristan, he supposes,
attacks and kills Melot
and is fatally wounded by him. Brangäne has tried to take responsibility for the tragedy on
account of the love-potion, and Marke, intending forgiveness, is forced instead to watch as Isolde dies, in
ecstasy now at the thought that she and Tristan
can become one.
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Such a bald account takes scant
account of the idea of Liebestod,
Love-Death, or the music with which Isolde takes her
leave of the mundane as, like a drop of water received into the ocean, she
achieves Nirvana: for Tristan and Isolde all pain,
sorrow and struggle are now over.
Nirvana?
It is easy for people consciously or unconsciously influenced by Christianity
unthinkingly to categorize the lovers through parody-Christian eyes: these
sinners merit a cold and foggy Hell on a rock in the Irish Sea; or these
penitent sinners may go to the Anglo-Catholic (Celtic Mystical Chapter)
Church's sunny Camelot Heights Estate, North Heaven (King Arthur, Manager). In
the Celtic world at this time, Christianity was by no means everywhere
dominant. But the old religion is lost, so what are the terms of reference
here? Wagner was influenced by Buddhism and it is at least reasonable to
approach this idea of Love-Death, that is, the inexorable end of this story,
from such a point of view. Whatever the hidden key, it is clear that the purely
logical, literal-minded, conventional Western approach is not likely to be much
use to us.
Is Act 3 real, or is it all in
Tristan's head? That most imaginative director Ponelle
said he thought it was a dream of the dying Tristan - in which case it is a
double dream, for Tristan must also dream Isolde's
dream, the Liebestod,
with its psychedelic light-patterns reported to be normal for us all at the
point of death.
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Wagner's Unique Art
The first thing one hears in
the theatre is the Tristan Prelude,
a musical microcosm of what is to happen. But as the whole action is about
unresolved emotion, inevitably the Prelude
is in psychological and musical senses unresolved. The double resolution only
comes at the very end of the opera, at the end of the Liebestod, and you know
it in your marrow. This is theatrical wizardry.
But the boxed set of an
opera is emphatically not the opera, and this is truer
for Wagner than for many other opera composers. Wagner was not just a composer, he was a consummate man of the theatre. Although
steeped in the old Classic/Romantic tradition of German theatre, his vision of
the world led him to the idea that music-drama should put one's whole inner
universe on stage. Some composers liked to show us the nobility we might all be
capable of (Fidelio comes to
mind). Wagner, on the other hand, a sort of musical Sigmund Freud, shows us
what we'd rather keep under wraps, and to the self-satisfied, that is
unforgiveable.
Like Dante, Shakespeare,
Pushkin, Goethe, Beethoven and Ibsen, other great creators who changed the
course of Western culture, Wagner gets right under our guard, with a unique
synthesis of music and mythology. Operatic symphonies?
Symphonic operas? There's no category big enough to
contain them.
If you are going to the
Festival production (and Tristan
is the best opera ever to be programmed at any Adelaide Festival, so I advise
you not to miss it, even if you have to take a bank loan to buy the ticket) -
if you are going, you should spend some time reading about it first, listening
to some of the music, getting to know the story, and just thinking it over.
In the last analysis, what is Tristan and Isolde about? Transcending
emotional limits in the impossible search for perfect love? Perhaps that will
do to go on with.
One thing remains certain: the
question will still be hotly debated long after the final curtain on the last
night of the Festival production. And that fact, the fact of its universal
fascination for all with the capacity for wonder at its twilight poignancy, is
the hallmark of its greatness.
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