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The first act of Tristan differs from the others in one very important respect: it contains, on the surface at least, nothing of the metaphysical themes of the second and third acts. The drinking of the love-death potion at the end of the act is the catalyst to the emergence of those themes in act 2, especially the night/day opposition and the idea of transcendence through the merging of love and night-death (Liebestod). Nevertheless, there is a strong sense that the events of act 1 mask an underlying deeper reality, that qualities of surface and depth are built into Wagner’s interpretation of the setting and constitute its true meaning. In this light the ocean voyage from Ireland to Cornwall is the beginning of a metaphoric journey, the confined space of the ship symbolizing the fragility and restrictedness of consciously held conventional ideas or conceptions (Haupt). These are set in opposition to the underlying source and ultimate goal of the journey: the ocean as symbol of the unconscious, to which Isolde returns at the end of the opera.

Act 3 of Tristan is considered the richest—the “greatest in every way,” “practically perfect,” according to Joseph Kerman—a perception extending back at least as far as Nietzsche’s panegyric in The Birth of Tragedy. It is not just because Wagner merges the exigencies of musical and dramatic structure to an unprecedented degree in this act, but also because act 3 completes a palpable large-scale design for the work in toto. Wagner himself said that act 3 was the “point of departure for the mood as a whole,” a statement confirmed by his 1854 letter to Liszt, which already looks ahead to the oppositions that attain their point of greatest intensity in act 3. Act 3 pivots around those oppositions: Tristan’s curse of the love potion and his own existence, his relapse into unconsciousness, and his reawakening and clairvoyant vision of Isolde. These events, as mentioned earlier, are centralized within the act.

The truth regarding Wagner’s attitude toward Gottfried is not to be found in his rejection of what he would have considered the dated aspects of Gottfried’s poem, but in his interaction with the universality of its underlying “music,” which emerges in the poetic language, thematic content, and even the structure of Tristan. In claiming to have amended Schopenhauer on the metaphysics of sexual love, articulating the view that love could lead to denial of the will-to-life, Wagner turned to Gottfried’s conception of Minne, intensifying Gottfried’s vision of the union of life and death through love (Liebestod) to the point of its becoming a force of metaphysical proportions, overcoming worldly values entirely.

The increasing depth of night is a metaphor for the lovers’ coming ever closer to oneness. The background in Gottfried von Strassburg’s lovers’ cave scene for the ideal of an enclosed “world apart,” a place of forgetfulness, of the dream of love, or Wunschleben, is evident primarily in the part of the scene from “O sink hernieder” to the end, encompassing the three duets that Alfred Lorenz called the “Nachtgesang” (song of night), the “Sterbelied” (song of death), and the “Liebesekstase” (ecstasy of love). With the transition to a slower tempo, the association of A-flat with night and a higher degree of periodic design (but one that is controlled by a still larger principle of transition), Wagner brings about the lovers’ consecration to night and the metaphysical. Preceding it is the most extensive instance of transition-dominated music in Wagner’s entire oeuvre, the Tagesgespräch. Paradoxically, it presents many signposts of a closed periodic design.

In Tristan, form rooted in musical and dramatic correspondences mirrors the representational aspect of the drama, but as such it often seems imposed or external, demanding that it be understood in relation to “deeper,” purely musical processes of the kind that Wagner described as transitional and developmental. In act 3, Tristan’s cycles—his quest for self-understanding—are the embodiment of the latter. In keeping with Wagner’s Schopenhauerian agenda, they are occupied with the role of desire in his life. From the point of his awakening until his first extended solo Tristan speaks in nothing more than the most fragmented utterances, often sounding to little more than a Tristan chord or related harmony. Tristan’s solo is occupied with his attempt to recapture the past, in particular the night that is now lost to him.

The tritone that sounds as Tristan sinks unconscious to F and the orchestra and Kurvenal enter on B is an expression of the purely negating view of existence. When Kurvenal, having pronounced love a delusion, cadences in B minor—“Behold what thanks love has won from him, what love ever wins”—Wagner brings in the F beneath his cadential b, then the Tristan chord, an octave below its usual pitch and in its darkest coloring, as if to evoke only the negative side of his words, not their ironic truth. This reveals that truth is the central theme of the opera from this point on, as expressed in the title of this chapter, taken from the final sections of Schopenhauer’s treatise and echoed by Wagner in his description of his amendment.

Wagner developed the succession of three scenes that constitute the second act of Tristan from the three love episodes that appear in Gottfried’s Tristan between the drinking of the love potion and the lovers’ separation, binding them into an overarching day-night-day sequence. Of Gottfried’s three scenes Minne is prominent only in the lovers’ cave scene, where she is the focus of Gottfried’s quasi-religious allegories. Wagner moves her forward to the torch scene; toward the end, she leads Isolde to its goal: the extinguishing of the torch.

The most conspicuous common element in both Wagner’s programs is that the prelude represents the dynamic of desire arising almost from nothing and expanding toward a climactic point at which there is a relapse. Basically, the thematic material of the prelude falls into three main groups that, for convenience, may be designated as A, B, and C. The first is the desire music, the second the so-called glance motive, and the third the E major Sühnetrank or “drink of atonement” motive. The last of these themes is associated with the dualistic nature of the potion. That is, it mirrors the fact that the potion is understood in part as a love potion and in part as a death potion. As is well known, all three theme groups are closely interrelated in ways that suggest variation of the desire music.

This introductory chapter sets out the goals of the book, one of which is to outline the connection between music and philosophy in Wagner’s mind, describing how it led him to Schopenhauer and how, in turn, the discovery of Schopenhauer conditioned his reading of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan poem and the design of Tristan. It discusses Wagner’s conception of the three-act design of Tristan, showing that Wagner had a very specific musical analog of how “the beginnings of sexual love” could lead to the path to salvation—that is, he had devised a transformation of the music corresponding to Schopenhauer’s conception of desire (the beginning of the opera) that would directly parallel the lovers’ progression from desire to transfiguration.

Wagner articulates the belief of the mythological tradition of Gottfried scholarship that Tristan and Isolde are guiltless of adultery and deception by asserting the metaphysical underpinning of their love, his version of Gottfried’s world apart. The primary sequence of leitmotif interrelationships in Tristan—that which bonds the themes of desire, deception, death, honor, and transfiguration—proclaims that the lovers’ honor is redeemed by their deaths, their loyalty, and their love (Minne), which bonds the opposites of joy and sorrow, and life and death. Wagner intensifies the interrelatedness of desire, death, and honor in relation to Gottfried’s story by merging desire and death in the love potion, by elevating desire to the status of a metaphysical force, and by uniting desire and intrinsic honor as the path to salvation.

The two death motives in Tristan relate to two different perspectives on death as Wagner interpreted and “amended” Schopenhauer. The first, in act 1, is an extension of desire. Emerging from desire, it returns to desire just before Tristan’s death, its last appearance in the opera. The second, which arises at the onset of night in act 2, incorporates on its first appearance the set of Tristan chords that appear in the desire music’s three phrases.

By late 1854 Wagner’s conversion to Schopenhauer was a fait accompli. References to Schopenhauer began to appear in letters to Wagner’s friends, and continued over the following years. In a letter written to August Röckel in August 1856, just a year before he produced the prose draft of Tristan, Wagner explained that his reading of Schopenhauer had enabled him to become conscious of the difference between his conceptions and his artistic intuitions in the Ring. He now viewed even the three operas of the 1840s in Schopenhauerian terms. Feuerbach’s anthropocentrism had led Wagner away from romantic aesthetics and the search for the absolute in which his intuitions were deeply grounded, whereas the discovery of Schopenhauer represented a return to those aesthetics, but now within a more explicitly philosophical framework, and one that emphasized both the tragic character of existence and the possibility of redemption from that existence. Schopenhauer provided the exact blend of the poetic, philosophical, and metaphysical that Wagner had been seeking, along with the most substantial metaphysics of music of any modern philosopher. As the embodiment of his Schopenhauerian aesthetics, it was Tristan, more than the Ring, that Wagner viewed as the point of no return in his stylistic development.

Outstanding among the many creative artists on whom Schopenhauer exercised influence was the opera composer Richard Wagner (1813–83), who, rarely for a composer, was an intellectual and studied Schopenhauer's philosophy seriously. He was already composing operas in accordance with a published theory of his own, which involved treating all its constituent elements as of equal importance. Schopenhauer persuaded him to accept not only hitherto rejected metaphysical ideas but also the supremacy of music over the other arts. In response, Wagner composed works such as Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal whose libretti are pervaded with Schopenhauer's ideas and whose music dominates the opera. Although the first of these Schopenhauerian works, Tristan and Isolde, was published in 1859, and therefore before Schopenhauer's death in 1860, it is virtually certain that he never knew of its existence.

This chapter analyzes Chausson's opera, Le Roi Arthus. It argues that Le Roi Arthus was not Chausson's first artistic contact with an Arthurian subject. It then considers the Arthurian sources Chausson used for his opera.