Souvenir of Tristan und Isolde
Here it is, the middle of Sunday afternoon, and I haven't even begun to write my Book Review review. I'm still shaking the music out of my ears. Yesterday's round of housecleaning was accompanied by a recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde that I didn't know well. On it, Daniel Barneboim leads the Berlin Philharmonic, with Siegfried Jerusalem and Waltraud Meier in the title roles. The recording was made in 1994, when Mr Jerusalem could still sing the part. Ms Meier is still singing Isolde, and as far as I'm concerned she owns the role. When she and Mr Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took part in a concert performance in Carnegie Hall a few years ago, I was blasted off to a new plane of music appreciation. If I hadn't listened to the Barenboim recording, it was because I preferred to watch the DVD from Munich (in a regrettably whimsical staging by Peter Konwitschny), with Jon Fredric West, Kurt Moll, and Marjana Lipovšek. Ms Lipovšek, another favorite voice, also appears on the Teldec CD.
I heard all sorts of things that I'd never heard before. Such as the hurricane of violas behind Isolde's mounting ecstasy in the first scene of Act II,
Die im Busen mir die Glut entfacht,
die mir das Herze brennen macht,
die mir als Tag der Seele lacht...
And I kept hearing Rufus Wainwright's "Memphis Skyline," the scoring of which now strikes me as patently adapted from this opera.
Ordinarily, I write up the operas that I listen to on Saturday afternoons as operas, at Good For You, and not as experiences, as I'm doing here, but Tristan still overpowers my critical faculties. It remains the most surprising work of art in Western history, almost unimaginable before its creation and still mighty startling. The better I know it, the less I understand it; the more simply miraculous it becomes. Richard Wagner seems so unlikely a character to have created Tristan that I am tempted to attribute it to divine intervention. It is both the supreme product of its age and the antidote to its repressions. As a work for the stage, it is hieratic rather than dramatic; all the excitement has been sealed into the score, which thrills as it unwinds no matter what's going on onstage. Even more than the great Ring cycle, Tristan has the force and heft and even the menace of myth.
I haven't yet figured out how to make Tristan und Isolde sound appealing and accessible to the uninitiated. From the outside, it is long and dark. The action is glacial. The singers sound melancholy, distressed, or angry - never was an opera so free of genuine good humor. Why on earth, you might ask, spend time in such depressing company? And I think that the opera will strike most listeners as depressing at first. It takes a while to sense that, just beyond the brown scrim of "opera," Wagner has seized every romantic yearning ever conceived, drained it of all thoughtlessness and frivolity, and fused it into a shimmering, iridescent rainbow that from time to time bursts open, like a cosmic nova, in a sublime ecstasy that has nothing to do with potions and lovers and everything to do with concentrated musical pleasure.
Comments
I'll have to get a hold of this recording, for since owning an LP in college I've never replaced it in my CD collection. Frankly, I've been afraid to choose an interpretation because it's so huge and the wrong voice or a lead foot from the conductor might render it unlistenable. T&O is in the same category for me, in terms of sheer emotion, as Elektra. One needs to mop oneself afterward. I actually took an entire course in college on Tristan. Besides a prodigious Schenker analysis, I remember reading alongside the libretto Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." Indeed! The professor was John Sessions.
Posted by: Susan | December 12, 2005 07:04 AM
Coincidentally, I listened to the third Act on Thursday; a in-house tape of an extraordinary peformance given in January 1974 --- the only one in which Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers, the two reigning dramatic voices of their time, sang the role together at the Met.
The work intoxicates me; it draws me in and at times I push it away as if it were poisonous. The end of the second act literally scares me, the horns blaring betrayal and death.
I think you've hit the proverbial nail on the head in your comment, RJ, about 'concentrated musical pleasure.' It exhausts me while making me crazy and energizing me and never leaves me without my wondering how any human being could have composed this endlessly fascinating work.
I still prefer the Bayreuth 1966 classic with Bohm conducting Nilsson and Windgassen; they sang it together 95 times and you can tell it in their mastery of the roles.
Posted by: PPOQ | December 12, 2005 07:22 AM
Even the 'uninitiated' can fall under its spell.
As I was unpacking my car at Tulane many eons ago, a kid complimented me on my stereo (KLH--anyone remember those marvelous sets?) and came by a few nights later to hear it. He was a freshman, in a rock band. I had just put the needle on the Prelude to Act I and 4 hours later he was still sitting there, but weeping profusely....he said he had never heard anything like it.... he left after his first semester so I don't know if he continued to explore other music but I will never forget how he looked that night, all done in by the Wagner magic and by his own imagination.
Posted by: PPOQ | December 12, 2005 07:59 AM