Random Thoughts on Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’
Having enjoyed and then reviewed the performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of Richard Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from his opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’, my mind has been filled by thoughts about this great masterpiece. I have written about it before, and I wonder why it fascinates me so much. Therefore tonight, having lain sleeplessly for two hours, I have decided to get up and sit at my computer, to see if I can find some clues to my seemingly endless fascination with this opera, first performed a very long time ago in 1865.
I decided yesterday to listen again to my favourite recording of Tristan, the 1952 studio version conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and to follow the words, both text and translation, unhindered by the musical score. One is struck by the astonishing achievement of Wagner in being able to conceive everything about his opera, alone. Plot, words, music, philosophical background, emotional electricity, all these erupted from the brain of this small German man in the middle of the 19th century, a man of a hundred contradictions. Anti-Semitic, vegetarian, atheist, over-sexed, revolutionary, complex, unpleasant but also highly attractive to women, dishonest, spendthrift, utterly ruthless, vain, egotistical, loving, Wagner was all these things, and perhaps the greatest musical genius of all time. Opinions differ on this last point, but there is no doubt of his importance in history, and ‘Tristan und Isolde’ is crucial to his legacy.
I first saw and heard the opera in 1973, when Scottish Opera staged it in a production by Michael Geliot, conducted by Alexander Gibson. It is impossible to underestimate the influence of Alex Gibson on the Scottish music scene from the 60s to the 80s. A genuinely world class conductor who also had a vision for music in Scotland, everything important musically at that time revolved around Alex. The tragedy of his relatively early death robbed us of that vision which was so carelessly thrown away in the ensuing years. I sang with him in the early 80s and liked him enormously, despite his famous wayward beat!
We were lucky in 1973 to have Helga Dernesch as Isolde. She was recording the role with Karajan in Berlin around the same time, and her glorious, full-throated voice dominated the evening. The tenor, Hermin Esser, sang Tristan, and at least got through to the end relatively unscathed. The role is a monster and is very difficult to cast, as it is relentless, with huge demands on vocal weight and tessitura. I didn’t mind his singing too much, as I had never heard the opera before, but he was not in the same league as the rest of the cast, as Norman Bailey sang Kurwenal, David Ward, Marke, and Ann Howard, Brangäne, titans all!
I was immediately smitten with the opera, and so began a lifelong love affair. It is one of the frustrations of my long career that I never sang King Mark in ‘Tristan’. It is not a huge role, but very important, musically and psychologically, and I always thought it suited me perfectly. Sadly, it never came up and I have had to watch from afar, although two of the Markes I have seen, David Ward and Gwynne Howell were two of the finest exponents of the role.
I was lucky enough to see the opera at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, when I was studying at the Guildhall School of Music in the late 1970s, and there I saw the great Jon Vickers singing the title role, conducted by Colin Davis. This phenomenal Canadian tenor was arguably one of the finest Tristans of all time, and Fran and I saw and heard him at his peak. Not a tall man, he had a presence which made him look seven feet tall, and his voice, totally unique, was as if hewn from a Canadian pine forest. It was a huge instrument, but capable of great subtlety, and apparently tireless in maintaining the cruel tessitura demanded by Wagner. I have never heard anything remotely like it and count myself amazingly fortunate to have heard him. We also saw his Peter Grimes around the same time, and again were stunned by his performance. Those ‘Tristans’ at Covent Garden also featured the great Gwynne Howell as King Mark. The Welsh bass possessed a beautiful voice, soft grained but full bodied, and his Marke was a superb characterisation of the confused and confounded old king, who has apparently been betrayed by his best friend, but who can still show compassion in the depths of his grief. I have got to know Gwynne well over the years, and he is a genuinely nice and decent man, unaffected by his success. He was very kind and generous with his advice and friendship early in my career, and I cherish that friendship very much.
‘Tristan und Isolde’ is a wonderful opera, in which nothing much happens. Discuss! Let’s have a look at the basic synopsis of the opera:
Act 1 - On a ship, a sailor sings an unaccompanied song, two women talk, one woman goes to two men with a request, and then she returns to the other woman. One of the men comes to talk to the women about disembarking. He is told they won’t go without speaking to the other man. The other man comes to speak, and one woman tells the other to prepare a drink. She brings the drink, which both the man and the woman drink. The other man returns to announce the imminent arrival of the ship at port. General confusion.
Act 2 - In a castle in a forest, the same two women stand beside a burning brazier and talk. There is a hunt taking place offstage. Horns are heard. The brazier is extinguished, the second woman withdraws to a tower on watch, and the man with whom the woman drank on the ship appears, declaring his love. They have a long talk of an amorous nature. As their passion reaches a climax of emotion, the hunting party returns to find the man and woman embracing, despite the warnings of the other woman in the tower. A younger man informs an older man that he was suspicious of the two lovers, and he has been proved right. The older man, who is the husband of the emotional woman, laments the betrayal, and demands an answer. The emotional man cannot explain but challenges the younger man. As a fight is about to take place, the emotional man drops his sword and is gravely wounded.
Act 3 - In a different castle, the original two men from the first act are seen, one lying badly injured and unconscious. A shepherd plays a sad tune on his pipe and tells the other man that no one is coming. He promises to play a joyful tune if a ship is spotted on the horizon. The man speaks to the other unconscious man, who wakes up and speaks at length in delirium. The happy tune is heard, but the visitors are not well-received. The man tending the ill man fights anyone who comes near and is himself killed. The wounded man rips off his bandages and dies himself, just as the woman from the ship arrives. He dies in her arms. The older man arrives at the scene of carnage and declares that everyone is dead. However, the woman is alive, and talks at length, before herself expiring.
The End.
As you can see, nothing very much happens in terms of plot and action, but the music lasts for well over four hours. The extraordinary thing about ‘Tristan und Isolde’ is that so much of the action goes on within the psyche of the characters and plays out through the music. Of all the operas in the repertoire, this is perhaps the most intellectually challenging, but also the most viscerally emotional. This is where Wagner is at his most revolutionary. Having never sung in ‘Tristan’, I have not studied it in depth in the way I do for operas in which I appear. Consequently, I have not spent time working through the dense, philosophical and psychologically obscure libretto, and, until recently, with the arrival of surtitles, I have never watched the opera and fully understood what the characters were saying to each other. It is a sad fact, at least sad for Wagner, that his libretti, which he wrote with such care and precision, are manifestly not on the artistic level of his music. He believed passionately that his genius was such that the words and the music were just as important as each other, but, in truth, no one would sit through a performance of the libretto of ‘Tristan’ without the music. Fortunately, the music is so good, so wonderful in fact, that this discrepancy is not a huge problem, but he would have been devastated to hear this. His ego would not allow for any mediocrity, and so his mixture of pessimistic philosophy, based largely on his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly his ‘The World as Will and Representation’, and the emotional turmoil focussed on his infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, was expressed most clearly in his music, rather than through words and music.
Much has already been written about Schopenhauer’s influence, and also about Wagner’s doomed, and probably unconsummated, relationship with Mathilde, the wife of Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk merchant and Wagner fan, so I will not get embroiled in those murky waters.
I would like, however, to try to articulate what I find so deeply thrilling in the music of ‘Tristan’, for my own benefit as much as for my readers. From the very first bars of the prelude, one is gripped by an extraordinary feeling of yearning, manifested in the famous ‘Tristan’ chord of F, B D sharp and G sharp. As readers will remember, I never studied theory or harmony, and so my understanding of things like the ‘Tristan’ chord are somewhat vague. This makes writing about such things tricky but bear with me. This chord revolutionised music, by opening the way to chromaticism and therefore eventually to atonalism. It had been heard before, but never in this context, and never so prominently. Chromaticism is one of these words I have read for years, but if asked for a meaning, would have been stumped. At its very simplest, it can be described thus: the use of notes that lie outwith the scale on which a passage is based. For example, if a passage is written in the key of C Major, the use of any note outside the C Major scale (e.g. F Sharp) constitutes chromaticism. Wagner’s use of chromaticism, and the breakdown of the major/minor key system which it heralded, led future composers to experiment with other scales, for example pentatonic, modal and whole tone scales. This inevitably led to the cul de sac of serial, twelve tone music, intellectually fascinating but almost suicidal in its hostility to public taste and pleasure. By the middle of last century, composers had gone so far down the road of atonal music that the very idea of writing music pleasing to the ear became anathema. Classical music was, in my opinion, dying, and it was only the reaction to this atonality in the form of minimalism (Reich, Adams, Glass) and the tintinnabuli (like ringing bells) of Arvo Pärt, that saved it. Nowadays, most composers have realised that they must take their audience with them on their musical journey. They can still be experimental and inventive, but, without some basis in tonality, they cannot hope to be successful. Most art goes through this cycle of development from experiment through expansion to decadence and then to reaction, leading to renaissance or collapse, renewal or a dead end. This is clear from the history of pictorial art, but also in the history of popular culture. The excitement of the 60s, the freedom to experiment, led to the development of Progressive Rock which itself gave way to the reaction of Punk Rock, leading to dance music, techno-pop, grunge and hip-hop. Some good things, some less so. Don’t get me started on Hip Hop!
How did we get from ‘Tristan’ to Hip Hop? It’s a mighty leap, but fascinating nonetheless. I wrote at the beginning of the last paragraph, that I wanted to articulate why I find Wagner’s music, and ‘Tristan’ in particular, so thrilling. Clearly, so far, I have failed in this task, and I see now that it is almost impossible to undertake. The elements of his music that I love are felt at an emotional level which I can’t describe in words. It makes me feel happy, sad, thrilled, churned up, sexy, all these feelings. It has been painted as overtly sexual music, with great swellings and relaxations and waves of emotion rushing through the listener, long slow crescendi leading to overwhelming climaxes and resultant recovery. I find myself moved to tears often by this music, and yet other people are utterly immune to it, and can see no merit. Some find the man so repugnant and so repellent, that they cannot bring themselves to like his music. Some find that Hitler’s adoration of Wagner means that his music will forever be associated with that awful man. Clearly, we must separate the man from the music. The play and film ‘Amadeus’ did a great disservice to Mozart, sensationalising his life unnecessarily, but his music has survived intact. So too I think with Wagner. It is clear that he was a most unpleasant human being, but he wrote wonderful music, the like of which we have not heard before or since, and I for one give thanks for that!
Part Two, July 2024
Having enjoyed and then reviewed, some time ago, the performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of Richard Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from his opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’, my mind was filled recently by thoughts about this great masterpiece. I have written about it before, and I wonder why it fascinates me so much. Therefore, I determined to see if I could find some clues to my seemingly endless fascination with this opera, first performed a very long time ago in 1865.
I decided to listen again to my favourite recording of Tristan, the 1952 studio version conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and to follow the words, both text and translation, unhindered by the musical score. One is struck by the astonishing achievement of Wagner in being able to conceive everything about his opera, alone. Plot, words, music, philosophical background, emotional electricity, all these erupted from the brain of this small German man in the middle of the 19th century, a man of a hundred contradictions. Anti-Semitic, vegetarian, atheist, over-sexed, revolutionary, complex, unpleasant but also highly attractive to women, dishonest, spendthrift, utterly ruthless, vain, egotistical, loving; Wagner was all these things, and also perhaps the greatest musical genius of all time. Opinions differ on this last point, but there is no doubt of his importance in history, and ‘Tristan und Isolde’ is crucial to his legacy.
I first saw and heard the opera in 1973, when Scottish Opera staged it in a production by Michael Geliot, conducted by Alexander Gibson. It is impossible to underestimate the influence of Alex Gibson on the Scottish music scene from the 60s to the 80s. A genuinely world class conductor who also had a vision for music in Scotland, everything important musically at that time revolved around Alex. The tragedy of his relatively early death robbed us of that vision which was so carelessly thrown away in the ensuing years. I sang with him in the early 80s and liked him enormously, despite his famous wayward beat!
We were lucky in 1973 to have Helga Dernesch as Isolde. She was recording the role with Karajan in Berlin around the same time, and her glorious, full-throated voice dominated the evening. The tenor, Hermin Esser, sang Tristan, and at least got through to the end relatively unscathed. The role is a monster and is very difficult to cast, as it is relentless, with huge demands on vocal weight and tessitura. I didn’t mind his singing too much, as I had never heard the opera before, but he was not in the same league as the rest of the cast, as Norman Bailey sang Kurwenal, David Ward, Marke and Ann Howard, Brangäne, titans all!
I was immediately smitten with the opera, and so began a lifelong love affair. It is one of the frustrations of my long career that I never sang King Mark in ‘Tristan’. It is not a huge role, but very important, musically and psychologically, and I always thought it suited me perfectly. Sadly, it never came up and I have had to watch from afar, although two of the Markes I have seen, David Ward and Gwynne Howell were two of the finest exponents of the role.
I was lucky enough to see the opera at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, when I was studying at the Guildhall School of Music in the late 1970s, and there I saw the great Jon Vickers singing the title role, conducted by Colin Davis. This phenomenal Canadian tenor was arguably one of the finest Tristans of all time, and Fran and I saw and heard him at his peak. Not a tall man, he had a presence which made him look seven feet tall, and his voice, totally unique, was as if hewn from a Canadian pine forest. It was a huge instrument, but capable of great subtlety, and apparently tireless in maintaining the cruel tessitura demanded by Wagner. I have never heard anything remotely like it and count myself amazingly fortunate to have heard him. We also saw his Peter Grimes around the same time, and again were stunned by his performance. Those ‘Tristans’ at Covent Garden also featured the great Gwynne Howell as King Mark. The Welsh bass possessed a beautiful voice, soft grained but full bodied, and his Marke was a superb characterisation of the confused and confounded old king, who has apparently been betrayed by his best friend, but who can still show compassion in the depths of his grief. I have got to know Gwynne well over the years, and he is a genuinely nice and decent man, unaffected by his success. He was very kind and generous with his advice and friendship early in my career, and I cherish that friendship very much. That he is not Sir Gwynne is a mystery.
‘Tristan und Isolde’ is a wonderful opera, in which nothing much happens. Discuss! Let’s have a look at the basic synopsis of the opera:
Act 1 - On a ship, a sailor sings an unaccompanied song, two women talk, one woman goes to two men with a request, and then she returns to the other woman. One of the men comes to talk to the women about disembarking. He is told they won’t go without speaking to the other man. The other man comes to speak and one woman tells the other to prepare a drink. She brings the drink, which both the man and the woman drink. The other man returns to announce the imminent arrival of the ship at port. General confusion.
Act 2 - In a castle in a forest, the same two women stand beside a burning brazier and talk. There is a hunt taking place offstage. Horns are heard. The brazier is extinguished, the second woman withdraws to a tower on watch, and the man with whom the woman drank on the ship appears, declaring his love. They have a long talk of an amorous nature. As their passion reaches a climax of emotion, the hunting party returns to find the man and woman embracing, despite the warnings of the other woman in the tower. A younger man informs an older man that he was suspicious of the two lovers, and he has been proved right. The older man, who is the husband of the emotional woman, laments the betrayal, and demands an answer. The emotional man cannot explain, but challenges the younger man. As a fight is about to take place, the emotional man drops his sword and is gravely wounded.
Act 3 - In a different castle, the original two men from the first act are seen, one lying badly injured and unconscious. A shepherd plays a sad tune on his pipe and tells the other man that no one is coming. He promises to play a joyful tune if a ship is spotted on the horizon. The man speaks to the other unconscious man, who wakes up and speaks at length in delirium. The happy tune is heard, but the visitors are not well-received. The man tending the ill man fights anyone who comes near, and is himself killed. The wounded man rips off his bandages and dies himself, just as the woman from the ship arrives; he dies in her arms. The older man arrives at the scene of carnage and declares that everyone is dead. However, the woman is alive, and talks at length, before herself expiring.
The End
As you can see, nothing very much happens in terms of plot and action, but the music lasts for well over four hours. The extraordinary thing about ‘Tristan und Isolde’ is that so much of the action goes on within the psyche of the characters and plays out through the music. Of all the operas in the repertoire, this is perhaps the most intellectually challenging, but also the most viscerally emotional. This is where Wagner is at his most revolutionary. Having never sung in ‘Tristan’, I have not studied it in depth in the way I do for operas in which I appear. Consequently, I have not spent time working through the dense, philosophical and psychologically obscure libretto, and, until recently, with the arrival of surtitles, I have never watched the opera and fully understood what the characters were saying to each other. It is a sad fact, at least sad for Wagner, that his libretti, which he wrote with such care and precision, are manifestly not on the artistic level of his music. He believed passionately that his genius was such that the words and the music were just as important as each other, but, in truth, no one would sit through a performance of the libretto of ‘Tristan’ without the music. Fortunately, the music is so good, so wonderful in fact, that this discrepancy is not a huge problem, but he would have been devastated to hear this. His ego would not allow for any mediocrity, and so his mixture of pessimistic philosophy, based largely on his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly his ‘The World as Will and Representation’, and the emotional turmoil focussed on his infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, was expressed most clearly in his music, rather than through words and music.
Much has already been written about Schopenhauer’s influence, and also about Wagner’s doomed, and probably unconsummated, relationship with Mathilde, the wife of Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk merchant and Wagner fan, so I will not get embroiled in those murky waters.
I would like, however, to try to articulate what I find so deeply thrilling in the music of ‘Tristan’, for my own benefit as much as for my readers. From the very first bars of the prelude, one is gripped by an extraordinary feeling of yearning, manifested in the famous ‘Tristan’ chord of F, B D sharp and G sharp. As readers will remember, I never studied theory or harmony, and so my understanding of things like the ‘Tristan’ chord are somewhat vague. This makes writing about such things tricky but bear with me. This chord revolutionised music, by opening the way to chromaticism and therefore eventually to atonalism. It had been heard before, but never in this context, and never so prominently. Chromaticism is one of these words I have read for years, but if asked for a meaning, would have been stumped. At its very simplest, it can be described thus: the use of notes that lie outwith the scale on which a passage is based. For example, if a passage is written in the key of C Major, the use of any note outside the C Major scale (eg F Sharp) constitutes chromaticism. Wagner’s use of chromaticism, and the breakdown of the major/minor key system which it heralded, led future composers to experiment with other scales, for example pentatonic, modal and whole tone scales. This inevitably led to the cul de sac of serial, twelve tone music, intellectually fascinating but almost suicidal in its hostility to public taste and pleasure. By the middle of last century, composers had gone so far down the road of atonal music that the very idea of writing music pleasing to the ear became anathema. Classical music was, in my opinion, dying, and it was only the reaction to this atonality in the form of minimalism (Reich, Adams, Glass) and the tintinnabuli (like ringing bells) of Arvo Pärt, that saved it. Nowadays, most composers have realised that they must take their audience with them on their musical journey. They can still be experimental and inventive, but, without some basis in tonality, they cannot hope to be successful. Most art goes through this cycle of development from experiment through expansion to decadence and then to reaction, leading to renaissance or collapse, renewal or a dead end. This is clear from the history of pictorial art, but also in the history of popular culture. The excitement of the 60s, the freedom to experiment, led to the development of Progressive Rock which itself gave way to the reaction of Punk Rock, leading to dance music, techno-pop, grunge and hip-hop. Some good things, some less so. Don’t get me started on Hip Hop!!!?!!
How did we get from ‘Tristan’ to Hip Hop? It’s a mighty leap, but fascinating nonetheless. I wrote at the beginning of the last paragraph, that I wanted to articulate why I find Wagner’s music, and ‘Tristan’ in particular, so thrilling. Clearly, so far, I have failed in this task, and I see now that it is almost impossible to undertake. The elements of his music that I love are felt at an emotional level which I can’t describe in words. It makes me feel happy, sad, thrilled, churned up, sexy, all these feelings. It has been painted as overtly sexual music, with great swellings and relaxations and waves of emotion rushing through the listener, long slow crescendi leading to overwhelming climaxes and resultant recovery. I find myself moved to tears often by this music, and yet, other people are utterly immune to it, and can see no merit. Some find the man so repugnant and so repellent, that they cannot bring themselves to like his music. Some find that Hitler’s adoration of Wagner means that his music will forever be associated with that awful man. Clearly, we must separate the man from the music. The play and film ‘Amadeus’ did a great disservice to Mozart, sensationalising his life unnecessarily, but his music has survived intact. So too, I think, with Wagner. It is clear that he was a most unpleasant human being, but he wrote wonderful music, the like of which we have not heard before or since, and I, for one, give thanks for that!
I recently acquired a DVD (yes, I know I’m a dinosaur, but bear with me) of the ‘Tristan und Isolde’ that Leonard Bernstein conducted over three separate evenings in 1981 in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz in Munich. Bernstein was very proud of this achievement, which he himself saw as one the finest performances of his entire career, and the production on Unitel, with a few caveats, is one of the best videos of any opera I know. The cast, almost exclusively German-speaking, was a fantastic one, and the semi-staged/unstaged nature of the performance was a welcome relief from the modern-day Regietheater which drives most of us mad. There was no directorial concept to confuse and irritate us, simply a cast of brilliant singing actors, wearing sort of mediaeval/hippie garb, on a large stage area behind the orchestra in the huge hall in the Residenz Palace in the heart of Munich. Bernstein was conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Bavarian Radio, the only German orchestra with which he regularly worked, who were on fantastic form, and he had specified that he wanted to record each act separately, so none of the singers would be exhausted by the end. The roles of Tristan and Isolde are utterly demanding, and any normal performance (even with Jon Vickers) would result in an understandable flagging of tone towards the end of the third act.
By 1981, Vickers was past his peak, as was the previous superman tenor, Wolfgang Windgassen, and Bernstein chose the young Peter Hofmann, who had not yet sung the role on stage, as his hero. Still only 37, Hofmann had achieved fame as Siegmund in the 1976 Centenary Ring, but was also celebrated as an Elvis Presley interpreter, and had dabbled with rock music too. Later on, as his voice deteriorated due to a faulty technique, he reverted to popular music, singing the title role in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ in Hamburg, and fronting the Peter Hofmann Show on German TV!
However, in this ‘Tristan’, he was magnificent, singing with great imagination and emotion. His voice was not as powerful as Vickers (none were), but he sang with genuine heroic tone and thrilling high notes and looked fabulous with his blond hair and film star looks. Using a score for the third act did not in any way detract from his whole-hearted and full-on performance, and since there was little interacting between the characters, it didn’t matter at all.
Kurwenal, Tristan’s faithful servant, was sung by the Austrian baritone, Bend Weikl, and his interpretation was as good as it gets. I saw Weikl 9 years later at Bayreuth singing the Flying Dutchman, when he was superb. He was a thrilling Heldenbariton, perfect for this role. King Mark was the great German bass, Hans Sotin, one of the finest of his generation, with a huge voice, tempered by subtlety, and a rock solid technique which allowed him to scale the peaks and troughs of this magnificent role. I would love to have sung Mark in my career but could never have sung it as well as this!
Brangäne was sung by the Australian mezzo, Yvonne Minton, who made quite a name for herself in the 70s and 80s, as a creamy mezzo, mixing power with sensuality. I saw her sing Kundry in Bern in the 90s, when my friend Ian Caley was singing Parsifal there, and remember how good she was. It’s interesting to note that, as I write in 2024, the two title role singers have died, but the three smaller parts are still going strong into their 80s.
Bernstein had only another 9 years to live, but his conducting here of ‘Tristan’ was visceral and overwhelming. By this time in his career, he was becoming notorious for slow tempi, and this was no exception, but, for me, it all made sense. His apparent wonderment as he proceeded through the score, his obvious love of the music even as he conducted it, and his encouragement of the singers and players was infectious. I would love to have been conducted by him. Memories of his Mahler 2 at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973 linger deliciously, especially as his film of the same performance in Ely Cathedral a few months later is available to watch on Deutsche Grammophon DVD. To be able to watch him conduct ‘Tristan und Isolde’ on this DVD is absolutely fabulous, and I would encourage anyone who can find it to acquire the recording.
