A Note from James Conlon, Music Director

"I think that the second act of Tristan, in part of its inspired instrumentation, is one of the most sublime creations of the human spirit in the field of musical invention. I could never quite grasp the fact that [it] had been created by a mere human being" (Giuseppe Verdi)

"Every erotic is a mystic who is unaware of it…or the contrary." (Denis de Rougemont)

No composer has been the subject of more books than Richard Wagner. No composer has written anything remotely close to the volume of prose works as Wagner. No composer has written the amount of poetry as Wagner (who penned all of his libretti himself). And of all his works, none has received more attention than Tristan und Isolde.

Tristan is generally seen as the work that would transform and ultimately exhaust the aesthetics of the 19th century. Musically-and in particular, harmonically-it is viewed by some to be the starting bell of the 20th. Even though the famous "Tristan Chord" was literally lifted intact from his friend Franz Liszt, as employed by Wagner it fractured the egg of the past. Together with Parsifal, it would simultaneously inspire generations of composers and cast a shadow over their efforts. They would try to emulate it, create a contemporary equivalent, push its harmony further over the edge of tonality or, after adoring it, reject it with a violence and fervor resembling a jilted love or the symbolic patricide of the young adult of an authoritarian parent. But, one way or other, they all had to come to terms with it.

Given the above, a program note can only select a fragmentary aspect from this immense subject. The written word is always inadequate to illuminate music in its essence, and it is particularly so for Tristan. Technical explanations of the harmonic revolution, the formal innovations, the further development of Wagner's system of leading motives (Leitmotiv) are better left to the music itself than to the page.

One can write about the subject which is of universal importance: eroticism. Tristan has been considered as the greatest single musical work that gives the auditor (I use this term advisedly) access to the cosmos, the permanent, the infinite, that which is beyond space and time, through the channel of the erotic union of two human beings.

Wagner had by the 1850s fully embraced the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The composer literally worshipped him from afar (most uncharacteristic for him), and was nourished by his writings until the end of his life, and saw his own art as the completion of and complement to the philosopher. For him, there were three modes of admission to direct contact with those aspects of existence that lie beyond that which we can know directly (in Kantian philosophy: phenomena) to those that can be known only intuitively or abstractly (noumena.) They were: mystical (the relinquishing or loss of the individual ego to a direct experience of all that is permanent, intangible and fundamental to the universe), erotic (through passionate sexual relations that unify body, mind and spirit) and art (especially music), whose power resides beyond the human's mind to articulate. Wagner, in fact, had devoted his immense genius to that premise, even before he was able to articulate it or was conscious of its force. That is why at the moment he encountered the writings of Schopenhauer, he felt both inspiration and self-affirmation. He recognized the older philosopher as a superior mind articulating what he was able to express and create through music drama.

The French Jesuit writer Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World (1939), cites the 12th-century legend Tristan et Iseut as the source of the fundamental European myth and the origin of Romantic literature. What he has to say about it is a key to understanding and contextualizing centuries of romantic and erotic European literature. It gives us an entrance point to Wagner, who distilled the erotic into pure music in a way that changed the course of musical history.

He writes: "Love and death, a fatal love, if not the whole of poetry, at least…whatever is universally moving in European literature…Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the sense nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fact."

So it is precisely the trials and tribulations that stoke the luminous fires of romance. Whatever the lovers' obstacles may be (betrayed spouses, disapproving, unsympathetic and uncomprehending societies, feuding families, forbidding parents), the story is over when the trials end. When it ends joyously they "live happily ever after" and the story is finished. When it ends tragically, the conflicts are resolved and the story is finished. The curtain of many a beloved opera rings down on a deceased soprano or tenor (or both), run through by the enemy's sword, poisoned by a jealous rival, by committing suicide or, failing all that, dead from a broken heart. Opera, literature, theater, poetry and yes, even absolute music, have this in common.

When the struggle is over, happily or not so, it is time for the fat lady to stop singing: the last out of the ninth inning. It is impossible to imagine, or to have any particular interest in observing, it has been quipped, Mr. and Mrs. Tristan in the kitchen in their bathrobes and slippers.

The development from legend to the status of myth is the first quantum leap. It is no longer only about the story itself, but the story that renders "transparent the transcendent" (Joseph Campbell). The second quantum leap is the abandonment of the word (despite all that Wagner writes and consciously believed about his poetry) to pure musical essence. The experience will be gently guided by the text, given three settings, but will only direct our conscious minds towards the particulars of this story, while moving our unconscious, our individuated egos, into the realm of universal consciousness and its unity that goes beyond any story.

The subjects of Wagner's music drama are, in my opinion, love and death, in equal measure. Death gives their love its urgency and eventually its goal: yearning, willing, wanting. Desiring, craving, aching. Thirsting with nostalgia for the world opened up through the erotic which knows no satisfaction, this is Wagner's dynamic from the first note to the last. The famous "Desire" motive with which the prelude will begin, will even at the moment of climax, subtlety reinsert itself to work its power again. The storms, the sea, the undulating harmonic and dynamics of the orchestral, are metaphors for the waves and tempests of passion. The traditional symbolism of Light and Dark, Day and Night, are turned on their head. The friendly Dark is where the lovers can freely express their passion; the hostile Light wants to destroy that passion by revealing it to society.

Almost no opera is as visually static as Tristan. But even this is a consequence of the Schopenhauer/Wagner conviction of the almost omnipotent power of the music to invade the soul of the listener, and to transport the auditor into the realm beyond our daily experience and the world of phenomena. More than in any other work of Wagner (with the sole (soul) exception of Parsifal) the text and the narrative fall into the background and the Music (with a capital M) bear (bare) the essence of the other -worldly experience. (both puns intended).

Whether the "eroticist as latent mystic" with yearning as its key (as in Tristan), or the "mystic as latent eroticist," with pity and compassion as its prime movers (as in Parsifal), the mode of transport (pun intended) is Wagner's music. Together with the third "mature" work, Die Meistersinger, they form a type of trilogy. They all derive from or at least reflect the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but inhabit three distinct, extraordinarily different, unique sound worlds.

For each human being who feels they have had a mystical experience, or have lived a Tristanesque love, these works need no elucidation, but they may serve for several hours, to put them in direct contact again with those feelings which, after all, as normal human beings, we cannot expect to sustain for all or even most of our lives. For those, who are yearning for this experience, it is well worth the investment of several hours time.

After two productions and numerous concert performances, I re-enter the magic of this "otherworldly sphere" fully knowing the power of the out of body experience that this work can induce. No composer or music can so well transport and convince the listener that there is no other music and no other universe possible than that which we are experiencing. Voltaire's "best of all possible worlds" seems superseded by "the only possible of possible worlds."

Wagner had wanted to unite the summits of western drama (the Greeks and Shakespeare) and symphonic development (Beethoven). He did that, and when he fully had incorporated and digested Schopenhauer, he bound together, through him, the fullness of the existing state of philosophy.

Having completed Tristan and Meistersinger and having revised Tannhäuser for Paris, he could return to the third act of Siegfried, which he had abandoned for over a decade. But he returned to it a changed man. Tristan and Schopenhauer had wrought their enchantment, and one can feel that in the midst of his Ring. More on that subject, much more, later.