Wagner’s Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde”
Notes by TŌN horn player Lee Cyphers
In 1857, Richard Wagner was living in exile, deep in debt, hounded by creditors, and in a tumultuous marriage, partly due to his own infidelity. A friend, Otto Wesendonck, allowed Wagner and his wife Minna to stay on his estate in Zurich, where an emotional affair began between Wagner and Wesendonck’s wife Mathilde. It was around this time that Wagner paused his work on Siegfried, the third opera in his famous Ring of the Nibelung, to write Tristan und Isolde. Wagner’s longing for Mathilde, and the fact that their relationship was never consummated, likely inspired his opera about tragic, impossible love.
Beginning in the 1840s, Wagner’s operas set him apart from his French and Italian contemporaries by eschewing clichéd storylines and traditional aria forms. Instead, he developed his technique of using leitmotifs to represent the action onstage, weaving the opera together in a structure of continuous music. The Ring of the Nibelung is a maximalist epic, and the cycle uses many leitmotifs to represent the Valkyries, Nothung the sword, the Rhine River, and other aspects of the sprawling plot.
In Tristan, the plot is simplified and abstracted; everything revolves around two characters who love each other and cannot be together. This is reflected musically, as the opera centers around the very first chord of the prelude, dubbed the “Tristan chord” because of its uniquely ambiguous harmony. Two chromatic lines pull away from each other in a dissonance that evades and displaces resolution, illustrating the main characters’ yearning for each other as they are wrested apart by fate. The tension continues to ratchet up throughout the four-hour opera until the final scene, Isolde’s Liebestod, a combination of the German words for “love” and “death.” Only when Isolde collapses atop Tristan’s lifeless body does the orchestra deliver the long-awaited B-major chord. The music is the story just as much as the text, and the listener, just like Wagner’s star-crossed lovers, is gripped by a burning passion that rages for the entire opera. Tristan and Isolde can only be together in death, and this makes their love tortured but perfect, unsullied by lived reality. Our two leads do not have to suffer the indignity of getting what they want.