The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Richard Wagner · a Handlung in three acts, WWV 90, words and music by Wagner, to his own poem in German after Gottfried von Strassburg · nine solo roles and a chorus of men · about four hours in performance
Mode
Handlung, an action in three acts; music drama without numbers, in which the orchestra carries the drama and the stage hardly moves
Mythos
Tristan and Isolde: the healer who knows her enemy by his wound, the drink, the torch put out, the ship watched for; death as the love’s consummation, which this work named Liebestod
Phase
Three situations: a ship by day, a garden by night, a dead shore by day; an A minor never confirmed, a cadence cut off in Act II and completed in B major on the last page
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in three acts setting Wagner’s own German poem, through-composed, with a chorus of men in Act I and briefly in Act III
Register
From a sailor’s unaccompanied song and the shouts for a king to a forty-minute duet on Night and Day, a delirium in two waves and a transfiguration
Scale
Two consciousnesses and a court; one drink, one torch, one wound, three ships; about four hours
Governing Proposition
Two people who were given a death-drink and drank love instead spend a night arguing that the Day which divides them is the lie and the Night which joins them is the truth, and are found out at dawn; he tears open his wound at her coming, and she sings herself to death over his body. The wager of the work is that desire is a suspension no object resolves, and that a music can withhold its cadence for four hours and grant it once, when both are dead.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with a phrase that does not finish. The Prelude is marked Langsam und schmachtend, slow and languishing, and is written without a key signature, nominally in A minor. In the first bar the cellos are alone: A rises a minor sixth to F, and F falls a semitone to E. On the F the winds enter, bottom to top, with F, B, D sharp and G sharp. That is the Tristan chord. The oboe’s G sharp climbs by semitones to B while the bass F falls to E and the D sharp to D, so that the third bar arrives on a dominant seventh on E, the dominant of A minor. The tonic does not follow. There is a silence.
There is nothing new in the four notes. Respelled, they are an ordinary seventh chord on the second degree of E flat minor. What is new is that no key claims them. Read as a half-diminished seventh they belong to one key; read as an augmented sixth, with the G sharp an appoggiatura, they belong to another; and the dominant seventh they move to is itself a dissonance that resolves to nothing. Two of the four notes are already in that chord, and every line that moves, moves by a semitone. The phrase is stated three times, rising each time, each statement ending on a dominant that no tonic answers. The Prelude climbs by sequence to one climax, falls away from it, and sinks back to the cellos’ falling figure. It does not close.
The harmonic argument of the whole work is this chord’s argument at full length: motion by semitone and suspension; cadences evaded, elided or interrupted; dominants that find no tonic; a resolution withheld across four hours and granted once, in B major, on the last page. What the chord is has been disputed since Wagner’s lifetime, and the dispute has not closed. In the theatre the Prelude passes without a break to a young sailor’s voice, unaccompanied, from the mast: “Westwärts / schweift der Blick; / ostwärts / streicht das Schiff.”
“Westward the gaze strays; eastward the ship runs.” And then: “Frisch weht der Wind / der Heimat zu: / mein irisch Kind, / wo weilest du?”
“Fresh blows the wind toward home: my Irish child, where do you tarry?” Eliot took the four lines whole into The Waste Land.
Movement II
Act I is day, on the deck of Tristan’s ship, which carries Isolde from Ireland to Cornwall as the bride of King Marke, to end a war. Isolde, who has heard the sailor’s song as mockery, rages, and then tells Brangäne what the audience must know. A wounded stranger calling himself Tantris came to her to be healed, and she healed him; she found a notch in his sword, and matched to it the splinter of steel taken from the skull of Morold, her betrothed, whom Tristan had killed. She raised the sword over him. He looked at her, and she let it fall. “Mir erkoren, / mir verloren”
“Chosen for me, lost to me”, she sings of him now, high and whole, bold and craven, death-devoted head, death-devoted heart.
She orders a death-drink for them both, and Brangäne substitutes another. The turn of the act has no words. Tristan drinks, Isolde takes the cup from him and drinks, and the orchestra takes up the Prelude while the two stand and look at each other. When they speak it is to ask what they had been dreaming of, he of Tristan’s honour, she of Isolde’s shame. Nothing has happened that the first two bars had not already said. What the drink does is remove the pretext for not saying it, and the work will later have Tristan admit that the drink was never the cause.
Then the ship lands, and the Day breaks in with the full orchestra. The sailors shout for King Marke, and the act ends in C major, A minor’s relative major, with trumpets and cymbals. Tristan, told that he is at the shore, asks “Welcher König?”
“Which king?” It is the first of the work’s three ships and the first of its interruptions. The outward action of the whole evening is this: a drink, a torch, a wound and three ships. Everything else happens in the orchestra, which has been given the drama to carry, and in two people’s minds.
Movement III
Act II is a summer night, in a garden before Isolde’s chamber in Marke’s castle, with a torch burning at the door. The hunt departs, and its horns recede off stage until Isolde, who wants them gone, hears them as leaves and a brook. Brangäne warns her of Melot and begs her to leave the torch burning; Isolde puts it out. What follows is a love duet of some forty minutes that is a metaphysical dispute sung together. The lovers curse the treacherous Day, the order that kept them apart, and call on the Night, in which there is no Tristan and no Isolde. The poem argues in words what the harmony, suspended since the first bar, is already doing.
“O sink hernieder, / Nacht der Liebe”
“O sink down, night of love”: the duet’s centre, in A flat major, the one key foreign to the Prelude’s scale. Over it, from the tower, Brangäne keeps watch, one voice floated above the two: “Einsam wachend / in der Nacht”
“Lonely, watching in the night”, and then “Habet acht! / Habet acht! / Bald entweicht die Nacht”
“Take heed! Take heed! Soon the night escapes.” Then “So stürben wir, / um ungetrennt”
“So might we die, to be undivided”, and the exchange of names: “Tristan du, / ich Isolde, / nicht mehr Tristan! / Du Isolde, / Tristan ich, / nicht mehr Isolde!”
“You Tristan, I Isolde, no longer Tristan! You Isolde, I Tristan, no longer Isolde!” The music climbs toward a cadence, and reaches for it.
It does not arrive. Brangäne screams, Kurwenal cries to Tristan to save himself, and the Day breaks in as an interrupted cadence: Marke, Melot and the court, at dawn. Marke does not rage. He asks, at length, with the bass clarinet under him, whether Tristan really did this, and how he could do it to him, and ends on the question the work will not answer: who will make the deep and secret ground of it known to the world? Tristan answers that he cannot tell him, and that what Marke asks he can never learn. Then he asks Isolde whether she will follow him where he now goes, turns on Melot, and lets his guard drop onto Melot’s sword. The act ends on his fall, and the cadence stays open.
Movement IV
Act III is day again, on a dead shore: the courtyard of Tristan’s ruined castle Kareol in Brittany, where Kurwenal has brought him, and a shepherd watching the empty sea for Isolde’s ship. Then the cor anglais alone, the shepherd’s old tune, and his report: “Öd’ und leer das Meer!”
“Waste and empty, the sea!” Tristan wakes to the tune and asks what it wakes him for. He has been, he says, where he has always been and where he is always going, in the wide realm of the world’s night, and Isolde is still in the realm of the sun. The doctrine of Act II is now tested in daylight, by a man who is dying of it.
The delirium runs in two waves, and the shepherd’s tune marks each return of the fever. In daylight longing is only pain: “Sehnen! Sehnen! / Im Sterben mich zu sehnen, / vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben!”
“Longing! Longing! In dying, to long; from longing, not to die!” At the second wave’s height he curses the drink and whoever brewed it, and then makes the work’s central admission: “ich selbst, ich selbst, / ich hab’ ihn gebraut!”
“I myself, I myself, I brewed it!” The drink caused nothing. Then the vision of her walking, blessed, across the fields of the sea, and the tune changes: the ship is sighted, and Kurwenal shouts that Isolde is coming.
Tristan tears the bandage from his wound to meet her. “Wie, hör’ ich das Licht? / Die Leuchte, ha! / Die Leuchte verlischt! / Zu ihr! Zu ihr!”
“What, do I hear the light? The torch, ah! The torch goes out! To her! To her!” He dies at her feet with her name. A second ship brings Marke; Kurwenal kills Melot and is killed; Marke’s pardon comes too late for anyone it was meant for. Three ships, a drink, a torch, a wound: the action is complete, and the music is not.
Movement V
Isolde sings over his body. “Mild und leise / wie er lächelt, / wie das Auge / hold er öffnet”
“Mildly and softly how he smiles, how sweetly he opens his eye”: she sees him alive, and asks the people round her, “Seht ihr’s, Freunde?”
“Do you see it, friends?” They see a corpse. The music is the duet’s “So stürben wir” passage, the music the discovery cut off in Act II, now carried through to the cadence that was denied it. The last words are “in des Welt-Atems / wehendem All, / ertrinken, / versinken, / unbewußt, / höchste Lust!”
“in the world-breath’s blowing all, to drown, to sink, unconscious, highest bliss!” The work ends in B major, and it is the first page in four hours on which the harmony comes to rest.
Wagner wrote the poem in Zurich in 1857, after reading Schopenhauer in 1854 and after breaking off the Ring in the second act of Siegfried; he had written to Liszt in December 1854 that he meant to make a Tristan. The music was composed from the autumn of 1857 to August 1859, Act I in Zurich, Act II in Venice, Act III in Lucerne. The opera was found unperformable: Vienna rehearsed it and gave it up, and it waited six years for a king, Ludwig II of Bavaria. It was first performed at the Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater in Munich on 10 June 1865, Hans von Bülow conducting, with Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld as Tristan and his wife Malvina as Isolde. Schnorr died in July, within six weeks of the first night.
Bayreuth staged it in 1886. Nietzsche had built part of Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872) on its third act; Thomas Mann named a novella after it in 1903, the year Mahler and Alfred Roller staged it in Vienna; Debussy quoted the Prelude’s opening in “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” (1908) and Berg in the Lyrische Suite (1926); Eliot set the sailor’s song and the shepherd’s line into The Waste Land (1922). Furtwängler recorded it with Flagstad in 1952, Böhm at Bayreuth in 1966 in Wieland Wagner’s staging, Kleiber in 1980–82; Ponnelle at Bayreuth in 1981 made Isolde’s arrival Tristan’s dying hallucination, and von Trier scored Melancholia (2011) with the Prelude throughout. What the work shows has outlasted the metaphysics it borrowed: a desire that no object resolves, held in a music that resolves once, when there is no one left to want.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance at every scale. Outwardly a drink, a torch, a wound and three ships are the whole action. Musically the work grows from the Prelude’s first two bars, and the deferral begun there is not discharged until the last page, so no act can end sooner than it does. Act III’s delirium runs in two waves, and the second, the curse on the drink, is the fever’s return. The test still finds give. Marke’s monologue states the Day’s claim at a length the drama has made plain, the lovers’ dispute on Day and Night argues in words what the harmony is doing, and theatres cut both for a century. On the music alone, two tenths higher.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: desire is the ground of the self, and what it wants is not the beloved but the end of the division that makes a beloved possible. “Tristan du, / ich Isolde, / nicht mehr Tristan!”
“You Tristan, I Isolde, no longer Tristan!” The drink is a pretext, and in Act III Tristan says so: I myself, I brewed it. The private absolute cannot be told: Marke’s question, who will make its ground known to the world, is never answered, and Isolde’s last vision is sung to people who see a corpse. Held below the top because the Night metaphysics is asserted as much as shown, part of it is Schopenhauer’s, and the social world disclosed is thin.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height and frequency are both at the ceiling. The Prelude. The drink, the Prelude returning while the two stand and look. “O sink hernieder, / Nacht der Liebe”
“O sink down, night of love”. Brangäne’s watch from the tower, one voice floated over the duet. The climax cut off by a scream. The Act III prelude over a dead sea; the cor anglais alone; Tristan asking whether he hears the light; “Mild und leise”. The terror is as high as the beauty: Isolde’s curse in Act I, the delirium’s second wave, the bandage torn off. Off the top because Marke’s monologue, Kurwenal’s cheer and the Act I exposition are ground level by design, and the elevation is of one colour.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The story was already myth, told by Béroul, Thomas, Gottfried and Malory. This work builds it again and changes what it bears. Wagner removes Isolde of the White Hands, the black and white sail and the chivalric middle, and keeps the archetypal: the healer who knows her enemy by his wound, the drink, the torch put out, the ship watched for. He adds what Gottfried did not have, Night and Day as two orders of being and death as the love’s consummation, so that Liebestod names a myth because of this work. The particular stays particular: the splinter matched to the notch; “Öd’ und leer das Meer!”
“Waste and empty, the sea!” Held below the top because the lovers thin toward allegory in Act II, and the myth was inherited.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The inheritance is German Romantic and French grand opera, and Wagner’s own Ring, broken off in Siegfried in 1857 to write this. The departures: a harmony in which the tonic is withheld across a whole evening and dissonance is the normal state; no numbers, no recitative, no chorus after Act I, the “endless melody” he named in 1860; an action cut to three situations; a love duet of some forty minutes that is a metaphysical dispute sung together, which his own Oper und Drama (1851) had ruled out. The stake was total: Vienna rehearsed it and gave it up, it waited six years for a king, and its first Tristan was dead within six weeks. Held below the top by its road: Liszt’s chromaticism, Lohengrin’s prelude, Rheingold’s continuous form.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses everything it knows, because what it knows is harmonic. Its claim is that desire is a suspension no object resolves, and the music is a suspension no cadence resolves until both lovers are dead. As a play the claim becomes a speech; as a number opera every cadence refutes it. In Act II the duet reaches for its cadence and is cut off by Brangäne’s scream and Kurwenal’s “Rette dich, Tristan!”
“Save yourself, Tristan!”: the Day breaks in as an interrupted cadence. In Act III Isolde completes that music, and that cadence, over his body. Held off the top where the poem doubles the music: the Day and Night dispute says as doctrine what the harmony knows, and Marke narrates what the audience has watched.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and 160 years of return that has not slowed. Nietzsche built part of Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872) on Act III. The Tristan chord was read by Schoenberg (1911), Kurth (1920) and Lorenz (1926); Kerman (1956), Bailey’s Norton score of the Prelude and Transfiguration (1985) and Chafe (2005) follow. Productions reread it: Roller (1903), Wieland Wagner (1962), Ponnelle (1981), Sellars and Viola (2005). The work stays open: whether the ending is transfiguration or delusion; whether Act III’s curse repudiates Act II; whether the drink causes anything; what the chord is; whether Marke is the work’s conscience or its casualty. Performance is unsettled too: the cuts, the tempi, a role that defeats most tenors.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work reorganised what harmony could be, by making unresolved dissonance a four-hour norm, and what opera could be, by making the orchestra the stage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is immediate and continuous. Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, Chausson, Franck, Scriabin and Elgar wrote inside its harmony; Debussy fled it in Pelléas and parodied it in 1908; Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and the emancipation of the dissonance descend from it; Berg quoted it in the Lyrische Suite. Beyond music: Nietzsche, Mann, D’Annunzio, Eliot, de Rougemont, von Trier. Discounted because part of the reach is shared with the Ring and Parsifal, and because it ran through art and letters rather than civic life.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated, with no discount for age: in the repertory since its first decade, at Bayreuth since 1886 and at every major house, recorded complete since the 1930s. It has outlived its first metaphysics, Nietzsche’s recantation, modernism’s rejection of Wagner, the Nazi use of Bayreuth and the post-war stage’s stripping of its romanticism; it absorbed Wieland Wagner’s bare stage and Ponnelle’s inversion without loss. The surface fixed to its moment: the Schopenhauerian vocabulary of the Day and Night dispute; the archaising diction of the poem; a vocal demand, above all for Tristan, that each age meets rarely; and a “Liebestod” partly detached from the whole as a concert piece. 160 years, continuous, with a casting cost that is real.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The making bears weight throughout: a voice-leading that moves by semitone through four hours; an orchestration that saves its colours, the horns receding off stage until Isolde hears them as leaves and a brook, the cor anglais alone over an empty stage; a motivic economy by which two bars become four hours; a long-range plan from an A minor never confirmed to the B major of the last page; voice writing that is punishing and singable. The costs are in the poem. The Day and Night dispute heaps antithesis on abstraction until the words resist setting; the expository verse is stiff; the alliteration can turn mannered; and the Act III Tristan sits at the limit of what a voice can do over this orchestra. On the music alone, three tenths higher.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the sailors’ C major shouts that end Act I, and Isolde’s “unbewußt, / höchste Lust!”
“unconscious, highest bliss!” in B major. One law governs them. Every diatonic, square, loud thing in the work is Day, and every chromatic, suspended thing is Night; the law is their opposition, and it holds from the first scene’s song against Isolde’s silence to the last ship against the transfiguration. The frame of C, A flat and B is one argument. The strain is Marke’s monologue, which gives the Day a music of such sympathy that some hear a second law. The range is narrower than the Ninth’s, with no comedy and no crowd after Act I, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, Acts II and III; eros and death, as one order; the feudal order, in tribute and vendetta, a marriage of state to end a war, vassalage and honour, “Tristans Ehre, / höchste Treu’!”
“Tristan’s honour, highest troth!”; kinship, in a father dead before Tristan’s birth and a mother dead in bearing him; the natural order, the sea, the night garden, the barren shore; service, in Brangäne, Kurwenal and the shepherd; the sacred, in negative, as Night. Act I’s politics make the drink necessary, and Act II’s discovery is a feudal breach before it is a marital one. What holds the axis here is absence: labour, history, the city, the family as lived, comedy and any crowd after Act I. Everything routes through two consciousnesses.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, with The Swerve at 9.6. Elevation from the Prelude to the transfiguration; a form in which the withheld cadence is the knowledge; 160 years of return still unsettled on what the chord is and what the ending means; and a redirection of harmony and of opera, from Wolf and Mahler to Schoenberg and Berg, made by a swerve that was found unperformable and whose first Tristan was dead within six weeks.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.5: the feudal order, kinship, nature, service and the sacred are held and integrated, but labour, history, the city, comedy and any crowd after Act I are absent, and everything routes through two consciousnesses. Next above it, The Inevitable at 9.1, held by the poem’s expository lengths, Marke’s monologue and the dispute on Day and Night, which theatres cut for a century.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.7, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, The Swerve at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.4 and The Unconcealment at 9.2 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 9.1, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score and poem of Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The work is scored complete and uncut, in the one version Wagner left; the theatre cuts once standard are evidence under necessity, not the object, and the concert Vorspiel und Liebestod is an excerpt and is not scored. Words and music are scored together, on Wagner’s German as he set it. German is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, and only the best known of them; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and is not charged to the work. The interval content of the Prelude’s opening, the chord’s pitch classes and the key frame were checked by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the bar count of the Prelude, the scene count, the Munich cast beyond the two principals and the running time as a measurement, are not given; the running time is a range across the recorded tradition. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.