Kareol Revisited

Action and Drama

f you are about to see a production of Wagner's opera (or music drama as some people prefer to call it) you might want to know a few things about the opera. Especially if you are seeing it for the first time. So here is everything relevant that you will not read in the opera programme. Actually you might prefer to read this little essay and spend the price of a programme on an ice cream instead. As this is only an introductory note, we are not going deeply into the work: references and suggestions for your further reading are given at the end of the essay. I have added in parentheses relevant phrases in German for you to drop into conversations during the intermission, especially if attending a performance of this opera somewhere in Europe.

Above: A traditional version of Tristan und Isolde. The ship is taking them to Cornwall.

Richard Wagner called his Tristan und Isolde an action (Handlung). Which seems odd, given that there is not much visible action in the opera. In recent productions, Isolde knocks some chairs over and that's about all the action we get to see (and probably more than we needed to see) until the last act, when there is a free-for-all towards the end. In older productions, at the end of the second act, Tristan was stabbed by Melot but (like the rest of the stage directions) that seems to have gone out of fashion now, at least in European theatres. Sometimes Tristan is stabbed by King Marke, which makes no sense given that the king has been telling us for several minutes about how much he loves his nephew. In the latest, sophisticated stagings of the opera, Tristan falls down for no obvious reason, like a footballer who just missed a tackle. Either the stage directors do not read much of the libretto (and Stefan Herheim is the only one who can read a score) or they simply do not care, and neither do the opera critics who praise such nonsense. Hardened Wagnerians just sigh or mutter about effects without causes (Wirkung ohne Ursache).

Left: A modern staging of Tristan und Isolde usually involves some intense knocking over of chairs. Bayreuth 2006.

Incidentally, when attending this opera for the first time, it might be best to ignore everything in the advance publicity, especially the bit about star-crossed lovers, setting an expectation of something like a Mills and Boon novel rather than a drama about love as fearful torment (die Liebe als furchtbare Qual). The same goes for those tedious programme notes explaining how the opera was the sublimation of Wagner's feelings for Mathilde Wesendonk ¹. In fact her contribution was mainly to listen to him, without interrupting him too often, and to ink over the musical sketches that Wagner had made in pencil.

Carl Dahlhaus made a useful distinction (in my view anyway) between "inner action" and "outer action". In this opera there is more inner action than outer (external) action. The inner action is going on in the heads of the lovers and of course they sing about it. The absence of outer action presents a difficulty for stage directors, who like to show us that they are contributing something, and they want to justify if possible their immense fees. Therefore they tend to supplement Wagner's libretto with bits of stage business, and to bring naked people onstage at random. This only distracts the audience from the narrative. Stage directors are always looking for subtexts and these are not hard to find, if they dip into recent books about the Wagner operas. One writer was convinced that this opera is about sacrifice, whilst another scribbler claimed that there is a subtext about homosexual jealousy. Subtexts are all very well but you must not lose sight of the core text, or in other words what the opera is about. Which is a question I shall come back to. It worries me that, when I speak to any opera fan who has seen more than one hundred performances of Tristan und Isolde, they cannot tell me what it is about.

I very much doubt that the average stage director who has been assigned to direct this opera has the slightest idea of what it is about and in many cases it is clear (for example from interviews) that they have not tried to find out. Perhaps we should not blame the stage director too much, however, because in many cases it is the opera house management who are at fault. Recently too many of them seem to believe that Tristan und Isolde is a standard repertory piece that requires no more preparation or rehearsal than does the average opera. Unfortunately the history of the work in performance tells a different story. And recently too many opera houses selected for their Tristan a theatre or film director who has never directed opera. Inevitably it all goes wrong.

The music critic Ernest Newman in his popular and still relevant book Wagner Nights (The Wagner Operas) asserted that it is not possible to understand the opera without a close study of not only the poem (libretto) but also the Prose Draft (of which an English translation can be found in the Cambridge Opera Handbook), and so it is hardly surprising, he says, that after experiencing this opera 99 out of 100 people will come away with a totally wrong idea of much of it. I am certain that this is still true. If Wagner had something to communicate then he has not been getting it across. Maybe that is because the distracting stage business ("let's write some French words on placards and hold them up") is concealing what Wagner was trying to say to us?

Left: Tristan and Isolde as it appeared in the advance publicity you received from the opera house.

At the start, Wagner wrote to Liszt that his Tristan und Isolde was to be a simple opera that easily could be staged. Although it turned out not to be a simple opera, there was some truth in this. The challenges it presents are more for the singers (9 soloists and male chorus) and for the orchestra (of about 60 players) than any that exist for the production team. All that is needed to stage this opera are simple props: in the first act a cup and perhaps a sword, a box of potions, maybe a curtain (there are several stage directions for Brangäne to open or close the curtain that separates the ladies from the sailors); in the second act a lantern or torch, or perhaps a candle; and in the third act a bed or couch. There is no need, as Adolphe Appia and Wieland Wagner demonstrated, to fill the stage with enormous pieces of scenery (or suits of armour, or giant toastracks) that get in the way of the actors. As noted above, for much of the opera there is little action to be seen, and stage directors should not try to compensate by introducing irrelevant business such as Isolde self- harming.

Making Sense of Wagner's Opera

ome people believe, and a few of them have tried to convince me, that an opera, even one as complex as Tristan und Isolde, can be understood from its internal evidence alone. Only up to a point, I believe, is this true. As Newman wrote 70 years ago, you need more help, such as the Prose Draft, and an opera programme synopsis is not a good substitute. The score contains music, poetry and detailed stage directions. The music can be analysed in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, tonality and so on. There are a good number of Leitmotive, if you want to play "spot the leading motif". They tend to be associated with abstractions such as day or night, love or honour. In the outer acts we can often hear the motif that has been identified with the sea. The empty sea which in the first act keeps the lovers together, on a ship, and in the third act keeps them apart. And of course the famous "Tristan chord", actually four of them, which I have written about in another essay. If you are skilled in music theory, you might be able to follow in the score a tonal argument, in which for example the tonality (major/minor) of A flat represents night, while B flat represents day, and B means transcendence ². And so on. We can also study the words, of which there are far too many, and try to make sense of Wagner's transcendental poetry. There is a lot there about "Sehnen" (longing). Either she is waiting for him, or he is waiting for her, and there is much longing. But are they longing to consummate their desire or are they longing for death, or both? In the first act the lovers, who are pretending not to be in love, drink a magic potion that they both believe to be a death potion. But it isn't and they are surprised to find themselves alive, and keen to make the most of life (this is, as they say, the gimmick).

The more I study Tristan und Isolde, the stranger but also the more wonderful it seems. This work is unique in the Wagner canon because it began as music and the words (mostly) followed later³. In December 1856 (two years after Wagner had written to Liszt about his enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and saying that in his head he had conceived a Tristan und Isolde), he wrote to Marie Sayn-Wittgenstein that it is still music without words (vorläufig Musik ohne Worte). The earliest surviving sketches for melodies are from about the same time. Not until August 1857, after he had put his Siegfried on the shelf so that he could concentrate on the "simple opera", did Wagner start writing his poem (libretto), by which time he probably had much of the music in his head if not already on paper. Although the music came first, and Wagner said that the words had been constrained by the music (and that he had not been so constrained when writing The Ring), that does not mean that the words are secondary: although this has been hotly debated among the learned⁴. Anyone who studies the score should be able to see that the opera has a form that is symmetrical, and that it is basically a musical form. So we are talking about a drama that was constrained by a musical form. In this respect Tristan und Isolde is unique.

Love and Death

ven the most superficial reading (or hearing) of Tristan und Isolde leaves the reader (or listener) in no doubt that it is a story about the love between Tristan and Isolde. Perhaps that love is represented by that sweet little word und that joins their names together. For a long time Isolde has been in love with Tristan and maybe still is, at the start of the opera: but she tells Brangäne how she wants him dead (and in the Prose Draft she longs for a storm to sink the ship and kill all living things on it). Tristan seems to be unable to admit, even to himself, that he is in love with her. Then the business with the love potion causes them, somehow, to lose their inhibitions and act one ends with them openly declaring their love. In the second act they sing about it, at length. I recall Rodney Milnes writing in Opera magazine about how much he wanted Tristan to get his leg over and stop going on about it.

The difficulty here was caused by the philosopher Schopenhauer (who inspired Wagner's ideas for a Tristan opera), with his "metaphysics of sexual love". In the autumn of 1854 Wagner went overboard for Schopenhauer's metaphysics ⁵ except for this part of it. Wagner was rather keen on sexual love and, what is more, he had already written several operas about "redemption through love". So he was not willing to give up on it. In 1858 Wagner actually drafted a letter to Schopenhauer in which he offered a "correction", a new path of salvation, in which the terrible Will could be pacified through our predisposition to sexual love: but he never posted the letter. This new path to salvation, leading to self-knowledge and denial of the Will, was (in 1856) intended to be the subject of two operas: Tristan und Isolde and the later abandoned project Die Sieger (The Victors). Writing to Mathilde Wesendonk (on 1 December 1858), Wagner said that the new path to salvation involves a total pacification of the Will through love, and not engendered on any abstract human love, but a love engendered on the basis of sexual love.

Turning to the other side of the opera, there is a lot about death. There are two distinct death motives in the score. The first one we hear in the first act, when Isolde sings of Tristan's death-devoted heart. In the second act this death motif is displaced by the leading motif of sweet death, representing a new conception of death, in which the lovers will be in some way united, or without separation as they describe it, in the realm of world-night. In the third act Tristan recalls the deaths of his parents, whom he never knew. He curses the potion but not because it was a love potion, rather because it threw him back from the gates of death into the sunlight.

The Backstory of Tristan and Isolde

n any of the later Wagner operas, a leading motive (Leitmotiv) is usually a motive of remembrance (Erinnerungsmotiv): it leads to, or recalls, an event that occurred onstage earlier in the opera. The glance motif is unusual, since it refers to an event that took place before the start of the opera: it refers to the moment when the lovers first realised that they loved each other. Long before the incident of the love potion. Here we see the problem with trying to understand the opera on internal evidence alone. What we are told, in the opera itself, about earlier events is fragmentary and incomplete. Sometimes an opera programme will provide a summary of the back story, from Gottfried's poem, to help the audience to understand the relationships between the characters. Kurwenal tells us how Morold came to Cornwall, to collect tribute, and how he was killed by Tristan. But he does not tell us that (according to Gottfried) Morold had been betrothed to Isolde, or that a piece of Tristan's sword was embedded in the head of Morold when it was returned to Ireland. Morold's sword had been poisoned and Tristan became seriously ill from it. He sailed to Ireland in the hope that Isolde (or her mother) could find an antidote that would heal him, disguised as "Tantris". Isolde tells us how she was about to kill Tantris when she met his gaze, and so she let the sword fall again. Only the glance motif tells us that this was the moment when the lovers discovered that they were in love; and it reminds us of this event again and again. If we are not allowed to use Gottfried's poem, or a summary of it, or the Prose Draft, to fill in some of the gaps, then it is not possible to understand what happened earlier because the libretto does not tell the entire story.

Desire and Magic

agic is taken for granted in 19th century opera and Wagner's operas are no exception. Isolde's mother is skilled in magic and she has prepared for her daughter a complete potion kit, which is being guarded by Brangäne. It includes a deadly poison (the death potion) and a love potion intended for King Marke. At the end of the first act, after drinking the love philtre, the lovers are keen to consummate their love, which they probably would have done right there on the stage, if they were not being held apart by Brangäne and Kurwenal. As Ernest Newman commented many years ago, whether or not it was a love philtre is not at all important: it might as well have been cold tea. Thomas Mann wrote that Brangäne could just as well have offered the lovers a glass of water ⁶. But we cannot rule out the possibility that the love potion really had some effect: Wagner in his own programme note suggests that it did. The important point is that they did not drink a deadly poison and so the lovers are surprised to find themselves alive. The shock of this discovery brings their until now suppressed passion into the open.

This is not original with Wagner, of course: he is following the story as told by Gottfried von Strassburg, who hinted that the love potion was not really necessary. In his "Tristan" poem there is a lot of consummating and for several chapters the lovers are doing it in corners and closets, anywhere that King Marke cannot see them. Wagner discards almost all of Gottfried's story, selecting only a few scenes to include in his opera. There is no cave where Marke can spy on the lovers, who know that he is watching and so are on their best behaviour; there is no Iseult of the White Hands to make trouble. Wagner simplifies the outer action to a minimum, while his music describes the inner action. At the end of the second act there is a crisis, the lovers are discovered, and Tristan is mortally wounded. In traditional productions he is stabbed by Melot, his false friend. Then in the third act we see Tristan on his sick bed, with Kurwenal tending him while a shepherd plays a long sad melody. Tristan is now only kept alive by his desire for Isolde, whom he sees in a sequence of visions. It is up to the audience to decide for themselves whether Isolde really arrives to hold the dying Tristan in her arms, or alternately that this is all inner action happening in the head of the unconscious hero.

Above: none of the usual clutter appears in this staging by Wieland Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival in 1952. This is act 3. Sometimes less is more.

Consciousness

f the most important word in the libretto is Sehnen then the second most important must be bewusst (conscious). Wagner wrote that in this opera he was undoing the work of the Will ⁷, in the sense that it works to achieve consciousness. Initially Tristan is conscious (bewusst) and, from some (not entirely certain) point in the final act, he is and remains unconscious (unbewusst). In the second act the lovers seem to be trying to become one being, ein-bewusst. By the end of the opera both of them are unconscious, if not actually dead. So perhaps it is a journey from consciousness to unconsciousness. What happens to Isolde after the second act is not at all clear: when she appears in the third act it might be only as a vision of the delirious Tristan.⁸ Initially (as in the Prose Draft) Wagner had intended that Isolde should walk into the sea and drown at the end of the opera. Hence the references to sinking and drowning in her final lines. But he dropped this idea, perhaps because it would be difficult to stage.

A Failed Suicide Pact and its Aftermath

ll of this can be confusing for the ordinary operagoer. Especially if he or she has been reading the opera programme, with its quotations from Novalis⁹ and other German poets you've never heard of. What is this opera really about? In simple terms, it is the story of a failed suicide pact. Summary: a couple try to escape from their situation by drinking poison but they actually drink a love potion (or possibly cold tea). Then they meet in secret and reflect on their new predicament (and metaphysics) until her husband gets home. There is a fight and Tristan is wounded. On his sickbed Tristan reflects on his life story, and on the deaths of his parents, while waiting for Isolde to come to him so that he can die in her arms. Therefore the opera can be seen as a meditation on love, death, longing and desire.

Selected References and Further Reading

1. Secondary Material and General References

• Adolphe Appia: "Die Inscenierung von 'Tristan und Isolde'", in "Die Musik und die Inscenierung", Munich 1899.
• Dieter Borchmeyer: "Das Theater Richard Wagners", Stuttgart 1982; English tr. "Richard Wagner Theory and Theatre", Stewart Spencer, OUP Oxford 1991. See chapter 18.
• Patrick Carnegy: "The Staging of 'Tristan und Isolde': Landmarks along the Appian Way", in ENO/ROH Opera Guide No.6, London and NY 1981.
• Eric Chafe: "The Tragic and the Ecstatic: the musical revolution of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde'", 2008, OUP Oxford.
• Carl Dahlhaus: "Richard Wagners Musikdramen", Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1971; Füssli 1985; Reclam 1996; Eng. tr. "Richard Wagner's Music Dramas", tr. Mary Whittall, CUP 1979.
• John Deathridge: "Public and Private Life: Reflections on the Genesis of 'Tristan und Isolde' and the 'Wesendonck Lieder'", in "Wagner Beyond Good and Evil", Berkeley CA 2008.
• Wolfgang Golther: "Tristan und Isolde in den Dichtungen des Mittelalters und der neuen Zeit", Leipzig 1907.
• Arthur Groos (ed.): "Cambridge Opera Handbook: Tristan und Isolde", Cambridge University Press 2011.
• Joseph Kerman: "Opera as Symphonic Poem", in "Opera as Drama", Berkeley 1988; London 1989.
• Bryan Magee: "Wagner and Philosophy", Allen Lane, 2000, London; published in the USA as "The Tristan Chord".
• Thomas Mann: "Wagner und unsere Zeit: Aufsätze, Betrachtungen, Briefe", ed. Erika Mann, Frankfurt/Main 1963, 1983; tr. Allan Blunden as "Pro and Contra Wagner", Chicago 1985.
• Ernest Newman: "Wagner Nights" (UK edn.), Putnam 1949; pbk. Pan 1977; or "The Wagner Operas" (US edn.)
• Egon Voss: "Tristan: Die Liebe als furchtbare Qual", in "Wagner und kein Ende", Atlantis, Zurich and Mainz 1996.
• Wieland Wagner (ed.): "Hundert Jahre 'Tristan'", Emsdetten 1965.
• Elliot Zuckerman: "The First Hundred Years of Wagner's 'Tristan'", New York 1964.

2. Primary Sources

• Richard Wagner: BB= "Das Braune Buch", ed. Joachim Bergfeld, Atlantis Musik-Verlag, Zurich 1975; English tr. George Bird as "The Brown Book", Gollancz 1980.
• Richard Wagner: Letters to Liszt: "Wagner Liszt Briefwechsel", 1889; Eng. tr. Francis Hueffer as "Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt", Haskell House 1968; Indypublish.com 2002.
• Richard Wagner: Letters to Mathilde: "Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonk: Tagebuchblätter und Briefe 1853-1871", ed. Wolfgang Golther, Leipzig 1914.

Recommended Recordings

here are many audio recordings and about a dozen video recordings of Tristan und Isolde available. If some of them are not in current CD and DVD catalogues, you might be able to find them in second- hand shops or eBay. Many interesting recordings, for example live from Bayreuth in the 1950's, are appearing on minor labels or available as downloads, now that they are out of copyright protection. Relative to other canonical Wagner operas, however, there is a consensus that most of the Tristan recordings are unsatisfactory. Some people say that the conductors and singers of 50 or 60 years ago were much better with this opera than any featured on recent recordings. So many of the recordings I can recommend are rather old. With newer recordings you have to take your chances.

In roughly chronological order, audio recordings:

• Bayreuth Festival 1953. Conducted by Eugen Jochum. A cast of "New Bayreuth" stars, including Ramón Vinay as Tristan and Astrid Varnay as Isolde. Of course this is in mono sound, and therefore not an obvious choice for your first recording, but it is worth hearing. Available as a download from operadepot.com.
• Studio recording from 1953, EMI Classics, previously HMV. Conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. ROH Chorus and the Philharmonia Orchestra. This one is regarded not only by "crazy Furtwängler people" but also by many other opera lovers as one of the greatest ever opera recordings. Sooner or later you need this recording in your record collection. Tristan is Ludwig Suthaus, perhaps not a great tenor but a solid contributor, and Isolde is Kirsten Flagstad. In mono but remastered sound.
• Bayreuth Festival 1966, DGG. Conducted by Karl Böhm. Although many of the live recordings from Bayreuth are off-air recordings of broadcast performances, this one is actually an in-house recording and the sound is good stereo. As with the Ring Cycle from the same period, the orchestral playing can be of variable quality, but there is all the excitement of a live performance and it is from the unique Bayreuth Festspielhaus acoustic. This is a very popular recording with Wagnerians. Tristan is Wolfgang Windgassen, Isolde is Birgit Nilsson and Brangäne is Christa Ludwig, with Martti Talvela and Eberhard Waechter in other roles. A dream cast.
• Studio recording from 1972, in good stereo, EMI Classics. Conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Isolde is Helga Dernesch, Tristan is Jon Vickers and Brangäne is Christa Ludwig, with several other top singers in the cast. Admired not only by "crazy Karajan people" but by many opera lovers.
• And so we come to the legendary Carlos Kleiber recordings. There are many people who like the studio recording on DGG but I am not one of them. I find it over-engineered: too much tinkering with the volume control, and Kleiber's tempo changes are bizarre. It is said that the conductor tried to stop the studio recording from being released. But if you like it, then buy a copy. My preference would be for any of the three live recordings listed below, despite them being in less than perfect sound. These recordings have appeared on minor labels (Exclusive, Memories) and at least one of them can be obtained as a download from operadepot.com.
• Vienna State Opera 1973. Live performance on 7 October. Tristan is Hans Hopf, Isolde is Catarina Ligendza, Marke is Hans Sotin. With the orchestra of the Staatsoper and the mens chorus, chorus master Norbert Balatsch.
• Bayreuth Festival 1975. This is an off-air recording of the broadcast on 26 July. Tristan is Helge Brilioth, Isolde is Catarina Ligendza, Brangäne is Yvonne Minton. With Kurt Moll as Marke and Donald McIntyre as Kurwenal. With the orchestra and the men of the Bayreuth Chorus, chorus master Norbert Balatsch.
• Bayreuth Festival 1976. This is an off-air recording of the broadcast on 30 July. Tristan is Spas Wenkoff, Isolde is Catarina Ligendza. Otherwise almost the same cast as in 1975.

A few video recordings from those (sometimes) available on DVD or Blu-ray:

• Orange Festival, July 1973. An open-air performance in the old ampitheatre at Orange. Tristan is Jon Vickers, Isolde is Birgit Nilsson, Brangäne is Ruth Hesse, Kurwenal is Walter Berry and Marke is Bengt Rundgren. The London New Philharmonia is conducted by Karl Böhm. This might be hard to find: my copy was obtained from Hardy Trading in Milan. Not great video quality and the sound is nothing special but the performance, directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, is.
• Munich Opera Festival, 1998. Zubin Mehta conducts the Chorus and Orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera. Directed by Peter Konwitschny. Tristan is John Frederic West, Isolde is Waltraud Meier, with a good solid cast in other roles. This was available from ArtHaus Musik.
• Glyndebourne Festival, 2007. Jiri Belohlavek conducts the LPO and the Glynditz Chorus. Tristan is Robert Gambill, Isolde is Nina Stemme, Brangäne is Katarina Karneus, Kurwenal is Bo Skovhus, Marke is Rene Pape. Directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff. On Blu-ray from Opus Arte.