Aural Epiphany: Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner

Wagner is more than just a bad rep and dodgy fans. It also means a ravishing, ground-breaking opera about love.

by David Allen

Saturday 27th February 2010, 14:02 GMT

Edmund Blair Leighton's pre-Raphaelite painting "Tristan and Isolde"

When I mention Richard Wagner, you probably think of one other man: Adolf Hitler. This is unfortunate. I’m not going to deny that Wagner was an anti-Semite, or that many of his views were repugnant, but he was long dead decades before fascism had even been dreamt of. In fact, Wagner was for much of his life an anarchist: he spent years in exile after taking part in the failed 1849 revolution in Dresden. Most of his operas–especially his 16-hour, 4-night cycle, the ‘Ring’–are about the inability of humans to express themselves, and particularly their love, within capitalist society.

His greatest opera, I think, is ‘Tristan und Isolde’. Briefly, it tells the story of two lovers who can’t be together because society won’t let them. There’s another aspect, though. Wagner had a rather odd philosophy, which meant that, simply put, ‘Tristan’ is all about sex. Wagner thought that no couple could truly be together until they were dead, but they could come closest through simultaneous orgasm.

Wagner, then, had to invent some music to represent this partially-unrequited love. The first bars of the piece are known as the ‘Tristan chord’: the music doesn’t sound finished, even though it’s obviously the end of the phrase. The first notes of it ask a question (Tristan, say), and the second notes can’t answer it (Isolde). Here it is, in the prelude:

If you manage to get to about 7:20, you think the music is building up to a climax, but then Wagner conjures up a cataclysmic chord that makes it clear something’s gone wrong. He keeps using the Tristan chord for five long hours. Every time, he leaves it unresolved, as if Tristan and Isolde’s love will never be complete. Once, in the second act, he has the two lovers meet up at night. Wagner’s version of foreplay is a long Schopenhauerian debate about the merits of day and night, but eventually the two get down to the nitty-gritty. The music builds up once again, and again, just as you think everything’s going to resolve, a the spell is broken as they’re caught red-handed. In the final act, Wagner finally lets us off the hook. Isolde comes on stage, sings what’s known as the ‘love-death’, and the chord resolves. Tristan’s already dead, and she dies too: the lovers are finally together.

‘Tristan’ changed everything about music. It pushed tonality to the brink, setting up the rest of music history. If you’re ever lucky enough to hear all of it in an opera house, you come out feeling shattered. About seven years ago, when I started listening to classical music, I bought Carlos Kleiber’s recording of ‘Tristan’, based on precisely no research. As luck would have it, Kleiber turned out to be one of the greatest conductors ever to have lived. It gathered dust on my shelf for a bit, and I listened to a few chunks, but one day I decided to listen to it all. Now I’m obsessed with all things Wagnerian. On this particular recording, Margaret Price sings a ravishingly beautiful Isolde, though she never sang the role on stage, and Rene Kollo sings Tristan. But it’s Kleiber’s interpretation, quick and white-hot, that makes it special.

Kleiber knew he was brilliant; he conducted rarely, and charged massive fees. Once he was paid solely with a bespoke Audi. Recordings of him conducting are like golddust, and when an archive disc appears on sale classical collectors start doing all kinds of weird things. There is one priceless video of him conducting Tristan at Bayreuth, the opera house that Wagner himself built. It’s grainy, the tape is shoddy, and you look only at him. But Kleiber is completely possessed by the music, exuding radiance, and drawing astonishing playing from the orchestra. It’s the most exhilarating classical video I know. Here are the last few minutes, as Isolde dies on stage. The Tristan chord resolves at 4:39.