Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883): Tristan und Isolde
You can love or loathe Richard Wagner. But you can never overstate his monumental influence. Few other western artists have left such a profound impression upon their age. He revolutionized operatic norms, opened up new realms of harmonic possibility and most strikingly, fused music, spectacle and poetry into a single art-form, better known by its German word, Gesamtkunstwerk. He created a cultural whirlwind that left few untouched. In the decades leading up to the First World War, he was a musical demi-god for countless young composers.
A man of forceful beliefs, at times not caring whom he offended, Wagner largely shaped his own story, one as compelling as any of his own operatic librettos. The steadfast and courageous idealism he took to his creative work was not always reflected in his personal habits. He did not like to be bored for any length of time, and in his younger years had a tendency to throw his cards in the air whenever life threatened to become too mundane. He lived all over Europe until he was well into middle age, moving from place to place and often creating self-inflicted calamities that necessitated quick, undignified exits.
A great man, certainly, but also a monster – feckless with money (and always expecting friends to bail him out), a serial philanderer and stealer of other men’s wives, and an influential propagator of late nineteenth century German anti-Semitism. The best one could say of Wagner’s problematic nature was that he seldom chose the easiest paths. It was perhaps why he took longer to establish himself than any of his contemporaries, enduring many humiliating setbacks along the way.
The lack of straightforwardness to Wagner’s personality might be partly explained by his less than straightforward childhood. There was, he complained, a lack of emotional warmth in his family growing up – even as he was spoiled by his mother Johanna. At the same time he lacked a father figure, having lost both his biological father and then stepfather by the age of eight.
The former, Carl Friedrich Wagner, a Leipzig police actuary, had died of cholera when the infant Richard was six months old. The latter, a Dresden-based actor and painter named Ludwig Geyer, who had married Richard’s mother Johanna in 1814, would pass away just as prematurely seven years later. But in that time, Ludwig managed to leave a lasting artistic imprint on his stepson: “the earliest recollections of my childhood are associated with my stepfather,” Richard later explained. Not least, Ludwig would often take him to the theatre in Dresden, outings that enchanted the young boy. Sometimes Ludwig would even arrange a minor role for him in certain productions. Hence on one occasion, Richard found himself dressing up as an angel “sewn up in tights with wings on my back, in a graceful pose which I had laboriously practiced.”
It was largely down to Ludwig’s influence that Richard’s first love would be not for music but for the theatre. By his teens, he was even writing his first tragic dramas (in the spirit of both Goethe and Shakespeare) – an excellent grounding for his eventual métier as librettist to his own operas.
For a time, Richard even took Ludwig’s surname, and only in his teens would he revert back to his biological father’s: perhaps the German meaning of Wagner, “one who dares”, seemed altogether more apposite. For better and for worse, he was not someone who was generally constrained by fear, while in later years he would prove himself to be an instinctive risk-taker.
He was also able to receive a decent enough education (largely through financial help from Ludwig’s relatives), but he was not a remarkable schoolboy. When starting at the Kreuzschule in Dresden aged nine, he cheerfully claimed he was “placed at the bottom of the lowest class.” He was also soon displaying the classic traits of a high-IQ student with a correspondingly low attention span: “what I really liked I was soon able to grasp without much effort,” he remembered, “whereas I hardly exerted myself at all in the study of subjects that were uncongenial.”
Even when he (finally) started having private piano lessons three years later, Wagner only wanted to learn just enough to be able to play duet arrangements of his favourite orchestral music – in this case the overtures of Carl Maria von Weber. He was not ever interested in theory for its own sake, preferring to delve deep into his innermost creative instincts when it came to writing his own music – an approach that would ultimately shape many of his most audacious experiments with German opera in the 1850s.
As for Weber, he was one of the first and most lasting influences on the budding composer, not least with the three ground-breaking operas he turned out at the end of his short life – Der Freischütz (1821), Euryanthe (1823), and Oberon (1826). With its magical, Teutonic medievalism, Freischütz has often been called the first romantic German opera, and for Wagner and others it challenged the predominant European fashions of the day for Italian and French comic opera. Here was a serious-minded piece of music that any German could be proud of– and in Wagner’s case, provide a creative starting point for something even loftier. As Wagner later put it, once he “learnt of the existence of our Weber’s music, and knew where lay my native land[,] I felt myself a German.” It was all the more exciting for the young boy when Weber himself turned up in Dresden to direct a performance of Freischütz: Wagner would sometimes see the great man walk past their house in the evening following a long day of rehearsals.
After his initial Weber craze, Wagner turned his attentions to Beethoven. Having heard a performance of the latter’s Seventh Symphony in A Major, he reported that “the effect on me was indescribable” – he would later famously describe the work as “the apotheosis of the dance”. Shortly afterwards he attended a performance of Mozart’s Requiem and from then on felt an increasing desire to write his own music.
But as Wagner the composer began to emerge (his first creative efforts appearing at the end of the 1820s), so did Wagner the spendthrift. He borrowed books from the local library on composition technique and orchestration and ran up hefty fines when he refused to take them back in time. He then got into further trouble by secretly taking organ lessons (without telling his mother) and arranging to put his lesson fees on a tab. He duly proved himself a nightmare student, not only in his eventual inability to reimburse his teacher, but also in the dire standard of his work. The former’s “teaching and exercises soon filled me with the greatest disgust,” he grumbled, “as to my mind it all seemed too dry. For me music was a spirit, a noble and mystic monster, and any attempt to regulate it seemed to lower it in my eyes.”
After a stern tête-à-tête with his mother (who also straightened out the debt), he took tuition on a more official basis from local composer and violinist, Christian Gottlieb Müller. But this proved scarcely more successful, at least in an academic sense, as Wagner continued his stubborn habit of rejecting any of the formal rules that came his way. By now he preferred to learn only what he thought he needed to learn, and in his own way, as he explained: “The dry study of harmony disgusted me more and more, though I continued to conceive fantasias, sonatas and overtures, and work them out myself.” He would study the scores of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber instead, and in the process of copying out whole symphonies acquire a decidedly neat handwriting (a useful asset for a future composer of huge scores). He was fascinated most of all by Beethoven’s recently composed Ninth Symphony – “the mystical goal of all my strange thoughts and desires about music” as he described it. No piano score yet existed of the work, so Wagner made his own. He would also have to wait until he was in Paris in the 1840s to hear what he felt was a genuinely coherent rendition of the work. Later he saw the symphony, with its then unprecedented introduction of vocal forces into the final “Ode To Joy” movement, as essential to his own creative development, commenting that it was “music crying out for redemption in poetry”.
By the time Wagner had enrolled at Leipzig University in 1830, his musical abilities had made such strides that he was able to turn out his first compositions of note – a Piano Sonata in B Flat Major and then a Symphony in C Major – even if both were still firmly under the influence of Beethoven. But his personal waywardness showed no signs of abating, his loud mouth sometimes getting him into conflict with other students, while he also developed a dangerous predilection for gambling. He would sometimes sit up all night “in the smaller gambling dens of Leipzig, where only the very scum of the students congregated.” One night he staked a private pension belonging to his mother and lost almost everything. He was just beginning to weigh up the consequences of his catastrophic stupidity, when as he later claimed, his luck miraculously changed. After a series of much more successful stakes, he was able to recoup his losses.
In 1833, he landed his first full-time adult job, as choirmaster at a theatre in Würzburg. Over the next fifteen years he would flit from job to job, finding work in various places (often opera houses) across Germany, France and even Russia, while also beginning to write his first operas. But it was also a struggle – he seldom earned enough money for his (already) expensive habits, and he began to be troubled by chronic debts. He also got hurriedly married to an actress named Christine Wilhelmine (“Minna”) Planer in his early twenties, and although the marriage would survive the next two decades, it was seldom a happy one. Wagner himself acknowledged that he and Minna were something of a mismatch, while Minna clearly hoped that her husband would forge a conventional livelihood as a composer of Parisian grand opera, even as Wagner was far from conventional and hated Parisian grand opera.
Their differences were soon apparent in other ways. While setting up home together, husband and wife quarreled endlessly about the furniture. Minna, the more practical of the two, argued that as her husband was a still near penniless artist, they should practice some economy. Richard, on the other hand, “was determined that the inauguration of a series of prosperous years which I saw before me must be celebrated by a correspondingly comfortable home.” Hence “furniture, household utensils, and all necessaries were obtained on credit, to be paid for by instalment.” Inevitably, his approach would end in disaster. Matters would particularly come to a head when the couple were living in Riga in the late 1830s and had managed to build up such disastrous debts that they were forced to flee the country.
Thereafter money was a constant struggle, even as from this time on Richard largely let his wife control the purse strings. Particularly grim was their three-year stay in Paris from 1839 to 1842. Here Wagner would write his first two mature operas: Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes) and Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), both of which owed something to French Grand Opera, but no-one wanted to employ him either as a composer or conductor, and he struggled to find work of any kind. At times he and Minna were reduced to the most abject poverty.
At a time when four of his close contemporaries, Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn were all flourishing in various European cities, Wagner was reduced to eking out a few francs from hack-work as well as making up tawdry operatic arrangements for a colourful but unreliable publisher named Maurice Schlesinger (Schlesinger would later serve as the model for Jacques Arnoux in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education).
Sometimes Wagner would spend whole days walking the streets of the French capital looking for contacts to petition for money, often returning home to his wife empty-handed. He even endured spells in a debtors’ prison.
One of the few bright spots of Paris was meeting composer Hector Berlioz and becoming better acquainted with his music. The latter would prove to be another important influence, with Wagner impressed as much by the Frenchman’s rule-breaking originality as his magnificent and innovative orchestration, the latter of which was “beyond anything I could have conceived. The fantastic daring, the sharp precision… I was simply all ears for things of which till then I had never dreamt, and which I felt must try to realise… I felt almost like a little school-boy by the side of Berlioz.” The two men further bonded over a shared love for Beethoven and Weber, as well as an abject disgust for the supposed banality of contemporary French music (even as Berlioz loved Paris too much to ever be able to leave his native country).
It was only when Wagner finally made an emotional return to his own native country (“for the first time I saw the Rhine—with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland”) that his career slowly started moving forwards again. Over the next three years, both Rienzi and Der Fliegende Holländer, as well as a third opera, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (Tannhäuser and the Minnesängers’ Contest at Wartburg) were all staged to an encouraging reception. Another major opera, Lohengrin (based like Tannhäuser on a medieval German legend) was completed not long afterwards and awaited its first performance.
Now living back in Dresden, he found gainful employment as Kapellmeister at the local opera house and his financial position slowly improved (though it took time: even during rehearsals for Rienzi, where he was being mooted as a rising star, Wagner could still not afford to buy his lunch). During this time he formed an important friendship with Franz Liszt, now based in nearby Weimar, with the well-connected, wealthy pianist-composer doing much to promote and financially support Wagner in the years ahead.
When things at last appeared to be moving in the right direction, Wagner found another way to poleaxe his career, this time by playing an active role in the (unsuccessful) Dresden uprising of May 1849. Already passionately involved in socialist, anti-government politics, he had been writing articles for the local Volksblätter (People’s Journal), basically inciting civilians to revolt. When the rebellion finally exploded into life, he turned his hand to making hand-grenades while acting as a look-out for government troops from the tower of Dresden cathedral.
Whatever their idealistic zeal, the rebels were ill-prepared and poorly armed, and were easily outmaneuvered when the government troops eventually showed up. While many were arrested many others fled, including Wagner himself, who was placed on a wanted list. Unable to return to Germany, he spent much of the next decade living in Zurich, once more without a steady job or income.
At first he suffered real privations in his exile, and it might have felt as if all the recent progress in his career had been lost. Too shell-shocked to compose, he decided it was time to take stock in other ways. “Soon after I had settled in Zurich,” he recalled, “I began to write down my various ideas about the things at which I had arrived through my private and artistic experiences, as well as through the influence of the political unrest of the day.” Over the next three years he would produce four lengthy pamphlets which served as an extended personal credo, showing the very best, but also some of the very worst sides to his personality.
In Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) and Oper Und Drama (Opera and Drama), he argued that modern art had sold “her soul and body to… Commerce”. Undeterred by his recent trauma in Dresden, he hoped that further revolutions across Europe could bring about a society akin to that of Ancient Greece, where stage-art had been created equally to challenge and instruct, as well as entertain. Now partly disowning his own ‘conventional’ past efforts such as Rienzi, Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, he laid out, for the first time, his more radical conception of a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), fusing “Dance, Tone [i.e. music] and Poetry”, and claiming that all three had been seamlessly united in ancient Greek drama.
It was only when Wagner decided to examine the so-called malaise in contemporary European music that his thinking went somewhat haywire. In a fourth pamphlet, ominously-entitled Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music), he found a way to blame the ever-growing commercialism of modern opera and the “unmanliness” of certain, conservative-minded composers, on influential Jewish musicians, and their innate lack of understanding of European culture. Among his German-Jewish targets were Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, the latter’s grand operas having taken Paris by storm over the previous two decades.
If there was something particularly personal behind Wagner’s attack on Meyerbeer (which he would only double down on in the years ahead), it may have been that Meyerbeer was probably the composer Minna had secretly hoped Wagner himself might be, even if the idea would have horrified her husband. As much as the struggling Wagner had envied Meyerbeer’s success, he knew he could never emulate his crowd-pleasing approach, nor what he scathingly referred to as his “rhythmic monotony and undue eclecticism, elevating contrived effect above genuine dramatic tension.”
Although over the course of Das Judenthum Wagner would make suggestions for integrating Jewish people better into European society (rather than excluding them), where they could then find “true emancipation”, most of the pamphlet is indefensible even by the most ardent Wagner apologists. Wagner gets personal all too often, portraying the Hebrew language and Jewish dress-sense as somehow repulsive, as well as comparing the ongoing Jewish destruction of European culture to maggots feasting on a dying body.
While he would surely have found a few like-minded supporters on today’s febrile social media, Wagner was genuinely surprised by the hostile reaction accorded to his antisemitic pamphlet. He soon complained that he was “being pursued by the entire press of Europe” before explaining this away, in classic bigot fashion, that “almost all the newspapers of Europe are in the hands of Jews.”
Even his staunchest friends, such as Franz Liszt, could only react with embarrassed silence to Das Judenthum. Liszt himself might have been further aggrieved, given how much he was doing to keep Wagner’s star shining in Germany. From his Weimar base, Liszt not only organised performances of Wagner’s music in his absence (such as the premiere of Lohengrin in 1850) but did everything possible to promote him – for example in having some of his work translated into French to allow it a wider circulation.
As Wagner later put it “Liszt contrived to attract the attention of intellects outside Weimar to the performances of my operas, in order, with kindly compulsion, to force them upon the notice of all who had ears to hear and eyes to see.” But Liszt could help his exiled friend in other ways: not least he could be a considerable artistic inspiration in his own right. Wagner would always react with a keen delight towards the bold modernism of Liszt’s mature compositions, and not least his daring harmonic experiments, which would arguably leave their mark on Wagner’s own later operas. Most significantly of all, it was Liszt who cajoled Wagner into writing music again, after a five-year silence. His long period of reflection now behind him, Wagner was ready to embark on one of his most important and intensive phases of composition.
Wagner had already signalled his intentions for his next grand project in a mini-autobiography from 1851 entitled Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (A Communication to My Friends). Aside from stating that he no longer intended to write operas, only music “dramas”, he also proposed to write a myth in three dramas (all based upon medieval German heroic legends) “preceded by a lengthy Prelude”, with the four works intended to be performed over four consecutive nights. Thus the beginnings of his gigantic Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) – also often known as The Ring Cycle – stumbled into life.
Wagner duly attacked his magnum opus with relish and had completed the first two Ring Cycle operas by 1856 – Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) and Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). In these Wagner continued his structural and harmonic innovations, throwing centuries-old operatic conventions overboard by largely eschewing the set piece recitatives, arias, duets and choruses, and allowing the music to evolve much more freely and organically. His new operas also further developed a device he had started to employ from Der Fliegende Holländer onwards, that is the use of musical ideas or “leitmotifs” (leading motives) to symbolize particular characters or narrative themes. Although leitmotifs were hardly unknown in pre-Wagnerian opera, Wagner would use them far more systematically than anyone before him, fully recognizing their psychological potential, as well as their unifying power across a long opera.
Wagner was a little way into writing a third opera, Siegfried, for his Ring Cycle when he suddenly broke off to start a completely different project. He had at this time become fascinated by the medieval chivalric romance, Tristan (as told by the 12th century poet Gottfried von Strassburg), a tragic tale of forbidden love between a Breton nobleman Tristan and an Irish princess Isolde, with the latter already betrothed to Marke, the king of Cornwall, also a close friend of Tristan’s.
Wagner immediately recognized a story ideal for a makeover in German romanticism. His own version would add considerable psychological depth to the original, fully exploring the erotic passion between Tristan and Isolde as well as their half-ecstatic, half-agonized realization that they can only be properly united in death. Above all, the poignant storyline inspired in Wagner a new type of music, of a kind that not even he had managed before.
The end result was one of his very finest achievements. Indeed, it would not be unfair to regard Tristan as a milestone in the history of western music, and not least with its striking subversion of long-accepted harmonic rules. Wagner’s hyper-chromatic language (evident from the work’s opening bars) abandons many of the traditional chord progressions we associate with tonal music, and instead introduces a new harmonic fluidity. The constant shifts of key, sometimes finding the most unlikely (and yet wonderfully effective) tonal links creates tension in the music that is both delicious and unsettling – perhaps entirely as Wagner intended. Even more striking, and original for its time, is the way in which the various harmonic progressions are rarely allowed to properly resolve. It is this that Arnold Schoenberg (a man who knew a thing or two about harmonic insurrection) would call the “phenomena of incredible adaptability and nonindependence roaming, homeless, among the spheres of keys…”
Harmony aside, the other striking feature of the work is a new sophistication in Wagner’s orchestration. Proving he was by now the equal of Berlioz, he uses the orchestra in endlessly effective combinations while time after time demonstrating a mastery of instrumental polyphony. The orchestral accompaniment is so continually inventive that it only makes one regret that Wagner stopped writing symphonies at such a young age: Whatever support Wagner wants to give to the singers, whatever idea or emotion he wants to accentuate at a given moment, he is always able to convey perfectly with his instrumental forces. In this way, Tristan sets a new bar for opera composers of the late nineteenth century and beyond.
This being Wagner, the creation of the monumental opera was of course a story in its own right. Despite craving a tranquil environment in which to work, Wagner was still extremely good at ensuing his life was anything but tranquil. The two years in which he wrote the work were a time of personal turbulence. Not only did he suffer from various health complaints – gastric problems, a painful carbuncle on his leg that made it difficult to walk – his personal life was also a mess, as he was at the time engaged in a secret relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck, a woman fifteen years his junior and the wife of one of his most loyal patrons.
Sometimes it was as if Wagner could only understand the emotional world of his operatic characters if he directly experienced them himself. He later reported that the process of writing Act III ofTristan (where Tristan, wounded in a fight, lies dying, but hoping in “one long ecstasy” to see Isolde a final time):
… wielded over me a strange, almost uncanny influence; for in the first scenes of this act it was made clear to me that in this opera, I had embodied the most daring and most exotic conception of all my writings. While I was at work on the great scene of Tristan, I found myself often asking whether I was not mad to want to give such work to a publisher to print for the theatre. And yet I could not have parted with a single accent in that tale of pain, although the whole thing tortured me to the last degree.
His own forbidden affair may have served as extra inspiration, but it was also to have disastrous consequences in the real world when it was eventually uncovered by his wife Minna. Recognizing their marriage was over, Wagner was forced – as he was so often in his life – to flee, in this case to Venice in order to finish the work. There he wrote the final pages while suffering from a bout of dysentery.
Although completed in 1859, Tristan would then wait a further six years for its first performance, as many theatres initially deemed it too demanding to be staged. It was finally premiered in Munich in 1865, conducted by Hans Von Bulow (a friend of Wagner and former pupil of Liszt) at a time when Wagner was engaged in a passionate tryst with Von Bulow’s wife Cosima. The opera was then performed in Weimar in 1874, and in Berlin (very much at the composer’s own volition) two years later. Its first performance at Bayreuth (where Wagner created his own purpose-built theatre in the 1870s) would not take place until after the composer’s death. In all, Wagner would get to hear his masterpiece just three times.
Given the work’s startling originality, it was perhaps unsurprising that not everyone liked it on a first hearing. The music critic Eduard Hanslick found it “repulsive… it repels a greater number than it fascinates.” For Clara Schumann (though she had her own personal misgivings about Wagner) it was “the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life”. For others there was something almost obscene about the opera and its all too suggestive music – “the glorification of sensual pleasure” according to the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (and not meant as a compliment).
But over time, the initially chilly reception would thaw. Giuseppe Verdi, a man who knew an operatic masterpiece when he saw one, quickly found himself in awe of the work. And despite eventually falling out with Wagner, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche never wavered in his belief that Tristan was the greatest artwork of any kind he had encountered in his life.
Perhaps Richard Strauss summed it up best when he called Tristan und Isolde “the end of all romanticism, as it brings into focus the longing of the entire 19th century.” But even as something about the work feels ultimately unanswerable, the ripples of its music would spread out far and wide across many decades – even to Richard Strauss’ own Four Last Songs, written almost ninety years later.
Having overcome many failures and humiliations, as well as his own self-destructive tendencies, Richard Wagner had finally nailed his colours to the mast, producing one of the greatest musical works of the nineteenth century. And he was not yet finished. Still in his mid-forties, he had another quarter of a century of composing in front of him – and a further four giant, ground-breaking operas to write.
A complete performance of Tristan und Isolde (with English subtitles) can be found here.