Tristram and Yseult become Tristan and Isolde in German. The
story is found in one form or another in Celtic, Norse, and no doubt other
mythologies. Chaucer tells it, and Wagner does it in what for my taste is one
of his less unsuccessful attempts at a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ —something more than
an opera; an attempt to combine ‘all’ the arts in one vast work.
The story is guaranteed popularity, being — like so many in
the late and slightly lamented News of the World — about forbidden love. In
crude outline: the young knight Tristan is sent to Ireland by King Mark to
bring back Isolde, whom Mark plans to make his queen. But on the return journey
Tristan and Isolde ‘accidentally’ drink a magic potion together and fall
helplessly — hopelessly — in love: Tristan is honour bound not to lay a finger
on Isolde, who desperately wants him to. The whole opera is, as Stephen Fry
forthrightly put it in a six-minute film (well worth finding on YouTube), a
four-hour coitus interruptus. Only right at the end, in the ‘Liebestod’, is
their passion at last consummated. You don’t need much German — Liebe=Love,
Tod=Death, to get the idea.
It would take better stage and literary craft than Wagner’s
to maintain the tension of a four-hour prick and pussy tease. Wagner’s genius
was — and passionate Wagnerians won’t like me for saying it — almost exclusively
musical, though he could do more with ‘pure’ music one would have thought
possible. There are more valid reasons than short attention-spans and the
superficiality of popular taste why the wordless and static Prelude (and of
course the ecstatic Liebestod) are the only bits of the opera most of us can
stand.
——~——
Hmm… Wagner’s lengthiness — ‘Monsieur Wagner a de beaux
moments, mais de mauvais quart d’heures’, said Rossini — is infectious. I haven’t
even got to the chord of my title. Tomorrow, barring such irritating distractions as the little earthquakes we’ve
been having lately, I’ll dive straight in with a music example.
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