Death-Devoted Heart: sex and the sacred in Wagner's
Tristan and Isolde
Roger Scruton Oxford University Press, 246pp, £17.99
ISBN 0826473350
The Wagner scholar Michael Tanner described Tristan und Isolde as one of "the two greatest religious works of art of our culture". The comment might seem puzzling. Divine intervention, religious rituals and direct mentions of God are all absent from the opera. Instead it offers us forbidden love, betrayal and extremely erotic music. Yet Roger Scruton, in this highly detailed study of the work, argues strongly that it is "one of Wagner's majestic attempts to articulate the idea of redemption in artistic and dramatic form".
Scruton's thesis is that Wagner's agenda was the redemption of mankind. Early in his career, standing at the Dresden barricades in 1849, he looked to utopian revolutionary politics to achieve it. In greater maturity, the composer accepted that the yearning for redemption is basically religious.
While Wagner practised no religion, he was intensely interested in man's craving for spirituality. He studied Christianity and Buddhism, and sketched out an opera covering the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But he found the promises of rewards in an afterlife unconvincing. He therefore set out to discover a redemption that required no God.
Redemption through selfless sacrifice is a recurring theme in his operas. Scruton offers us two models. Hans Sachs renounces his claims to happiness with Eva in Die Meistersinger and instead helps the younger Walther to win the girl. Parsifal, through abstinence and physical hardship, redeems the sin of Amfortas, which has disgraced the knights of the Grail. Both are heroes of compassion. They forgo their desires for the sake of others, and thereby renew the social order.
But Wagner's heroes of erotic love exist outside the social order, in a state of exalted solitude. In the Ring cycle, Siegfried and Brunnhilde enjoy a perfect love but lose it because he forgets her existence. They die separately, but she follows Siegfried into the funeral pyre so that together their deaths can purge the world of all the wrongdoing that has followed from the theft of the Rhine maidens' gold.
Scruton persuades us that there is no finer example of Wagner's concept of redemption than the death chosen by Tristan and Isolde. It occurs when they find together the love that meets their inner needs, and the perfection of that love carries them to extinction. Tristan chooses death and invites Isolde to follow. Badly wounded, he is transported to a distant shore. There he is unable to die until she joins him. The love that at one level appears futile - because they cannot marry or love openly - on the contrary provides the supreme vindication of their existence. Their erotic passion cannot be subdued by the conventions of society. It is more important than death and they urge death as proof of that. They regard the confrontation with death as a sacred moment. Isolde undergoes a transfiguration, borne to her death on the sweet vapours into which Tristan, she imagines, has been metamorphosed.
Wagner was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer when he wrote Tristan. To the philosopher, the lovers' choice of death over life would make perfect sense, because he believed individual human existence is a "mistake", a miserable but temporary state that separates us from the "Will", which is the idea underlying all things.
You may have deduced that Scruton's book is not an easy read, and it is certainly not an "introduction" to Wagner's masterpiece. Scruton supplies answers to important questions: what is the opera about, what are the story's antecedents and how does religion come into it? He also offers a staggeringly comprehensive guide to the music. Wagner was delighted by Schopenhauer's belief that music has a unique place in human achievement. Tristan und Isolde is Wagner's most ambitious attempt to present a drama that unfolds entirely through the inner feelings of the characters, expressed by the music. The words hint at the feelings of the characters, but we can only really understand them through the music.
Scruton enables us to glimpse the breathtaking genius of Wagner's work. To hear Tristan und Isolde without fully understanding the music may still allow us, as Wagner intended, to enter the feelings of the lovers. But Scruton's superb analysis of how the music impacts upon the listener opens our eyes to the scale of Wagner's ambition and achievement.
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