Richard Wagner
Tristano e Isotta

On November 16th, tickets in hand, I fulfilled a long-held desire to see “Tristan und Isolde” live; I was seated in the central boxes of the Opera House - right in the embrace of the wort-ton-drama.

From the silence starts the Prelude, and all the enharmonic tensions that will only be resolved at the end of the third act are already rising; it takes a moment to settle into the role of a Wagnerian spectator, the ear is not accustomed to such a sonic suspension - so much “irresolution”. The chords begin to climb like ivy over us, and one cannot resist their allure. Even from the start, timbres and dynamics show how Wagner was, for musical tradition, an alien. Sovereign of harmonic ambiguity, he takes the orchestra, uses it for his own purposes, and puts it at the service of the word; yet he is also one who can afford the luxury of “scorning” the melodrama tradition, seeming to eye it and say, “I don’t need you, in fact, I don’t like you. I have enough greatness to create - my way”. The opera’s gestation was swift (compared to the Tetralogy!), Wagner interrupted Siegfried to devote himself to it from 1857 to 1859... it was the journey to representation that was long: the premiere was only six years later because almost everyone then deemed it unplayable, and even today it is a tough challenge for singers, set designers, and especially directors. It cannot be easy to handle such fiery material, the most complete fusion of verses, music, and scenic space: a constant becoming of themes that entwine and contaminate, striving to surpass the stale and suffocating melodrama of “closed” forms. The maximum Wagnerian aspiration taking shape.

The sea (where the entire first act is set) and the night (the protagonist of the second) are the two key symbols marked with obsessive continuity: they are emblems of decadence, as the two lovers’ mutual annihilation is an “immersing” and oblivion with morbid outlines, including long invectives against the falsity of day and light. The magic potion is merely a scenic expedient so that deeply repressed but already present emotions can explode, hidden because Isolde is destined for the king and friend of Tristan (towards whom the hero thus commits a “parricide” in a broad sense). Tristan and Isolde aspire to death as the supreme coronation of their bond, like in the medieval tale where, after death, they turned into entwined trees: decadence par excellence. During the development of the story from the Prelude to the beginning of the third act, the main leitmotif (the famous one of love) has appeared, disappeared, reappeared, transformed, insinuated, yet never concluded in one way or another; Wagner measures it out: lets it appear on stage only with Isolde or next to certain key words only to systematically suffocate it into new harmonies. This compositional conduct makes the beginning of the third act shine: from the instrumental introduction, a dark and funereal theme was inserted into the song of Kurwenal, the squire watching over a dying Tristan. But when the squire tells a passing shepherd “...if he were to awaken/ it would be only/to leave us forever/ unless first appeared/ the healer/ the only one who can rescue us [... ]”, at the moment the allusion to Isolde begins, this funereal theme assumes the ascending chromatic progression of the main leitmotif and transforms into it, indeed into a hybrid of the two, only to regain its identity at the end of the phrase. The entire fabric of the opera is composed of such entanglements, sustained by the maniacal care and the personality of the orchestral dynamics: often, for example, the orchestra simultaneously executes a sudden crescendo together with a diminuendo to differentiate the references or create an effect. Who knows what the final Verdi, Bruckner, Mahler, and Schoenberg, etc. would have been without Wagner. His ghost slips under doors and enters - forcefully or stealthily - into the pen of almost all early 20th-century composers; they can be counted on one hand those who were impervious (like Brahms) to his style.

In the third act, Tristan awaits Isolde’s arrival by sea to heal him and vents his delirium in half an hour of music and words, so much so that the impatience becomes viral, transmitting even to spectators or listeners: the stage times are indeed stretched to the maximum, in a climate of absurd theater that incredibly works, because it is not action speaking, but the suspended unconscious in a limbo, the soul and its metamorphosis. When Isolde finally arrives, the hero dies in front of her. It is the end marked by inescapable destiny. Yet the final episode remains to make sense of a sea of chromatisms, delays, false cadences, which if it has touched tonalities numerous times, it has done so almost by chance; the pentagrammed version of the Eternal Return, the “Death of Isolde” (Liebestod): abandoning herself on Tristan’s body in a delirium with cosmic breath, Isolde deliciously sinks into the indistinct, into the great Whole of Romanticism. The “Liebestod” (which beyond any possible hierarchy is a peak - if not the peak - of Western music) not only bears the imprint of genius, but historically embodies both a beginning and an end: harmony is no longer that “inaugurated” by Bach and consolidated by Mozart and Beethoven; it is the first step toward modern music - the life shout of a newborn breathing for the first time. On the strangled and surge-heavy singing of the soprano, the orchestra gradually increases in volume, the flow of incomplete cadences becomes more and more dizzying, increasingly so, we are lost, there is no point of reference until, after the umpteenth whirling, sinuous, golden climb of the leitmotif on itself, it envelops us in a crash, the climactic, final, and decisive cadence, the explosion of the will to power. Isolde cries out “in the breath of the world.../In the all-breathing.../to sink...”; and in this crash even the fibers of the spectator seem to disintegrate and lose themselves, captured among the very strong vibrato of the strings in the eternity of a few seconds: all harmonic tensions explode and resolve here, in this final harbour after which the song dissolves, whispering into a soft carpet of strings, winds, and harp that aspire to extinguish themselves. Isolde collapses to the ground.

And at that point, I too returned to dry land, inevitably shaken and just in time for the applause.