Richard Wagner’s adoption of Schopenhauerian philosophy was in evidence in his work before he ever conceived of the Tristan und Isolde legend as opera. Many of the central figures in Wagner’s earlier works are actors in a dark universe, where heroism and a striving for happiness run up against the inevitable misery and hopelessness that Schopenhauer ascribed to the temporal world. Wagner came to realize that Schopenhauer’s concept of renunciation actually formed “a long-standing, if unconscious, Wagnerian conviction” (Vandenabeele, 349). As such, “the main characters of those operas he wrote before coming under the spell of Schopenhauer – The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Lohengrin and even The Ring – already exemplify an attitude very much like the Schopenhauerian negation of life” (349). Wagner’s interpretation of the Schopenhauerian ethic in Tristan und Isolde is actually the fulfillment of a natural evolution in Wagner’s musical aesthetic. It is an emphasis on music which expresses those philosophical concepts that lead Tristan und Isolde to the ultimate fulfillment of their love, the Liebestod. As such, Wagner’s romantic tragedy represents a new belief in music theory, one profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer’s writings.
In his biography, Wagner is quite direct in crediting Schopenhauer with the inspiration for Tristan und Isolde. Wagner wrote that his “poetic impulses” were set in motion when working on a musical production (Wagner, 416). It was this “serious mood created by
Schopenhauer, (which) was trying to find ecstatic expression. It was some such mood that inspired the conception of a ‘Tristan und Isolde’” (Wagner, 416). However, this time poetry was not to be Wagner’s inspiration. Schopenhauer’s influence inspired a work in which the music, not an array of visual images or words, tells the story. “Schopenhauer had a profound effect on (Wagner’s) music as well, causing him to modify his theory on the importance of achieving a balanced synthesis of music, poetry, and drama: he now privileged music as the most potent and expressive of the arts, alone capable of transporting one beyond the material world” (Grimbert, lvii).
Wagner’s telling of the Tristan and Isolde legend traces the arc of Schopenhauer’s core philosophy. The two lovers, carried away by the power of their emotion and with faith that an idyllic contentment is within their reach, seek “transcendent heights before the dream isshattered” (Grimbert, lvii). The music carries the story of their lovely, yet ultimately false, delight through the first two acts into the third, in which oblivion awaits. Here the story comes full circle and the couple’s death wish is fulfilled in the Liebestod, the perfect death and the preservation of love in one final, poignant act. As in Schopenhauer, the lovers’ blissful delusion is realized in the denouement. Eric Chafe wrote that Wagner’s music achieves a beautiful symbiosis of atonality and tonality unknown in his previous operas. The music culminates with what Chafe calls an “affirmation of tonality,” which mirrors the romantic aspect, in the Liebestod, the power of which is brilliantly set up by the atonality of the music leading up to Tristan’s curse in Act 3 (Chafe, 14-15). This atonality addresses “something much closer to Schopenhauer’s negative, or pessimistic, wisdom” (14-15).
Schopenhauer held that the only meaningful way for an individual to attain a measure of inner peace is to renounce worldly desires. While Wagner addressed this philosophy in greater depth in Parsifal, it is present in Tristan und Isolde as well. There is an element of renunciation in the final, conciliatory act of the two lovers. Their death compact is a resignation to the inexorability of fate and the impossibility of true happiness in a world marked by death and suffering. The drama leading up to this conclusion is suffused with Wagner’s erotic sensibility, an expressive element that connects him to Schopenhauer. “Schopenhaueris the nineteenth-century lynchpin for equating Wagner’s music with Eros, for while we are long familiar with his claim that music exhibits ‘the Will itself’, once music’s capacity to evoke a gnawing metaphysical desire through prolonged dissonance is equated with what Schopenhauer calls the ‘Will-to-live’” (Trippett, 249). The conclusion Wagner reaches through the music is that the “Will-to-live” is manifested in the “ecstasy of copulation,” in the use of erotic love to achieve a measure of immortality (249). The Schopenhauerian interpretation is that the psychological root of sexual activity lies in the search for a kind of immortality, a doomed but powerful assertion that Wagner elaborates throughout the first two acts.
Wagner’s interpretation of Schopenhauer produced a burst of erotic passion that elicited extreme reactions from other composers. After watching a performance, Emmanuel Chabrier sobbed uncontrollably, while Guillaume Lekeu actually passed out during a performance in Bayreuth (The Guardian, 2000). Wagner himself had a foreshadowing that the music in Tristan und Isolde might prove too overpowering for some, worrying that he had created “something fearful” (2000). Subsequent stagings of the opera have remained faithful to the equating of sex
with death, the theme that had produced such extreme reactions, in which the expression of physical love cannot fulfill the lovers’ profound desire for each other. Wagner’s “lovers feel a desire for each other so intense that the physical world cannot contain it and its only fulfillment lies in their voluntary embracing the ‘supreme pleasure’ of the total dissolution of identity, being and life” (2000). It is in his portrayal of the dissolution of the self, the achievement of what Schopenhauer defined as “Nirvana,” that Wagner’s art comes full circle. Death as the culmination of failed striving and human yearning was a theme that Wagner explored in his earlier works, but which lacked the pathos of Tristan and Isolde’s fate. Schopenhauer’s contention that an “attitude of sympathy” toward the suffering of others is beneficial to the individual (Caldwell, 423) is actualized in the finale of Tristan und Isolde.
Wagner was able to elicit such a powerful range of emotion by freeing his musical composition from the constraints of tonal harmony. In so doing, he created a vortex of feeling by consciously using the music as a sensual channel for evocative, even erratic feelings of passion. Schopenhauer had convinced Wagner that art could provide a conduit to a deeper realm, one which rendered superficial traditionally prosaic artistic representations of love. This is Schopenhauer’s great legacy to Wagner, whose music reached previously unknown levels of complexity and maturity, indicated by his employment of dissonance (the monumental influence of the famous “Tristan chord,” the initial chord in the opera, is perhaps the most notable example of Wagner’s new musical depth). The extent to which Wagner understood and internalized Schopenhauer’s philosophy is evident in the influence that Tristan und Isolde still wields as an icon of Western culture. Wagner had clearly realized the artistic possibilities inherent in a world
view which held that unachievable desire is what drives human beings. His comprehension and musical interpretation of that philosophy helped Wagner fulfill the vast potential inherent in his music.
Of course, there is more to an examination of Schopenhauer’s influence on Tristan und Isolde than analyzing the psychological effect on Wagner of “the annihilation of the will” (Vandenabeele, 349). In fact, Wagner resisted Schopenhauer’s evident gloominess as contrary to the spirit of his earlier works. However, as has been discussed, Wagner (with the help of Friedrich Nietzsche) came to realize that this was not the case. One must also consider Wagner’s re-assessment of his role as an artist. He came to realize that, given the starkness of Schopenhauer’s perspective, art and music had a vitally important place in the world. As such, Wagner concluded that “the true role of artis an escape from this intolerable world into an alternative one” (Magee, 186). In other words, to provide a means of escape from the inevitability of man’s limited destiny.
Schopenhauer and Wagner formed what is quite likely the most formidable and lasting coupling of ethos and art in modern Western culture. Tristan und Isolde is widely considered one of the most important works of musical theater in the history of the milieu. It opened new vistas of expression for the composer, significantly expanding the importance of music within the context of opera. Schopenhauer showed Wagner that there is a deeper meaning to the human condition but, more importantly, this realization changed Wagner’s approach to music, the potential of which he understood to be unlimited as a means of articulation. Tristan und Isolde is the product of Wagner’s artistic awakening, the last great evolution of a great career. Together,
Wagner, Schopenhauer and Tristan und Isolde form a triad that transformed not only Wagner as a composer but the entire Western musical aesthetic.
Works Cited
Caldwell, William. Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance. London: W.
Black, 1896.
Chafe, Eric Thomas. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s ‘Tristan
und Isolde.’ New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005.
Grimbert, Joan T. Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. Oxon, UK: Psychology Press, 1995.
“Is This the Most Powerful Music Ever Written?” The Guardian. 13 October 2000. Retrieved
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review
Magee, Bryan. The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. New York, NY: MacMillan, 2002.
Trippett, David. “Wagner Studies and the Paralletic Drift.” Cambridge Opera Journal, 22, 2,
235-255.
Vandenabeele, Bart. A Companion to Schopenhauer. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons,
2012.
Wagner, Richard. My Life. Middlesex, UK: The Echo Library, 2007.
