Nano Note: O sink hernieder
When I was in college, I took a heroic view of Tristan und Isolde. Musing over a remark that I’d heard, according to which German musicologists regarded Tristan as the perfect opera — a view that made sense to me, even if I wasn’t always in the mood to listen to the alleged perfection — I saw Tristan and Isolde as Olympian lovers who were willing and able to go a lot further to gratify their passion than anybody I knew. Wagner’s great achievement was to do the lovers justice by composing music that captured — a significant choice of words, I now think — a transcending, self-immolating love that could find resolution only in death.
When I say that this was an adolescent understanding of the opera, I don’t mean to condescend. I recognized that I knew nothing about love (nothing at all); and I was on the lookout for pointers. I did not long for love; on the contrary, I wanted to watch out for it. An opera that never shut up about the connection between love, on the one hand, and night, oblivion, and death, on the other, seemed very wise to me, and possibly full of prophylactic hints. At the same time, I wanted to be swallowed alive and completely roasted by Love — which is very much the same thing as not longing for love. Like any teenager, I wanted excitement without consequences.
In my middle years, I thought a lot about the love potion that Isolde slips Tristan — or, rather, that Brangäne slips Isolde. Isolde has asked her companion to prepare a lethal cordial that she will share with the man she hates most in the world — Tristan, the foreign murderer of her fiancé, Morold. Whether Brangäne makes a mistake and chooses the wrong bottle, or quietly overrules her mistress’s suicidal command, the result of drinking the philtre is undying love. The enemies become lovers, just like that.
Wagner may have been innocent of Freudian insight, but he knew his Shakespeare, and a huge chunk of Act I of his opera is taken up by Isolde’s protesting too much. Counting the ways how she hates Tristan, Isolde makes it clear that no other person on earth appears on her radar. If Tristan were dead — her fondest wish — she’d be lost, which is why she decides to kill herself along with him.
In a word, there is abundant evidence, at least for modern eyes to see, that Tristan and Isolde are in love before they drink the potion. When the potion doesn’t kill them (and certainly Tristan also expects it to), it allows them to acknowledge their mutual longing.
Listening to the opera this afternoon, I saw that a great shift in my understanding of the opera had taken place. The story of Tristan and Isolde themselves was no longer very important; it was but an armature on which Wagner could hang music that I used to think represented passion. Now, however, I knew that the music was the passion. Even though I was calmly — to all outward appearances — dusting the mantelpiece and vacuuming the carpet, the entire passion of Tristan und Isolde coursed through me. I was not leading a secret life of banked passion, sundering, on an imaginary plane, my connection with the banal quotidian world, permitting myself an internal escapade, clothed in the drag of grand amour, while applying a damp cloth to the marble top of a commode. There was no discontinuity at all between giving the phalaenopsis its weekly sip of water and crying out the praises of Frau Minne, as Isolde does when Brangäne tries to take ‘credit” for the very inconvenient love of Tristan for his uncle’s wife. “O tör’ge Magd!” ripostes Isolde — “you foolish inexperienced woman!” Every time I hear that line, I feel the true lover’s incinerating contempt for the world, and/but there is no need for me to set any fires myself. On the contrary; I wipe the glass on Kathleen’s wedding portrait and set it back on the table. Unlike the ancient Celtic lovers, but thanks no end to Wagner’s music, I know what I’m doing.