Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" Part 11

One pa.s.sage may be noted for its interesting modulations, the alternating duet with the words "_Barg im Busen uns sich die Sonne_." It is in phrases of three bars in rising semitones, A flat--A natural--A natural--B flat, ending in the beautiful strain No.

13 as they fall asleep in one another's arms.

We have now in Brangane's watch-song, and the instrumental nocturne that accompanies it, reached the highest point of the musical expression, not of the Tristan drama alone, but of all music since Palestrina. Before such music silence is the only thing possible. It scoffs at our words; it is not of this earth. Many will now prefer to draw the veil, to pa.s.s over the little that I have to say, and resign themselves to the aesthetic impression. For those who feel curiosity to know the mechanism by which its wondrous effect is brought about, I will a.n.a.lyse the instrumentation. The thematic material employed is very slight; only here and there a motive from the preceding is indicated as if in a dream.

The syncopated pulsations are resumed in one-half the full number of strings muted, and continue to the end, as do the broken chords of the harp. The wood-wind generally sustain soft chords, clarinet, oboe, flute, and horn succeeding each other with the sighs from No. 12.

[Music]

Brangane's voice on the watch-tower behind the scene enters at once in 3-2 rhythm against 3-4 in the orchestra. At bar 11 (counting from first entry of the harp) four pairs of unmuted violins detach themselves from the body of the strings, and play a quartet independently, with free polyphonic imitation, afterwards joined by soli violin, viola, and 'cello, in such close score and intercrossing as to make the whole resemble a very closely woven pattern of exquisite beauty, but of which the single threads are hardly distinguishable.[42] Half the violas, joined later by half the 'cellos, maintain an accompaniment of broken chords. They are the voices of the night through which are heard the long-sustained notes of Brangane's watch-song, wood instruments here and there uttering motives like pa.s.sing dreams from the lovers' melodies:

Realms where the air we breathe is love, Which in the winds on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.

[Footnote 42: For the independent string parts, see the Appendix.]

At the end three trombones enter, sustaining slow chords. The whole body of the strings, now united, soar once more and subside to rest.

The dialogue which follows is the most difficult in the whole work. It will be necessary to take it sentence by sentence. Tristan, as the cooler and more self-possessed of the two, sees more clearly than Isolde whither they are tending. He has sunk into a state of almost complete oblivion, from which Isolde wishes to rouse him. He replies (139'1(6)): "Let me die, never to awake." Isolde, scarcely yet realizing that this is indeed the only possible ending, asks (139'4): "Must then daylight and death together end our love?" He replies: "Our love? How can death ever destroy that? Were mighty death standing before me threatening body and life--that life which so gladly I resign to my love--how could its stroke reach our love? Were I to die for that [love] for which I gladly would die, yet that love itself is immortal and cannot end with me. So Tristan is himself immortal through his love." Now (141'3(8)) she grasps his meaning: "Our love is the love of _both_--Tristan _and_ Isolde." Then there follows a little conceit on the virtue of the word "and," i.e.

the bond which unites them both together. The notion is according to Kufferath taken from a couplet of Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg:

Zwei vil kleinin Wortelin, Min und Din, Diu briuwent michel Wunder uf der Erde.

Tristan continues: "What would die in death (namely, this bodily and worldly life) is only that which comes between us and prevents us from loving and living." Isolde returns to her play with the word "and."

"What is true for you is also true for me. Tristan can only die through Isolde's death." The final conclusion is reached in the great duet beginning p. 143'1, "We die but to be united for ever in a more perfect love." with the motive No. 14.

The duet ends with a reminiscence of the nocturne, Brangane's voice entering with beautiful effect warning the lovers in the midst of their rhapsody. I resume at 146'1. The previous dialogue began with Isolde's rousing of Tristan with the words "_Lausch' geliebter_."

Now _he_ turns to her smiling and asks: "_Soll ich lauschen_?" and _she_ replies: "_La.s.s mich sterben_." She has now attained full insight, and when he finally and seriously puts the question to her: "Shall I return once more to the day?" she replies with enthusiasm ("_begeistert_"), "Let the day yield to death," and the piercing harmonies of No. 4 indicate the wrench of the parting. Her mind is now quite resolved. To another decisive question she replies: "Eternal be our night!" It is this that Tristan has been waiting for; until he knew that Isolde was ready to accompany him he could not form his own resolve.

Herein we have the key of the whole of this complex and difficult scene. Wagner's aim was not, as might appear on a superficial view, to prolong a rhapsodical love-scene, but a dramatic one, to bring the two characters, each being such as he had conceived it, to a full understanding of each other before they could be united in death.

An introductory pa.s.sage made of the love-motive simultaneously in direct and contrary movement--the union of opposites--leads to a duet which opens with the harmonies of No. 4 (K.A. 117). Its character throughout is triumphant joy, well supported by a running violin accompaniment which continues to the end. In the course of it there appears another important motive (No. 15), first in the clarinet. All ends in a crash of the entire orchestra; Kurwenal rushes in crying, "Save yourself, Tristan," and in the next moment Marke and his court enter conducted by Melot. "The wretched day for the last time."

SCENE III.--Words and music of the next scene need little comment. It may be noted that a great part of Marke's address is in strophic form, with four lines of two accents followed by one of three accents.

Tristan stands before Isolde screening her as well as he can, crushed to earth by Marke's calm dispa.s.sionate reproaches, with short interludes on the ba.s.s clarinet. The music is of great beauty, but, as I have observed in an earlier chapter, the explanatory parts are too much extended. The King calls upon Tristan to say what is the deep, mysterious cause of such a falling off in his honour. Tristan cannot answer, but the love-motive in its most complete form, as in the opening of the Prelude, replies more clearly than words.

Tristan now turns full round to Isolde, and in impressive words asks her whether she is prepared to follow him to the land to which he is now going; it is the land where no sun shines, the dark land of night.

The voice takes up the melody No. 12 from an earlier part of the act.

Her reply is if possible even more sublime. When Tristan carried her to a stranger's country, she had to follow. Now he calls her to his own, to show her his possession and heritage; how should she refuse?

"Let Tristan lead the way; Isolde will follow."

He then calls upon Melot to fight with him, but first lets fall a significant remark:

My friend he [Melot] was ... it was he who urged me on to wed thee to the King. Thy glance, Isolde, has dazzled him too; out of jealousy he betrayed me to the King, whom I betrayed.

From these enigmatical words Wagner leaves us to conjecture what we can. They fight; at the first pa.s.s Tristan lets the sword drop from his hand and falls wounded to the earth.

CHAPTER XIII

OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC CONTINUED

ACT III.--Wagner has described the slow introduction to Beethoven's C sharp minor quartet as the saddest music ever written. If there is anything sadder, it is the instrumental introduction to the third act of _Tristan und Isolde_. Tristan, after being wounded by Melot, has been carried off by Kurwenal to his own home, Kareol in Brittany, where he is discovered lying asleep on his couch in the castle garden, Kurwenal by his side. Nothing could exceed the desolation of the scene, nor the utter woe expressed in the music which begins with a new transformation of the love-motive (1_a_). Isolde alone can cure the sick man, and word has been sent to her to come from Cornwall. Her ship is just expected, and the shepherd who is on the watch outside plays a sad strain so long as the ship is not seen, to be changed to a joyful one when she appears in sight. The plaintive strain is played on the English horn, an instrument which in the hands of a skilful player is capable of very great expression, and, unlike most of the wood, has a considerable range of soft and loud, a quality of which Wagner has made very happy use.

The melody itself seems to have caused some heartburning to many excellent critics. Even Heinrich Porges describes it as a sequence of tones apparently without rule,[43] and has not a word to say about its enthralling melodic beauty. Really what difficulty there is, is only for the eye, and only in one note, the constantly recurring G flat, which is easily accounted for. In a later part of the scene (p. 200), it will be found fully harmonized.

[Footnote 43: _"Eine scheinbar regellose Tonfolge."_]

SCENE I.--In the first scene of the third act, Kurwenal attains an importance far beyond what he had in the first and second acts. He, too, is changed; he is no longer the rough, unmannerly servant, the events which have pa.s.sed and the responsibility now resting upon his shoulders, have brought out the finer qualities of his nature. There is noticeable in his melody all through the act an air of freedom and lofty devotion quite different from his former self. He is, as it were, transfigured, and there is a refinement in his tenderness which may surprise those who have never observed what delicacy and sensitiveness are often hidden beneath a rough exterior among the lower cla.s.ses.

After a short conversation between Kurwenal and the shepherd, who looks over the wall to ask how the patient is progressing, Tristan awakes, asking with feeble voice where he is. Kurwenal relates how he has brought him to his own home in Kareol, where he is soon to recover from wounds and death. It is some time before Tristan fully understands, and as memory begins to awaken, he tells of where he has been, speaking as one inspired:

I was there where I have ever been, whither for ever I go, in the wide realm of the world-night, where there is but one knowledge--divine utter oblivion,

i.e. in that Brahm, that eternal negation, in which all physical life has its existence. The words are accompanied by _pianissimo_ chords of trombones with tuba. It is the first time that the heavy bra.s.s has been heard in this act, and the effect is excessively solemn. He continues:

How has this foretaste (of eternal night) departed from me? Shall I call thee a yearning memory that has driven me once more to the light of day?

The music of this and the following part is very interesting, but the modulations are too subtle and too evanescent for a.n.a.lysis. The motive, which has throughout been a.s.sociated with the metaphor of daylight, is united with the languishing love-motive and with No. 4, of which three motives the following part is chiefly made up. The combination is expressed in Tristan's word, _"Todeswonne-Grauen,"_ "the awful joy of death." The culminating point is reached at the strongly alliterative words, _"Weh' nun wachst bleich und bang mir des Tages wilder Drang,"_ when for the moment there is quite a maze of real parts in wood-wind and strings. Immediately following is a very curious pa.s.sage, nothing else than a succession of augmented chords in an upward chromatic scale, seemingly ill.u.s.trating the words _"grell und tauschend sein Gestirn weckt zu Trug und Wahn mein Hirn."_ For a moment Kurwenal seems overawed by the words and sufferings of his beloved master. His free bounding spirits are gone, and he speaks like a broken man. But he soon recovers his former mood as he tells of Isolde's expected arrival. The news, scarcely comprehended at first, is the signal for an outburst of joy on the part of Tristan expressed in a new motive, No. 17, p.

193'4. His joy is so violent that it brings on a return of delirious raving. He seems to see the ship, the sails filling to the wind, the colours flying, but at that moment the sad strains of the shepherd's song tell him that the ship has not yet appeared. He knows the tune, which once bewailed his father's death and his mother's fate when she brought him forth and died. And now it tells of his own lot:

to long--and die; to die--and to long. No! Not so! rather to long and long, dying to long, and _not_ to die of longing.

He cannot find the death for which he longs.

In the following soliloquy the plaintive melody is woven into the orchestral accompaniment and taken by various instruments in turn. I resume at the words _"Der Trank, der Trunk, der furchtbare Trank"_ (p. 207'1), where the full orchestra accompanies with bra.s.s and drums, the tempo being still rather slow.

The draught! the draught! the terrible draught!

How it raged from my heart to my head.... Nowhere, nowhere may I rest. The night casts me back on the day for ever to feed the sun's rays on my suffering....

The fearful draught which has consigned me to this torment, I, I myself brewed it! Out of [my]

father's woe and [my] mother's anguish, out of tears of love ever and aye, out of laughing and weeping, joys and wounds, I have gathered its poisons. Thou draught which I brewed, which flowed for me, which I joyfully quaffed, accursed be thou, accursed he who brewed thee.

He sinks once more into unconsciousness. This drink, this fearful draught which has brought him into his present state, is the work of his whole life, the outcome of all his former deeds. The despair which he feels now as his end approaches is expressed in the motive No. 18, in unison in the wood-wind. Both music and words of this soliloquy offer great difficulties and need close study, with special attention to the tempo.[44] It ends with the F sharp minor chord in the 6-4 position with full bra.s.s and drums; then sudden silence in the orchestra as the voice sings the words _"furchtbarer Trank."_

[Footnote 44: This is the pa.s.sage which perplexed the greatest of all Wagner singers, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, so much that it hindered him from taking the part of Tristan until light came to him from Wagner himself. See the interesting account in Wagner's _Reminiscences of Schnorr von Carolsfeld_ in his collected works, viii. 221.]

As he lies in a swoon the wood-wind in turns continue the malediction.

The tone then changes as Kurwenal stands beside him, uncertain whether he is alive or dead. The wood softly sound the chord which we have so often heard before, No. 12, in syncopated triplets, as in the great duet in the second act (pp. 131 seq.). Above there floats a melody of exquisite tenderness, first in the oboe, then in the clarinet, continued later in a solo violin. A horn quartet then begins the soft theme No. 13, Tristan's failing voice telling how he sees the vision of Isolde floating towards him over the sea. It is as if the strains of the garden scene were hovering in his dreams and calming his troubled thoughts. As he reads in Kurwenal's looks that she is not yet in sight, he once more threatens to become violent, when suddenly the joyful tune, the signal of Isolde's approach, is heard.

SCENE II.--The catastrophe which now follows is one of the most terrible ever conceived by a dramatist. Directly Kurwenal is away, Tristan begins to toss in his bed; he seems almost to rise from the dead. Strange, restless orchestration and 7-4 time seem to show that something is pending. Several motives are hinted at, and at last there breaks out in the lower strings and wood the motive No. 13 from the second act, but now how changed! The tender, dreamy melody, now in distorted 5-4 rhythm, appears like a dance of death, first in C major.

A short climax brings it in A major and again in C major with the utmost fury and the force of the entire orchestra. It is as if the very gates of h.e.l.l had burst and every fiend were dancing around him, shouting: "Live! live! and be for ever d.a.m.ned! false knight! perjured lover!" He springs from his couch, tears the bandages from his body; the blood streams from his wound; he staggers to the middle of the stage as he hears Isolde's voice and sinks into her arms as she enters. The love-motive is heard in the wood-wind like a long dying breath as, breathing the word "Isolde," he expires. The orchestra dies away; one chord is heard alone on the harp, and the violoncello continues the love-motive as he breathes away his life.

Isolde is left alone with Kurwenal, who has followed her. The soliloquy in which she laments the cruel destruction of the plan for saving Tristan is profoundly touching, both in the words and in the melody:

Art thou dead? Tarry but for one hour, one only hour. Such anxious days longing she watched, to watch but one more hour with thee. Will Tristan beguile Isolde of the one last ever-short world-happiness (No. 4). The wound? where? Let me heal it, that, joyful and serene, we may share the night together. Not of the wound--die not of the wound!

Let us both united close our eyes to the light of heaven....

Sounds are heard without. Another ship has arrived, and with it Marke in pursuit of the fugitive princess. Hastily the gates of the castle are barricaded. Brangane's voice is heard imploring them not to resist. It is vain; Kurwenal leaves no time for parley, but rushes upon them and is at once pierced through. He is just able to reach his master's body and die at his side; when Marke has forced an entry he finds nothing but death. Brangane notices that Isolde is still living, and they now explain. The secret of the love-potion has been told to King Marke, and he has hurried up to renounce his intention of wedding Isolde and to unite her to Tristan.[45]