Tristan's Silence, philosophically (2011)

NTU Studies in Language and Literature Number 26 (December 2011), 73-100 73 Tristan’s Silence, Philosophically* Herbert Hanreich Assistant Professor, Department of Applied English I-Shou University ABSTRACT Music for Richard Wagner is a form of language that transports contents without words, being of a higher—metaphysical—dignity than its spoken or written form. Music, he thought, aims at evoking natural feelings, true feelings that had been blocked as a result of domination of the language of the word. According to Wagner, great art has to evoke such true feelings, which would open gates to a truer world than our phenomenal one. Schopenhauer’s distinction between the (true) world of the will and the (deceptive) world of representation provides the philosophical/ metaphysical background for his theory of music. Consequently, words, the text, the story, necessary ingredients of operas, should be designed so as to immerse in the world of tunes which would support the metaphysical mission of operas—evoking true feelings. But there is also a true world, as opposed to the false one, the social one. The true world is ineffable; it is only accessible via true feelings thanks to music. Wagner believes that dramaturgical considerations have to be integrated into the concept of opera itself in order to evoke such true feelings for his audience. Tristan und Isolde is conceived as a work of art that tries to achieve exactly this, with “love” as its main subject and object of his metaphysical and dramaturgical quest. Tristan, in its unfolding story and artistic concept, is supposed to express the true, ineffable world and, at the same time, it even offers physical access to it by using the opera’s main topic—love—as a medium of staging metaphysical insights as an existential event. The story of Tristan has to be (re-)read accordingly. Eventually, it is the artist who triumphs over the philosopher when it comes to expressing and realizing ineffable truths that come up whenever one pursues ultimate goals. However, noble goals could result from very personal concerns—as Nietzsche, Wagner’s close ally at one point, knew very well. This essay demonstrates that Nietzsche was right. Keywords: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, silence, opera, Nietzsche, words and music, metaphysics, philosophy, Schopenhauer, theater * Presentation at the conference at the National Taipei University of Technology: Silent & Ineffable: Functions of the Unsaid in Literature and the Humanities (Taipei, November 26-27, 2010). 74ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature ፤஭ල‫ۅ‬ϟܼলᏱϟጟᓷ ᗻິճ ဏԉτᏱᔗңऽᇮᏱ‫ق‬ֆ౪ఁ௳ ᄣ! ् ㅠᐪଃⓧጁₗņRichard WagnerŇ≟⤵ŊᆯɺỚᕐㅱᄽ઎֯⋱ЗⳭา൳᱿⦝⤵ ഐೣŊҢңሷᕗ‫⦝ם‬໣ሬ૯ഐೣሩ⸅⣬‫ד‬དྷ⩽᱿ǖъϊȯ ˟⦓ᣅŊㅠᐪ᱿Ჿ᱿߱ᅠ⤯ᱹ⎊ᤋ෼฾Ŋ⴨ˀ⡕ᄽ઎⦝⤵໽࿳Ӽぁხ᱿᳠૪฾ ෼ȯϒञ᱿♊⠛ൕㅱ۸ⷙⳆỚ᳠૪฾෼Ŋⓧጁₗ⦓ᣅŊⳆỚ฾෼⋱͐ːⳇദᕗ᫠⩽ ʊ᮹ሩԽ᳠૪᱿ʊ᮹ȯ‫ז‬቏ⓧ⧄าൠʊ᮹ņ᳠Ň⎞⠧⩽ʊ᮹ņϐŇʠ⿵᱿దᯌŊᔌ ॑ဏͧⓧጁₗ᱿ㅠᐪ᫧⧄ɺΤ‫ڏ‬ણ᱿ōདྷ⩽᱿⋍ᇓȯߌᔍ˟⦓ᣅŊ⤵⥱Ȯᄽ቏Ȯᄑ ʶǖᓼԮ᱿⃅ໞ⣬₪ǖະ⥑⤺ໞ⩕ː⋱ᙺᛐ߱ሧ⦲ʊ᮹Ŋ˫ᄄྃᓼԮ᱿དྷ⩽ ͐‫ل‬ǖ֯۸⬚ːㆩ᳠૪᱿฾෼ȯ ̟ⳆʬᆯɺΤ᳠૪ʊ᮹Ŋ≟ʃᆯ⚣ϐ᱿ḽሳʊ᮹ȯᤋ≟Ŋ᳠૪ʊ᮹ᆯᤀᘍ⤵‫܍‬ ᱿Ŋ‫ڱ‬ሷⲿ⳧ㅠᐪ༇⋱฾‫Ⳇט‬Ớ᳠૪᱿෼฾ȯⓧጁₗ᱿ȳஞᅗࠎ⎞̀€ോȴᔌᆯ⥶ ߧⳭӷⳆΤࣀ᮹Ŋ˫ȵ฻ȶ̳ᣅʙ⣬᱿㆛ቨُ˟དྷ⩽࿯€᱿Ჿᐻȯ ȳஞᅗࠎ⎞̀€ോȴ᱿ᄑʶ෼ῃُ♊⠛Ꮥ൳Ŋଔᆯ⣬ЗⳭ⴨᳠૪᱿Ȯᤀᘍ⤵‫܍‬ ᱿ʊ᮹Ŋᮚ⎏☼᮫ᓼԮ̳ᣅདྷ⩽᫧⤟᱿਄˛Ŋ˫ң㋤‫ا‬᫠ʙ㆛ǖȵ฻ȶ ȯߌᔍȳஞ ᅗࠎ⎞̀€ോȴ᱿ᄑʶൕㅱɺ⩊Ҫ⩊ȯ˟ʙ೺ᯍⲲᖣ⃃Ꮞ᱿ᲿᐻᆹŊ♊⠛૊ദദᕗ ‫ڏ‬ણ૊ሩႸ⿢ЗⳭǖ˫‫ד‬ㅽ෤ǖK㓿ʃ⦝᱿าᚠȯ ߌᔍŊ஖㋧᱿དྷ⩽Ჿᐻ‫⋱ר‬ᆯ㄄౑Τː᱿〦ᘜǖ⦞ॖⓧጁₗᯍᆹ᱿⤃૓Ჴ‫ה‬ ଛ⸁໽᥊ᵧȯⳆῇ⧄ᄽ֯ᆯ⣬⨢ᆙଛ⸁᱿᳖ᘍᆯᔌᷨ᱿ȯ 〦⼫⥱ŘⓧጁₗȮȳஞᅗࠎ⎞̀€ോȴȮK㓿ȮᓼԮȮଛ⸁Ȯᄽ઎⎞ㅠᐪȮഐ≟ ʀણȮ‫ڏ‬ણȮ‫ז‬቏ⓧȮ໵Ԯ Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 75 Tristan’s Silence, Philosophically Herbert Hanreich I. Introduction In October 1854 Wagner read Schopenhauer for the first time. The book he read was The World as Will and Representation, published already in 1818, soon forgotten, and rediscovered just a few years before it fell into the hands of Wagner. In this book Schopenhauer wrote that all life is, in principle, suffering, a suffering which stems from an urge he called the “Will”1 that incessantly demands—but never gets—satisfaction. This indefinable force in us is the essence of our life, which all living beings have in common: our essence is—the Will. Redemption from this source of suffering is only possible for individuals through its containment. There are several ways to achieve it: Leading a sexually ascetic life; contemplative “ecstatic” dissolution in arts; or following the Buddhist path of compassion with anything alive. The ultimate goal of a thoughtful, a philosophical life is a mixture of these ways: Dissolution into the Nirvana, a longing for the Nothingness which would finally end all insatiable passions of the Will and, subsequently, redeem from life’s suffering. Only a life under such premises is meaningful, whereas a life that values worldly success is egotistic and illusionary. The Nirvana is not just an empty Nothingness. It is, in Schopenhauer’s words, an “infinite richness” (unendliche Fuelle), eluding any rational comprehension and accessibility except through specific forms and practices of art and religion by which rationality, and with it individuality itself, is ecstatically dispensed as it is resorbed by the general Will. Wagner was fascinated by such thoughts. In his often-quoted letter to F. Liszt of December 1854, in which he expounded the proceeds of his new philosophical discovery, he wrote that he finally found there what he was looking for since a long time: “...the yearning for death and for a state of complete unconsciousness, complete annihilation, and complete end of all dreams—the only, final redemption.” True life and true love—key ingre1 In the following capital W is used in order to distinguish Schopenhauer’s concept of will from the common use. 76ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature dients for the search of a meaningful life for which Schopenhauer had become probably the fashionable literary source during the second half of the nineteenth century and for Wagner impossible to achieve under current social and political conditions—had already been the Leitmotifs of his previous operas. What he, in late 1854, found was a philosophical or, more precisely, a metaphysical sanctuary of love’s and life’s plight, allowing him now to reinterpret his whole artistic concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a redemptive task in the search of a true world. Wagner’s main ideas had not much changed since the Flying Dutchman of 1842—they were already in place long before his discovery of Schopenhauer. But they now received a Schopenhauerian design, intimately connected with a dramaturgical point by which the opera itself had become a redemptive enterprise. Tristan und Isolde (finished 1859) had been its first result on stage. We interpret Wagner’s Tristan from two points of view, reading it, first, as a piece of art in which its story deals with the metaphysical relationship between the true and untrue world, and also with the problems that arise when trying to express in a comprehensible way what by nature evades rational expression—the true, but ineffable world. Language and music, their limits and their relationship, Wagner’s life-long concern as a composer and librettist, are the core players of his philosophical deliberations. He applies them on the topic of love, Tristan’s central subject. There, silence—in music and in words—, together with various forms of the characters’ frequent concealments in crucial scenes play an important role; they are part of a solution Wagner offers to succeed with his task to deliver an adequate expression of the ineffable. It is the Schopenhauerian side of Tristan. But, secondly, we need to look at Tristan also from a dramaturgical perspective that includes Wagner’s intention to lead the audience for the time of the performance of his opera into a ‘true’ world where the metaphysical truth can be existentially realized with artistic means. So we have a metaphysical side (Chapter II) of Tristan, resulting from Wagner’s Schopenhauerized theory regarding the essence of the world and its representation. And we have a practical side (Chapter III) which aims at the artistic realization of the theory through the stage performance of Tristan in transforming the minds of the people in the audience. Wagner hoped that this artistic enterprise would result in the creation of a new, revolutionary concept of culture that would serve as the metaphysical fundament of the new German empire (eventually founded in 1871) and its people. It is no Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 77 coincidence that Wagner’s ideas have been linked with the chauvinist ideology of the Third Reich that came into existence in Germany sixty years later. Fr. Nietzsche, Wagner’s close confident in his years as a young professor in Basel since 1869, called Tristan the “opus metaphysicum of all arts” that requires considerable intellectual efforts to decode the complexity of this rather dark piece of art. A few years later he would be the fiercest critic of Wagner and of his art concept, denouncing the person Wagner as jester and his compositions as a tool of seduction exploiting the proclaimed metaphysical side of the ineffable for rather vain and very personal purposes. Yet he never stopped admiring Tristan. We follow here Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, though not explicitly. It is, however, implicitly omnipresent. II. Tristan and Tristan’s silence, metaphysically 1. “Silence” within the story of Tristan Wagner’s theories are centered on the ineffable; the ineffable stands for a metaphysical, a truer world that underlies the physical world as it appears. Wagner’s art is designed to bring forth this true world with true means, i.e. with means that in revealing the ineffable leave it nevertheless untouched—the ineffable remains ineffable without being disfigured by a rationality that somehow disenchants its ineffability. Silence has a vital function in his art. In 1860, just a year after he finished Tristan, he wrote: “The greatness of a poet is truly to be judged only by what he conceals in order to have conveyed to us silently the ineffable; it is now the musician, who brings the concealed into sound, and the correct form of such sounding silence is the infinite melody” (Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften 8: 93). 2 In Schopenhauer’s theory he found the elements of the ineffable, the dual world view, that apart from the world as we sense it there is also a “true”, ineffable side of the world which could be given only one apt form of expression: Wagner’s operas. Tristan, therefore, is to be interpreted as a piece of art that has brought “the concealed into sound.” So: What is this opera about? What is the “true”, hidden story of Tristan, the tragic story of a knight and his mistress originally written many centuries earlier, having been available in a variety of versions (Wapnewski 42) in the 1850ies when Wagner came across it? Here the story: 2 R. Wagner is quoted from different sources. The letters quoted from Wagner are indicated by their exact date. Translations of the quotes from German sources are mine. 78ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature Tristan and Isolde, in the First Act, are on the ship from Ireland returning to Cornwall from where Tristan brings a reluctant Isolde to his king, uncle and friend Marke for the wedding. Shortly before landing they are given a love potion instead of, as they had demanded, the death potion. The dialogue between them in the scene before reveals that they had met earlier in Ireland, when Tristan killed Morold, Isolde’s groom, in a fight in which he himself was seriously wounded. Only Isolde, having special medical talents, could heal him, which she did despite knowing that Tristan was her fiancé’s murderer. They fell in love, promised each other to materialize their mutual passion after Tristan would return from Cornwall the next time. But he returns not as her lover, but as his king’s matchmaker. Put under pressure by Isolde, Tristan decides to die by drinking the death potion, which, however, through willful confusion of Brangaene, Isolde’s chamber maid, is the love drink. Isolde, ready to die as well, drinks from the same cup. Love instead of death enters the scene. Emotionally confused, they arrive in Cornwall, welcomed by an ignorant king. The Second Act plays at night, in the king’s garden where Tristan and Isolde, still under the effect of the love potion, meet furtively, exchanging words and gestures of love. Both long to die in their love trance because for them the state of death would be the only fulfillment of their love without any disruption from the present external world which plays against them. But they are caught in flagranti: King Marke, guided by his subordinate and Tristan’s friend Melot, finds them in a compromising position. In the ensuing fight Tristan is seriously wounded by Melot. Act III consists of long monologues of Tristan. More or less dying, he has returned back to his castle in the Bretagne, pondering in his delirium over his parents, Isolde, and love and death. A ship arrives. Kurwenal, Tristan’s faithful friend, tells him that he has sent for Isolde so that she would come from Cornwall and heal him again, mentally and physically. She arrives, but the moment they fall into their arms, Tristan dies. A second ship arrives, bringing a forgiving Marke and Melot to them. A fight breaks out, killing both Melot and Kurwenal. Isolde, in the final Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 79 scene of the third Act, literally sings herself into death, finally being reunited with her lover. This is the plot. But the “real” plot happens between the words, in the elliptic dialogues, in the music, and even in the opera house to those attending the performance; Tristan is construed as a metaphysical drama with an artistic point. There is hardly any action on stage; for most of the opera the actors tell stories of events of the past. And there are also, quite conspicuously, composed moments of silence. It has been noted that the dramatic process of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is characterized more by what its main characters do not say than by what they say (Mayer 64). Indeed, there are scenes where the protagonists, in decisive moments of the plot, refuse to speak, be it vis-à-vis their superiors (Tristan/King Mark; Isolde/Brangaene), their friends (Tristan/Kurwenal), or even their partners (Tristan/Isolde; Isolde/Tristan). One may rightly assume that the refusal to speak is crucial for its understanding. But: Understanding of what? H. Mayer (an eminent scholar on Wagner and close friend of the Wagner family for decades, suggests that the main characters in Tristan are “silent in order to continue to live” (67). They are silent about their secret love because both are deeply anchored in social roles incompatible with their amorous affair, which, once uncovered, would lead to scandal and death; they are also silent about their mutual love because they are aware of their true emotions which they cannot live out due to the social reality; and they (especially Tristan) are silent because they are too proud to admit that they are playing a false game, namely the game of the social world at the cost of their true feelings. Wagner’s heroes in all his operas live in two, incompatible worlds: a true (metaphysical) and a false (social) one. True love takes place in another world than in the social one, and mutual interference would be fatal for the lives on either side. Silence functions, therefore, as a precautionary measure adhered to by the protagonists when dwelling in the social, untrue world, with the ‘true’ one clandestinely in focus. Here are some passages from the text3 where silence or concealment is meaningfully integrated into the narrative of Tristan: In Act I, scene 3, on the deck of the ship that brings them to Cornwall, Isolde tells Brangaene that she kept Tantris’ (Tristan’s alias in Ireland after he killed Morold, Ireland’s hero 3 Siener (2010) has listed and commented all passages in Tristan which include silence or concealments. 80ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature and Isolde’s groom) true identity hidden from her revenge-seeking countrymen—her silence saved his life (“me, who kept silent to let him his life, thus protecting him from the foes’ revenge”); in Act II, scene 2, Isolde keeps silent vis-à-vis herself, repressing her burning love for Tristan during the time of waiting in Ireland, knowing she would not be able to continue to live without him (“Alas, in the heart’s deepest regions, how painful there was the wound, where I secretly kept [my love]”); silence also when Tristan is asked by King Marke to explain his betrayal after he was caught in flagranti with Isolde at the end of Act II (“o King/this is what I cannot tell you;/and what you ask/you will never experience”); and silence also in Act III when the dying Tristan tells Kurwenal where he “dwelled” during his delirium (“Where I dwelled/this is what I cannot tell you”). When Tristan and Isolde finally speak to each other in Act II, they actually do not really speak in the sense of exchanging information in the form of a dialogue; they hold monologues. Besides, they don’t seem to communicate with words that carry meanings. Mayer puts this long fictitious dialogue of Act II, arguably one of the greatest scenes of all operas, into a broader perspective: Sullen silence (Act I), via a feigned dialogue in which the partners immerse themselves in the other (Act II), turning into final silence when both die (Act III). Silence, it seems, is the story’s leitmotif throughout the opera. What do Tristan and Isolde hide? In order to answer this question we need to take a look into the sometimes meandering and contorted thoughts Wagner had when he was working on his Tristan. 2. Wagner’s metaphysical concept of Tristan In this sub-chapter, we first provide a metaphysical interpretation of Tristan, resulting from Wagner’s readings of Schopenhauer; it is an interpretation that can frequently be found in previous perceptions of this opera (a). Then we interpret the role of ‘silence’ within this metaphysical concept (b), uncovering Wagner’s artistic/aesthetical intentions that accompany his metaphysical deliberations. These findings lead us to chapter III which summarizes Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as an enterprise deemed capable of performing a piece of art that offers philosophical insights, aesthetic conclusions and existential experiences at the same time. Bayreuth is anticipated when Tristan became the artistic “topos” where art and metaphysics “happen” for and to an audience that has become an integral part of Wagner’s concept of opera. To them, Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 81 Nietzsche would later say that metaphysics happens for “five or six hours” (Nietzsche 6: 325). a. Wagner’s Schopenhauer In the Introduction we mentioned Wagner’s sudden and enthusiastic conversion to Schopenhauer in the autumn of 1854 after he had read the philosopher’s master piece “World as Will and Representation” several times within only a couple of months. We know, however, that Schopenhauer’s impact on Wagner’s concept of his Gesamtkunstwerk has been more marginal than previously assumed (Zoellner 358-66); he found in Schopenhauer rather a confirmation of his own thoughts than a discovery of new ones. He soon began to adjust Schopenhauer’s semantics to his own artistic plans and reinterpret core pieces of his philosophy for his own purposes. What was so appealing for Wagner was how Schopenhauer, in following a mystified Kantian version of Plato’s dualistic metaphysics, construed the relationship between the rational (bright, false, dayish) and the (dark, true, nightly) instinctive sides in us, each standing for different modes of knowledge vis-à-vis different modes of reality. Ontologically, there are two modes of reality: the true world of the Will, a kind of incessant urge that unifies and defines the nature of all life, and an illusionary, divided world of appearances that is just an inadequate representation of the true world of the Will. Epistemologically, Schopenhauer thought that rational thinking could never reach the ‘true’ sphere of the Will; only our intuitions could because they are ontologically “closer” to the true world. Our intuitions however fail us if one tries to express them in words from our abstract language that, by its propositional nature, divides, and hence fails to grasp, the unifying force of the “world-Will” The rational side of our epistemological faculties, therefore, needs to be muted or silenced if we go for the true world, the world of the Will. A suspended rationality would hence allow the emergence of certain intuitions or, as Schopenhauer also calls them, of “pure apperceptions” (reine Anschauungen) as the more appropriate medium of truth. Art, especially music, evokes such pure Anschauungen which provide unmediated access to the “true” unifying side of the world without fragmenting it; they enable access to the truth of the Will, to the unifying force of the world; they adequately express the ineffable (Will). Wagner developed similar ideas, but he departed from Schopenhauer’s philosophy in two important aspects. First, Wagner thought as an artist who could create the medium which would ‘produce’ the metaphysical truth, not 82ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature just describe it. Tristan was to literally perform the philosophy of Schopenhauer as a stage event for an audience that needed to be pulled into the drama as an essential part of the theory itself, as an act of purification that prepares the listeners for the entry into the spheres of the Will or into the meaning of life. Accordingly, the rational, “bright” side of our epistemological apparatus needed to be somehow neutralized by a certain technique of composition that would create an ecstatic state of mind which would eventually serve as the door opener to the true world of the Will; Schopenhauer could only describe this ecstatic condition, whereas Wagner knew he had the means of factually putting it into reality. Chapter III elaborates this point. A second deviation from Schopenhauer is that for Wagner the essential realm of the Will could be opened not by tranquilizing the individual will through a sexually ascetic life for the sake of bringing the world-Will into effect, but in contrast by letting the individual will escalate to its highest climax, into a state of delight where the act of unification with the world-Will really takes place and achieves a similar tranquilizing effect—at least for a short period of time. We have, therefore, rather an ecstatic immersion than a Schopenhauerian renunciation as the key into a metaphysical world. This “metaphysical deed proper”, as Nietzsche called it (Nietzsche 1: 24), could be achieved by music in connection with the dramatic performance. The dramatic work of art would just have to be composed and staged accordingly. One could say, in short, that Wagner transformed his philosophical ideas into music where they “happen”, hereby presenting his art as a truthful metaphysical medium and event that supersedes any rational discourse. Wagner’s philosophy is not just a doctrine; it is also its proper execution. The true medium or form of the truth in this sense is music. Only music is capable of producing “pure apperceptions” which “perceive” more than language can express, because essential truths concerning our human nature get lost by the way our language works. They must remain inaccessible for the written and spoken word which function only in the form of judgments made in propositions; forms of intuitive, “apperceptive” knowledge are beyond language but not beyond truth. Wagner thinks that music has not only unmediated access to the world-Will, or, as he also calls it, to the world-Idea. In fact, it is even more than that: it is the world-Idea itself. In 1870 he wrote that “music is itself a world’s-Idea, an Idea in which the world immediately displays its essence, whereas in those other arts this essence has to pass through the medium of the understanding (das Erkenntniss) Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 83 before it can become displayed. We can but take it that the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician [sic!] as the universal Will, and—above and beyond all power of vision—now recognises itself as such in full self-consciousness” (Wagner, “Beethoven” 72). For Schopenhauer, philosophy still has an important function in this metaphysical enterprise. It translates such perceptions into the language of concepts and describes them; it does not, however, generate them. Philosophy is only secondary for the task of “knowing” the true, noumenal world for which music, as Schopenhauer believes, is much better equipped: “The composer reveals the most inner substance of the world and expresses the most profound wisdom in a language which cannot be comprehended by rational means” (Schopenhauer 341). Wagner’s Tristan, it seems, is construed as if to prove Schopenhauer’s own concession favoring the musician who is in the better position for the “metaphysical deed proper” than any philosopher. The musician Wagner, this is how he saw it, trumps Schopenhauer within the philosopher’s own professional domain. b. The ineffable: Resonating silence, concealment, and the “metaphysical deed proper” in Tristan The rational function of language, as we have seen, is an insufficient means for the accomplishment of the metaphysical task. But, for the sake of composing an opera it is nevertheless needed in order to perform the ‘metaphysical deed’ in the form of a drama. A rationally coherent plot as well as the usage of words with rational meanings is simply needed to convey the story of the drama to the audience. The challenge for Wagner was, therefore, to construe the literary plot of such a drama in a way that it assists music in the fulfillment of its metaphysical mission. It would have to focus on the inner course of events which is much better and much more adequately accessible by means of an a-rational language—by music. Tristan was the project to perform this “metaphysical deed proper” in which “life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the external world solely [would depend] on the inner motions of the soul” (Wagner 8: 85). In Tristan he realized his own artistic version of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. His task, again, was to stage a drama whose inner story could be told with music beyond abstractions of linguistic concepts used by the poet when writing the exterior side of the story. The story, therefore, had to be construed in a way where words provide ideal opportunities for the music to 84ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature unfold the essential inner structure of that very same story written in words. In a fictitious dialogue with himself Wagner the poet refers to Wagner the musician when he declares that “you may say what I [the poet] conceal, because only you can say it, and tacitly I say all there is to say, because I will guide you by my hand” (Wagner 8: 93). He then continues: “Truly, the greatness of a poet is best assessed when we learn to understand what he conceals in order to silently let the ineffable itself speak to us; it is now the musician who lets resound what had been concealed, and the perfect form of his resounding concealment is the infinite melody.” Wagner repeatedly insists that his art is the only adequate form to essentially express what evades rational expression in principle, which, in Tristan’s case is love. He wrote for instance to Mathilde Wesendonck that his Tristan is the better medium to “say” what he actually wanted to tell her (i.e. his love for her), namely by means of the “deep art of resonating silence.” If music could convey contents to others, then it must function like language, endowed with an analogous structure, as a language however without words and silence as an integrated part of its semantics. How can we understand this? Nearly twenty years after Tristan, Wagner’s remark to Cosima (Wagner, Cosima 65) about Parsifal could also be applied to his Tristan: “In the written drama [a] pause would be impossible; the speaking pause, this is the [genuine] property of music.” There is some debate about how to interpret Wagner’s “resonating silence” (or the “speaking pause”) within his Tristan. Is the “resonating silence” composed in the form of music a sounding silence expressed by music by which ineffable dramatic constellations are intuitively understood without words? The Leitmotifs would be a typical example to support this thesis; they make audibly present what is visually absent, thus either supporting the audience’s memory with respect to previous scenes of the play or amplifying the intensity of an emotion that is to be evoked for dramatic reasons. The Leitmotif would thus condense a complex situation that subsequently could be adequately understood by “pure apperceptions” or by, as we mentioned above, “unconscious, purely objective artistic perceptions” by which what is ineffable would be presented as a unified experience to the audience without rational mediation. Or did Wagner also include the interpretation of silence as a lack of music or as a non-resonating pause into his concept of a resonating silence where silence—the lack of sound—now “speaks” from within the context? Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 85 Dahlhaus (72) and Peil (387) follow the first approach. They hold that whatever needs to be unsaid during the opera is expressed through the activation of an “artistic element in order to make the concealed speak, and this is the orchestra.” The various scenes in ‘Tristan’ where silence is integrated in the literary plot (as we have seen in Chapter I) are so closely linked to the orchestral music that all “gesture as well as language stand out like ice mountains from the water” (Peil 388). What is meant with this is what Wagner wrote in his Oper und Drama which he published in 1851, i.e. some years before Tristan and just with his Ring project in sight. There indeed music is interpreted as a kind of meta-language which frequently comments—sometimes contradicting, amplifying or anticipating—the actions on stage. The story is always under symphonic scrutiny with respect to the psychological, emotional, or social state of the ‘Ring’s protagonists as the drama unfolds. The dialogues in the tetralogy are, as it were, embedded in the flow of music that connects the speakers in their “true”, essential relationships by which the words they utter become intelligible despite scenes that are inconclusive for an audience not so familiar with the details of the plot. In “Oper und Drama,” the theoretical background for such an interpretation of resonating silence, Wagner writes that the intention of the opera text is only realized if it is completely translated from the sphere of reason into the sphere of feelings: The orchestra has the “potential to express the unspeakable” (Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften 7: 309). An apt example for this can be found for instance in the scene in Walkuere Act II where Wotan, in his dialogue with Bruennhilde, musically reveals his “true” fatherly feelings for the incestuous Sigmund despite his Fricka-induced duty to sacrifice him for the sake of maintaining the traditional order for which he officially stands. But Tristan also has such scenes. In Act I, at their first encounter on the ship, Tristan remains stiff, tight-lipped and uncommitted, whereas Isolde rages in hate against him. Nothing in the story indicates that in their inner world the truth is very different from its appearance: that they share a strong affection for each other. But their passion can be “felt” if we listen to the music when the “glance-motif” from the Prelude that immediately follows the famous “longing-motif” from where it develops. It comes up again in Isolde’s tale to Brangaene about how she spared Tristan’s (alias Tantris’) life the moment she looked into his eyes, a moment that sealed her love for him. No words explain her inner state; the musical motif, instead, does. This motif also resonates when Isolde meets Tristan on the ship for the first time 86ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature soon after her tale to Brangaene, obviously indicating Isolde’s “true” feelings despite her hate tirades against the person she audibly loves. But silence has different faces. The silence we find in Tristan has also the important function of concealment. There is silence about what cannot be said, but there is also silence as concealment of what should not be said. Both, silence and concealment are present in the opera. We have seen that “silence”, in its metaphysical, Schopenhauerian function, gives way to the language of music that connects us much better with our essential nature, the Will. Concealment, on the other hand, is a refusal to communicate what, from the characters’ perspectives, should not be communicated. The reasons for the refusals in Tristan are apparently acts of precaution, keeping both spheres of reality separated. The whole Act II is a Schopenhauerian version of silence, whereas most scenes of Acts I and III where silence resonates are concealments, i.e. indicators of silence as imperatives. Let’s take for example the scene in Act I when Isolde is about to drink the assumed death potion. Moments before this scene she urges Tristan to explain his cold behavior since his return to Ireland. His answer (“The mistress of silence/orders me to be silent:/in grasping what she conceals/I keep silent what she cannot grasp”) is consequent: His social position at this time—as King Marke’s matchmaker—forces him to conceal the truth; hence his silence. Tristan conceals his love for Isolde, a love which he fears is doomed under the present social constellation. He is aware of their tragic situation, and he knows that under the given circumstances there is no solution possible in their favor. “Tristan’s honor/highest faith/Tristan’s misery/boldest defiance/deceived heart/dreamt suspicion/eternal mourning/sole comfort”—with these words Tristan drinks what he believes is the death potion, ready to die: Love has no place in a world that is essentially governed by honor and duty, but not by passion; Tristan knows this, and there is nothing else to say. But the moment they drink the potion, at the end of Act I, both, scene and music, change. The “truth” of love reigns in at all levels after worldly reservations suddenly disappear. What now follows in the external world of the story is filtered and condensed by the “inner reason” of life, preparing for Act II. This moment is the proper beginning of the drama: the story begins to unfold as a consequence of the “inner” life as the external life’s raison d’être. Drama for Wagner, we remember, is “visual deeds of the music.” Since “meaning and existence of the external world solely depend on the inner motions of the soul” (Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften 8: 85), we experience now the musical translation of these “inner motions” into an Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 87 “inner” language, the language of the Will as the “true” character of all visual and individual manifestations. From this moment on Tristan and Isolde do not “speak” with each other; communication between them has reached a different, a “truer”, an a-rational level where unbound feelings have become the guide of their understanding. The imperative concealment of the day turns into Schopenhauerian silence of the night when music takes over the dialogue as the resonating sound of a language beyond words which only true lovers can understand. But there is still another function of silence in Tristan, apart from silence as expressed in the form of music. There is also a ‘resonating’ silence without music. Tristan’s answer for instance in the above-mentioned scene before he grabs the potion from Isolde and drinks it (“The Mistress of silence…”) at the end of Act I, music nearly fades away, just as in Act III when Tristan, on the brink of death, tells Kurwenal where he “dwelled” in his delirium during his transfer from Cornwall to his castle in the Bretagne. No orchestral support carries what he says, and what he says can hardly be heard. The nearing death, it seems, is not only without words; it is also without music. There is nothing to resonate; there is no ineffable. Wagner seems to tell us that “death” can only be a subject of his art if it is perceived as ineffable, as a death on stage within the context of a story where it is part of something quite alive. Chapter III will elaborate this point. And there is yet another function of how silence as lack of music could assume a meaningful role. To demonstrate this we need to make a short detour to his philosophy which he developed in the wake of his Schopenhauer readings, especially of his version of Indian philosophy. We know (Kienzle 124) that Wagner read numerous books about Buddhism and Indian philosophy after 1854 during the years he worked on Tristan.4 What he learned from those studies was that life is an eternal cycle of birth and death interrupted by the Nirvana, a state as he called it, in a letter to Franz Liszt in 1854, of “absolute unconsciousness” (Wagner, Saemtliche Briefe 6: 298), free from the painful passions of life from which ultimately new cycles of life begin or dawn again. As could be expected Wagner found a role for (his) music within such cosmic events. How did Wagner compose the Nirvana? There are several passages where Tristan refers to such a state of mind. First, we have Tristan’s offer to Isolde to follow him after they have been caught by Marke and Melot at the 4 Wagner had plans to write and compose a Buddhist opera entitled “Die Sieger.” 88ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature end of Act II, when he says to Isolde: “Wherever Tristan parts/would you, Isolde, follow him?/This land which Tristan has in mind/where there is no sun/it is the dark, night-like land/from where my mother once gave birth to me/as she died/…/the magic empire of the night/from where I once awoke/this is what Tristan offers Isolde.” This indeed does not only resemble “a state of complete unconsciousness, complete annihilation, and complete end of all dreams”, but also a state in which all social barriers between Tristan and Isolde that had prevented their unification would lose their power over them. Apparently Wagner is alluding to the metaphysical power of music with its “metaphysical deed proper” in mind by which things are expressed without words. Let us have a closer look at the musical challenge for Wagner to set the Nirvana—a “haven of entire tranquility”, a “negative space” (Treadwell 172-73) —into music. The “negative space” or the lack of a space that could be located within the grid of mental coordinates must be placed nevertheless within the musical world if it is to represent a major category of the opera. J. Treadwell offers a convincing interpretation of Tristan in this aspect. He holds that music for Wagner is “the language of empty space: what it expresses is the vast gap between itself and ‘the world’” (Treadwell 179); music is for Wagner of no linguistic quality. There is no message transported by music, and the silence that resonates in and through music “makes no reference to the world, it has no linguistic content: a resonating absence, nothingness turned into sound. Like the Nirvana, music represents a negative presence, a state of existence defined by its utter remoteness from existence” (Treadwell 179). Silence rather symbolizes a transcendental realm of which nothing can be said at all— even music would fail, for there is no content to be transported from the orchestra (the “musician”) to the audience. And it is exactly this trait that puts music into a privileged position to perform the Schopenhauerian redemption program. Treadwell gives an example of what he understands under “soundturned nothingness.” He analyzes the first bars of the Prelude where the initial phrases, together with their pauses, resound as musical unities, with the pauses as their silently “sounding”, integrated part. What we hear in the pauses of the prelude, Treadwell thinks, is not just nothing, but the resonating nothingness via the absence of sounds which puts us into an empty space, and which, at the same time, invokes in us a desire to overcome that very empty space. This ambiguous feeling, a calculated effect of Wagner’s compositional technique, takes us into the first act and never releases us Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 89 throughout the whole opera, for the music in its chromatic unresolvedness never “conquers” the emptiness it helped to create and it musically “promises” to resolve it but never does so except at the very end. So the first Act already places us into a Nirvana with a music which is “saying nothing, speaking nothingness, making absence present and palpable” (Treadwell 180), finally disconnecting itself from the world it presents on stage. Treadwell’s point now is that for him Wagner equals the Schopenhauerian element of renunciation of desire with the renunciation of the common idea that music “speaks”, that it has anything meaningful to say about the world. Music, in this new concept, practices a “true” renunciation of the individual will by refusing to accept that the Nirvana qua nothingness be “pressed into [its] service” (Treadwell 181)—not even by music! Music, therefore, has the (Schopenhauerian) role to “interpret” Tristan’s and Isolde’s worldly sexual desire as tentative, as revocable, denying its “stable meanings, offering instead the impression of distance and emptiness” from and of an improper social world - music as the proper form of denying the world, thus music as the “metaphysical deed proper” (Treadwell 184). The performance in the opera house demonstrates with artistic means that the stilling of sexual desires in the real world is factually impossible; the silent moments, the pauses in the melos of the music “remind” (with the help of the composer) music itself of its own essential reservations and restrictions vis-à-vis a meaningful fulfillment of any desire that could be uttered in an intelligible language. Language loses its meaning; in the land of Nirvana it has no rationally conveyable meaning as long as the inherent silence of the music resonates. Treadwell’s interpretation opposes those which rely too much on the quasi-language concept of music, and presents instead an understanding of the opera which integrates music as an essentially non-linguistic medium of communication with its limits in principle as to what music could convey to the audience. What has not been sufficiently dealt with, however, in this interpretation is the ideological role of the whole operatic enterprise as such, which we believe is a crucial aspect of the Tristan concept. From this perspective we need to “rehabilitate” the quasi-language concept of music, this time, however, not for metaphysical, but for existential reasons based on dramaturgical considerations. Wagner had always been a man of the theater, a theatrarch or a mimomane (Nietzsche), who wrote and composed his plays never without calculating the effects that the scenes should trigger when 90ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature performed on stage. We now take the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk5 one step furtherwhen focusing, in the following chapter, on the intended stage effect which played an outstanding role in his concept of Tristan. III. The “Tristan”-Effect Silence, compared to Treadwell’s interpretation, regains its quasi-linguistic function if we follow the thesis that the effect that is to be achieved during the performance of Tristan is the dominating aspect of an appropriate interpretation. Tristan is silent because the “true” world he envisages is ineffable and cannot linguistically be expressed except by music (metaphysical silence); and it would not make sense to speak because it would not be understood, which in turn would create situations of conflict with fatal results (imperative silence). Subsequently, music reigns in as it opens in its own wordless language a new, “truer” world in which language fails, thus enthroning itself (and its composer) with its ability to present, in “pure apperceptions”, the deep structure of the world—the universal world-Will—as the proper medium of a metaphysical truth. The longing-motif in Tristan is intonated whenever the narrative of the story suggests it to be there. But what is new now is that this metaphysical function of music in Tristan is itself superseded by a “higher”, dramaturgical function in an artistic event that also integrates the audience into what happens on stage. Wagner, one could say, returns to his old revolutionary dreams in Dresden of 1849 when he wished to educate and guide a new audience that finally would be in the position to appreciate his art. This time, however, not under the premises of political and social changes, but under the guidance of a musician who succeeds to seduce an audience that has come to celebrate a genius. 1. Experiencing the ineffable with “Tristan” on-stage With the rise of capitalism art has become overwhelmingly a matter of business during his time, governed, according to Wagner, by rational calculations for which the art work is just another commodity produced for the sake of profit-making for impresarios who follow the taste of the masses, art had been degraded as mere entertainment. In reaction to this, Wagner de5 Wagner hardly used this term. Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 91 vised his Ring as an artistic remedy: The main theme of the Ring is the demise of the “pure human nature” (das rein Menschliche) in humans when confronted with the corrupted industrial captains who solely strive for profit; consequently, the leaders (the gods) and their corrupt value system must fall. The Ring is a genuinely critical enterprise, targeting the various forms of alienation of human relationships which had been colonized by the prevailing capitalist paradigms of greed, power and profit-making. “Tristan” is not so much concerned with such a critical attitude. It certainly deals with the most central of all human emotions, love, and the impossibility of living it fully out thanks to awry social arrangements in which the lovers are inescapably embedded. Indeed, the Ring concept resonates considerably in Tristan. But the factors that hamper love’s untainted delights between Tristan and Isolde are rather in place as metaphysical necessities than as social factors that allow evil minds to prevail. Both of Tristan’s antagonists, for instance, behave nobly: King Marke, being betrayed by (an innocent) Tristan, remains a sympathetic, but tragic figure, even seeking forgiveness from Tristan after having learned of the fateful potion in Act III from Brangaene; Melot, Tristan’s friend and doom, has no evil motives in mind when he killed Tristan. His motives were to defend his king’s honor, an action to be expected at that time from a loyal peer even vis-à-vis a friend. The interruptions, the disturbances from the outside world that timely interfere with the fulfillment of Tristan and Isolde’s pure love in all three Acts (Act I, scene 5, at the arrival at Cornwall; Act II, scene 3, when Marke/Melot arrive; Act III, scene 2, Tristan’s death) are of a higher, of a more philosophical dignity than those of the malicious minds of protagonists of the Ring (Alberich, Hagen, even Wotan) who are lured into their evil actions by the prospect of sheer power. The non-fulfillment of Isolde’s and Tristan’s love, their “failure”, results instead from the nature of love itself, from its inherent impediments of fulfillment which prevents love from being destroyed the moment it would be fulfilled. The metaphysical paradox—unifying the truth-seeking individual with the world-Will without giving up individuality—is now repeated at the level of love, both paradoxes resulting from the unrealizable burden of finding answers to questions with ultimate solutions. Searching for absolute love, i.e. love at its purest as an absolute togetherness, is labour’s lost for our rational understanding. The metaphysical situation is the same for both, for the philosophical truth-seeker as well as for the lover. 92ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature Tristan links both, the lover and the truth-seeker, by staging the impossibility of fulfillment of a (metaphysically) true love (unification of partners) in the real social world as a consequence of the impossibility of fulfillment of a (metaphysically) true life (unification of individual with the world-Will) in the real social world. Wagner the artist transcends this impossibility with his artistic means, i.e. with music as his metaphysical tool. Music creates the metaphysical world (or atmosphere) for an audience that experiences in the opera house what the protagonists cannot experience on stage. Metaphysical fulfillment in the form of unification with the essence of the world (for the singers: love; for the audience: the world-Will). Love’s fulfillment in the social world, as known by both Tristan and Isolde, could only be achieved without any social constraints in death. But if death is the only state where no outside interference could possibly disturb love’s perfection, then love itself would be eliminated, together with its external factors. What could love be for lovers in a world in which they no longer exist? Why do Tristan and Isolde long for their common death as love’s ultimate fulfillment? A fulfillment of this yearning would mean the end of suffering – but also the end of love. Answers to these questions would have to take Wagner’s ideas as man of the theater into account. It would better explain the connection of love and death in an opera that envisages higher aspirations than “just” presenting metaphysical deeds. Metaphysical deeds need to be done; they need to be performed as deeds, not just represented. Wagner, in trying to do so, so to speak individualizes the metaphysical enterprise that propagates the end of the principium individuationis as an event that could only be realized by a genius individual—by himself. To achieve this goal Wagner needed his theater; he needed a “Bayreuth” even long before he ever heard of this town. The importance of the performing moment for his metaphysics, the act of the “metaphysical deed proper” can be demonstrated by having a closer look at the way how Wagner the artist integrates what happens on stage into the idea of the whole opera. In the case of Tristan it is the topic of love and death. The latter will be discussed first. 2. Death that must not die It has escaped many interpreters of Tristan that in the plot of the drama death or complete self-obliteration into night has been interfered with as many times as it has been the case with the full consumption of love: In Act Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 93 I, when Brangaene, Isolde’s maid, instead of offering both the demanded death potion hands over the love/life drink; in Act II, when Tristan tries to commit (passive) suicide by allowing Melot to fell him, but without the desired result, and wakes in daylight back at home in the Bretagne far away from his Isolde; and in Act III, when the second ship arrives, preventing Isolde from dying after Tristan’s death, though only with the delay of a few stage minutes. Basically, the main characters are dying or longing to die throughout the whole opera, but they can’t. Tristan, since the end of Act I until his death in Act III, is prepared for the final silence, which of course would be death, the only solution they have in mind all three acts whenever they talk about their love. One wonders how death could be an option for love’s true fulfillment. Wagner plays with two different concepts of death, bringing both into the main theme of Tristan, love: a symbolic death on stage (stageD) as opposed to the real death in life (realD). The performed death symbolizes a metaphysical message for the audience, whereas death as the absolute end would leave nothing to symbolize. What Wagner, in his Tristan, does is to perform the stage death (stageD) so as to demonstrate what love in its purest form would be if freed from all possible contingencies. The only problem is that then, as mentioned above, love would no longer be possible; the lovers would simply be dead. But death in life is different from death on stage. By performing the impossibility of pure love in life visibly on stage where the lovers who consequently try to live their true love would have to die, pure love is at the same time made possible by means of an art form that undermines its visible = social = day = dividing limitations. The distinction lies in the performance of the opera, with an unfolding drama on stage that indicates the rational impasse (in life; in philosophy) for which music offers an audible = metaphysical = night = unifying solution. The symbolizing effect which the staging of Tristan offers when integrating death into its plot can be described as follows. In the fight at the end of Act II Tristan invites, as it were, Melot to strike him down with his sword, hoping to die and thus transform his love for Isolde into a pure state within a “true” world (“... to the land where the sun’s light does not shine”). However, a new deception reigns in: Tristan remains alive, again, re-entering the day-world for the second time; Melot’s sword did not kill him. It just afflicted a wound that renders him lingering in a middle-world between life and death. The wound, as we read in this scene, stands for an unfulfilled love, only to be healed by forces that would also 94ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature heal the love-pain. Since love-pain can only be healed, i.e. redeemed or freed to its purest form by the elimination of all the real-world obstacles, redemption would happen for both, Tristan and Isolde, once they died—but only as stageD staging realD. But Tristan awakes again – love’s fulfillment would not happen if one of them—Isolde—survives, because the “world” would still interfere, in the form of surviving Isolde, with the pure, true love even after his death (as stageD). He awakes home, in his castle back in the Bretagne, away from Isolde, wounded, in love-pain of unfulfilled desire. For a moment music and words are remarkably in harmony: Tristan “explains” to Kurwenal (Act III, beginning) where he “dwelled” in his agony before they returned home: “Where I wake up, I do not stay, but where I stayed, I cannot tell you.” Tristan does not sing these words; he rather stammers them without any musical support. They are hardly audible, quite often straining the patience of a sometimes impatient audience during performances. Apparently, Wagner deliberately orchestrated this scene in this way where music fails to express the unspeakable, i.e. the sphere of death (realD) from where not even music would be able to assume any meaning. There would be nothing from where to seek or where to convey any meaning. Death (realD) would not only mean the end of the suffering, but also the end of love. But music continues, and the audience needs to be appeased, needs to be released from the tensions that arise when death plays its cruel game on stage by being necessary and impossible at the same time. Apparently, Wagner the artist has the other death (stageD) in mind when he composed the long Act III with Tristan dying throughout nearly the whole act and who, together with the audience, is finally redeemed by Isolde’s pure love alias pure death (stageD). It is the artist who lets his creatures die for the sake of pure love. There is always a day as long as you live. So if love (personified by Tristan and Isolde) longs for the real night (death as realD), and if it were fulfilled, love would be annihilated at the same time. Their deaths must be therefore interpreted as Wagner’s plea for life: “Love, not silence”, Mayer correctly brings the ending of the opera to a point (74). Would this mean that Tristan has a happy ending as Nietzsche suggests despite almost everyone dying like in a Shakespearean tragedy? Doesn’t Isolde, in her Liebestod at the end of the tragedy, finally have a positive message, at least for those who survive, the audience? Why did Wagner create such a paradoxical story of fulfilled non-fulfillment? The heroes oscillate somehow between dualistic scenarios Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 95 that trigger actions in the social world which only could be properly interpreted from the “true” world’s point of view, but the true world is not a world that can be told, explained or performed with words that necessarily would miss its “true” dimension; but it can be performed in effigy or as an illusion where the whole dramatic circumstances of the performance become the silent presenters of what necessarily escapes words. We now confront Wagner’s solution with Schopenhauer’s philosophy to see how he departs from his ideas in some essential scenes. 3. Love that cannot be lived The nature of love for Wagner is paradoxical, and Tristan is the drama that brings this paradox on stage: Love, always longing for fulfillment, cannot be fulfilled without losing its innocence or nature. Subsequently, love should not be fulfilled if it were to maintain its nature, because love is longing for— but not having—fulfillment. Therefore, whenever Tristan’s and Isolde’s love draws closer to its fulfilling climax on stage, Wagner “saves” love for the true love’s sake by interrupting fulfillment in favor of maintaining the illusion of fulfillment necessary to preserve love’s nature. Or, as it has been noted by a subtle, very Lacanian connoisseur of Tristan: The “objective reality intervenes to externalize the inherent impediment, to sustain the illusion that without its intervention the blissful immersion would have gone on to its ecstatic climax” (Žižek 125). The world after the climax, we sadly have to concede, is always très triste. Assuming that Wagner holds that illusions about love’s fulfillment are vital for the continuation of eternal love, then re-reading the text of Tristan from this perspective would eventually lead to the correction of the rather simplistic view that “night” stands for true love which must remain unfulfilled in the daylight of social realities from where the lovers ultimately cannot escape. A Schopenhauerian interpretation would go along these lines, as we have seen; it would have the sphere of the night as the true reality (of the Will) against which the (rational objectivations of the) day just stand(s) for a reality that only could be overcome if true love (= immersion into the other, ascetically renouncing one’s own individuality or, as modified by Wagner, immersing oneself into the full delight/delirium of love passion) indeed happens. Many interpreters see it this way. There is another Wagnerian interpretation. It is of a different category, now assuming that—despite the metaphysical point that is always present in 96ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature Wagner’s thoughts—the day reality is, unfortunately for the protagonists on stage, the true reality that inherently must succeed in order to save the illusion of love from being disillusioned. Yet the illusion of fulfillment is part of love’s own nature: Illusion as nature of love, thus perverting “true” love in a common romantic sense. The Wagnerian solution of the love-paradox is, therefore, utterly anti-Schopenhauerian: Redemption from burning desire must happen in the real (day) world, and the redeeming self-obliteration of the desire would take place instead by an ascetic renunciation of the world-dominating urge now by the illusionary execution of the real coital sexual act by which the will’s obsolete longing for satisfaction would indeed come to a standstill—but likewise as an illusion! In order to achieve this, the individual in the real world must be put into an exhilarating mental state so as to be immersed with the essence of love by way of ecstasy that causes an illusionary state of mind, though only for a rather short period of time when emotions reach their most intense stage. The paradox would still be there: The real climax of love needs to be avoided for love’s sake; otherwise it would mean eodem actu its very death. Imagine: The assumed nightingale would have been Juliet’s lark, Romeo and Juliet marry and live happily together until they retire. Wagner uses the theater as the location where a sphere of ecstasy is created by the composer, and where redemption solely can take place. In an ideal theater (“Bayreuth”) attending an ideal performance of an “artwork of the future” (so the title of Wagner’s essay of 1849), the audience would see on stage the story of an unfulfilled true love that never reaches its climax, because the loving couple would never be allowed by the social circumstances to be united, but, more importantly, also because Wagner cannot allow this to happen for artistic and metaphysical reasons. The climax, however, could be illusionary, achieved the moment the audience feels united with the stage event itself. Wagner, therefore, needs to create a story of passionate but unfulfilled love that is complemented by music which is now (unlike the “rational” plot) the right metaphysical tool to accomplish real unification or fulfillment at an emotional level. Unification would happen in the real world, this time, however, not between the lovers (Tristan and Isolde) on stage, but in the audience in front of the stage, lulling the spectators into an ecstatic state of mind. Music creates the medium in which ecstatic experiences are made possible. An audience in ecstasy is literally drawn into the performance by a music that suggests the obliteration of the conscious world—the blurring of the minds of the people is a calculated effect that Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 97 Wagner deliberately integrated in the concept of his Gesamtkunstwerk (Fuerbeth 401). In this way, all the Schopenhauerian elements needed for an event of metaphysical dimensions—the metaphysical dual world, music, rationality, feeling—are there, plus the Wagnerian solution that could not possibly be delivered by a non-artist: The infinite flow of music captures the audience for a period of time—the time of the performance—, and transforms the audience’s expectations into a heightened state of mind in which redemption, in form of a physical relief, really takes place as a live event orchestrated and directed by the philosophical and musical genius Richard Wagner. It has been Wagner’s program for decades indeed: To return to the classic Greek idea of drama as an event that brings together an audience—the citizens of Athens/Bayreuth—for a limited period of time in which their attention is fully captivated by what happens on stage. The stage action is related in one way or in another to all citizens of Athens; they “recognize” themselves as the main subjects of the drama, thus creating an invisible bond amongst them that spiritually ties them together as one “nation” (or one audience) with members sharing a common experience and common tasks. The ideas which Wagner follows are of course from Aristotle’s Poetica, where he ponders over the cathartic effect of the performance of the tragedy on the audience. The tragic events on stage should lay bare emotions of “fright and lament” or “fear and mercy” [phóbos and éleos] in the people’s hearts, thus relieving the tensions of their affective lives that have been accumulated during their everyday activities. Whereas Aristotle interpreted this liberating effect as a rather therapeutic enterprise that would help to release tensions in a controlled way (Seeck 255), Wagner remodeled this calculated physical effect in favor of his metaphysical-Schopenhauerian aspirations. But this “Schopenhauerian turn” has been turned over by a further—final—development of Wagner’s art. It has become personal. What needs to be redeemed by “Tristan” is not the written word or the rational thought; nor is it the true loving couple that had to fail in a world full of profiteering and inhuman political and social constellations; nor is it the will as such, but the redeemer himself—Wagner! Nietzsche seems to get it right when he equated his former mentor with the French Late-Romanticists: “… all of them great discoverers in the sphere of the sublime, also of the ugly and the abominable, even greater discoverers in the field of effects, of pretending, in the art of personal exhibition, all talents far beyond their geniality—virtuosi through and through, with eerie 98ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature access to all that seduces, lures, forces, overthrows, natural-born enemies of logics and of straight paths, longing for the alien, the exotic, the Immeasurable, the awry, the contradictory; …” (Nietzsche 5: 202-03). The heroines in Wagner’s operas, according to Nietzsche in 1888, are “always five steps away from hospital” (Nietzsche 6: 34). This warning might be applied also to an audience which is engaged in search for a metaphysical adventure à la Wagner. Tristan’s Silence, Philosophicallyʳ ʳ 99 Works Cited Bubner, Ruediger. “Ueber einige Bedingungen gegewaertiger Aesthetik.” Aesthetische Erfahrung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. 9-51. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Das Musikdrama als symphonische Oper.” Vom Musikdrama zur Literaturoper. Munich: Katzbichler, 1983. 67-85. Dahlhaus, Carl. Richard Wagners Musikdramen. Munich: Piper, 1985. Frank, Manfred. Der kommende Gott. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Fuehrbeth, Oliver. “Tristan und Isolde.” Wagner und Nietzsche. Kultur-Werk-Wirkung. Ed. S. Sorgner et al. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008. 397-402. Gregor-Dellin, Martin. Richard Wagner: Sein Leben. Sein Werk. Sein Jahrhundert. Munich: Piper, 1980. Habermas, Juergen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Kienzle, Ulrike. “Buddhismus.” Wagner und Nietzsche. Kultur-Werk- Wirkung. Ed. S. Sorgner et al. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008. 122-42. Mann, Thomas. “Leiden und Groesse Richard Wagners.” Wagner und unsere Zeit. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983. 63-121. Mayer, Hans. “Tristans Schweigen.” Anmerkungen zu Wagner. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. 61-75. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Die Geburt der Tragoedie [The birth of tragedy].” Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Critical Study ed. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988. 9-156. ---. “Jenseits von Gut und Boese [Beyond good and evil].” Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Critical Study ed. Vol. 5. Frankfurt: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988. 9-243. ---. “Der Fall Wagner [The case Wagner].” Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Critical Study ed. Vol. 6. Frankfurt: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988. 11-53. Peil, Peter. Die Krise des neuzeitlichen Menschen im Werk Richard Wagners. Koeln: Boehlau, 1990. Pothast, Ulrich. Die eigentlich metaphysische Taetigkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Safranski, Ruediger. Romantik. Eine deutsche Affaire. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2009. Safranski, Ruediger. Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990. 100ʳ ʳ NTU Studies in Language and Literature Schnaedelbach, Herbert. Philosophie in Deutschland 1831-1933. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983 Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The world as will and representation].” Vol.1 Ed. Werner Brede. Munich: C. Hanser Verlag, n.d. 7-522. Seeck, Gustav Adolf. Die griechische Tragoedie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Siener, David. “Schweigen und Verschweigen in Richard Wagners Musikdrama ‘Tristan und Isolde.’” MA thesis. U of Vienna, 2010. <http://othes.univie.ac.at/9867/1/2010-04-27_0205449.pdf>. Treadwell, James. Interpreting Wagner. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Wagner, Cosima. Die Tagebuecher [Diaries]. Vol. 3. Eds. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack. Munich: Piper, 1976. Wagner, Richard. Saemtliche Briefe [Collected Letters]. Vol. 6. Eds. G. Strobel and W. Wolf. Leipzig/Wiesbaden: VEB Deutscher Verlag fuer Musik, 1976 Wagner, Richard. “Beethoven.” Trans. William Ashton Ellis. Actors and Singers. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works [1896]. Vol. 5: 61-126. The Wagner Library. <http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr 0133.htm>. ---. “Oper und Drama” [Opera and Drama]. Dichtungen und Schriften. Jubilaeumsausgabe in zehn Baenden. Vol. 7. Ed. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1983. ---. “Zukunftsmusik” [Music of the future]. Dichtungen und Schriften. Jubilaeumsausgabe in zehn Baenden. Vol. 8. Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1983. 45-102. Wapnewski, Peter. “Tristan und Isolde”. Der traurige Gott. Richard Wagner in seinen Helden. Munich: dtv, 1982. 29-85. Žižek, Slavoj. “I do not order my dreams“. Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge, 2002. 103-225. ---. “The Politics of Redemption, or, Why Richard Wagner is Worth Saving.” Lacan. The Silent Partners. London: Verso, 2006. 232-69. Zoeller, Guenter. “Schopenhauer. Der Vordenker des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Wagner und Nietzsche. Kultur-Werk-Wirkung. Ed. S. Sorgner et al. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008. 355-72. [Received 14 February 2011; accepted 19 December 2011]