Chafe - The Tragic and the Ecstatic

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

Oxford Universitys objective of excellence

in research, scholarship, and education.

OxfordNew York

AucklandCape TownDar es SalaamHong KongKarachi

Kuala LumpurMadridMelbourneMexico CityNairobi

New DelhiShanghaiTaipeiToronto

With offices in

ArgentinaAustriaBrazilChileCzech RepublicFranceGreece

GuatemalaHungaryItalyJapanPolandPortugalSingapore

South KoreaSwitzerlandThailandTurkeyUkraineVietnam

Copyright 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chafe, Eric Thomas, 1946

The tragic and the ecstatic : the musical revolution of Wagners Tristan and Isolde / Eric Chafe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 9780195176476

ISBN 0195176472

1. Wagner, Richard, 18131883. Tristan und Isolde. 2. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 17881860

Views on music. 3. MusicPhilosophy and aesthetics. I. Title.

ML410.W14C432004

782.1dc222004007871

To my friend and colleague Martin Boykan

FOR MANY YEARS I have felt the need for a study of Tristan and Isolde that would do justice to the influence of Arthur Schopenhauers philosophy on its musicodramatic character and design. Many studies have dealt with the influence of Schopenhauer on Wagner in a general way, whereas others have made it their central theme. Some of these studies, most notably in English Bryan Magees The Philosophy of Schopenhauer and his Wagner and Philosophy, have greatly illuminated our understanding of the subject from the standpoint of Wagners biography, his philosophical interests in general, and the poetic text of Tristan and the operas that followed it in Wagners oeuvre. Bridging the gap between those investigations and the composition of the music has proven less tractable, however. I hope with this study to carry the torch further, even to lay a basis for understanding the processes by which extramusical ideas, philosophical and other, became the material of musical designs for Wagner.

I have been helped in this undertaking by many persons. Some have given me concrete assistance in the preparation of the manuscript or acquisition of source material. Among them are Ray Komow,Heather Shaw-Philips, Joseph Morgan, Rachel Cama, Annegret Klaua, Michael Hamad, Rick Beaudoin, Silvio dos Santos, and Katarina Markovi-Stokes. A few persons have given selflessly of their valuable time reading drafts of part or all of this book and making suggestions, most of which I have followed: William Youngren, Bonnie Gordon, and Elizabeth Joyce.Mr. Gnther Fischer and the staff of the Richard-Wagner Archive in Bayreuth gave every possible assistance to my study of the original sources on the spot and through photocopies. And the Brandeis University Mazer Fund for Faculty Research supported this project with grants that enabled me to meet some of the expenses.

I gratefully acknowledge permission from Penguin Books to cite excerpts from A. T. Hattos magnificent English prose translation of Gottfried von Strassburgs Tristan. Schott and Co., London, gave me permission to use a modified version of the 1906 London edition of Karl Klingworths piano-vocal score of Tristan for many of the musical examples (piano-vocal reduction by Karl Klingworth Schott). I have made corrections and adjustments to Klingworths score where it seemed necessary, as well as removing obvious pianistic elements. And the Richard Wagner Archive in Bayreuth gave me permission to reproduce the five photographs from Wagners compositional draft in the appendix. I am grateful to Gertrude Fttinger for her assistance in this regard.

Among those who have helped me out in very substantive ways relating to the content of the book itself, one person stands out, both for his depth of understanding of Tristan, Wagner, and music in general, and for the patience and generosity in listening and becoming involved in someones elses work that very few persons are willing to give. I am speaking of my friend and colleague of more than twenty years, composer Martin Boykan, who shared his profound musical understanding on occasions vastly too numerous even to remember. Marty has taught composition and analysis at Brandeis for well over forty years now; and there are a great many musicians across the country who will know what I am talking about. I have been unusually lucky to have such a resource close at hand, and dedicating this book to him is the best way I can think of to thank him.

IF THERE IS ONE SINGLE QUALITY of Wagners Tristan und Isolde that underlies its fascination for musicians, culture historians, and a substantial segment of the opera-loving public from its own time to the present, it is that, more than any other work in the Western musical canon, Tristan embodies a vision of human existence in which the tragic and the ecstatic are interwoven, a vision encompassing much that had formerly been the province of religion and that its author now proclaimed the domain of art. That vision drew Wagner to study myth and philosophy, literature and Eastern religion; and it enabled him to recognize qualities in Gottfried von Strassburgs Tristan und Isolt that reached across the centuries, bridging the two greatest eras in all of German literature. Once realized in the unique sound world that forms the Tristan style, it communicated itself to all around him, most notably the young Friedrich Nietzsche, and it spread rapidly through Europe and the Western world. By now its influence, direct or indirect, is incalculable.

Wagners vision is clear from the earliest reference to his plan to compose an opera on Tristan and Isolde, a letter to Franz Liszt of December 1854. This letter is also Wagners first announcement of his discovery of Schopenhauer:

I have now become exclusively preoccupied with a man whoalbeit only in literary formhas entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven. It is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose ideasas he himself puts ithe is the first person to think through to their logical conclusion. His principal idea, the final denial of the will to live, is of terrible seriousness, but it is uniquely redeemingI havefound a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night; it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreamsthe only redemption!.

But since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a Tristan and

A decade later Wagner maintained that he had always viewed Gottfrieds Tristan poem (which he had known since the 1840s) as innately tragic, adding, it was no doubt in part the earnest frame of mind produced by Schopenhauer, now demanding some rapturous expression of its fundamental traits, which gave me the idea for a