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By Root 444 0

which means I should fill you in on a few things starting now, to prepare you. You’ll be happy to note (as I read somewhere, or possibly imagined) that certain listeners who attended the opera’s premiere 130-something years ago did in fact GO INSANE and were shipped off to asylums in the Bavarian Alps with a diagnosis of “Tristania.” I can hear you muttering “apocryphal” in your Ph.D. voice, and while I’m not inclined to disagree, insanity IS perhaps an understandable reaction if we put ourselves in the shoes of 19th-century listeners (always an interesting exercise at the opera, or at least the old ones) and consider the unprecedented volume of the orchestra (one of the largest ever assembled) combined with a complete absence of recorded sound to that point in history—i.e., NO WALKMEN?!—and an equally unprecedented musical dissonance (except for perhaps a few “tone poems” by the supremely gorgeous and talented Franz Liszt—who by the way was Wagner’s father-in-law and whom he shamelessly ripped off both financially and artistically, in the way things were done back then)—I DIGRESS.

First the easy stuff: on its most superficial level, Tristan and Isolde is about an affair—surprise!—between T and I that unfolds as she’s about to be married to his uncle (“uh-oh” is right), after which scandal and tragedy ensue, THE END. What’s more interesting is that their love, in addition to being illicit, is very much entwined with an unceasing torment and longing (represented by “the day” or more broadly “life”), not just for each other but for a more permanent form of relief (otherwise known as “the night” or “death”). BEAR WITH ME—IT’S NOT AS DEPRESSING AS IT SOUNDS! Or even if it is, it doesn’t matter because the music—despite possessing very little that might be considered a “tune”—is lush and restless and revolutionary to the extent that, like so many great works of art (leaving aside the question of exactly which ones), it encapsulates much of what came before and predicts much of what followed. Or to put it in more musico-historical terms (whatever, I know it’s not a word), it’s essentially—and perhaps shockingly, for those of us who get excited to find traces of ourselves in such things—“modern” for its failure to ever quite resolve, or at least until the very end, by which point—if it’s a good performance, which I expect given the parties involved—you’ll be reduced to a spoonful of quivering jelly. The piece is in a state of constant flux, with one atonal chord giving way to the next and then to the next and so on and so on and so on, like you’re listening to the aural equivalent of one of those time-lapse photography projects of an endlessly mutating landscape. My own theory (by which I mean I may or may not have also read this somewhere) is that Tristan contains the seeds of modern “abstraction” and “psychology” that ultimately defined so much of the twentieth century, i.e., it’s no accident that in the wake of Tristan (1865) you have impressionism (Elstir!), cubism, Duchamp (specifically Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2), Freud and Jung and V. Woolf and Einstein (that’s for you, Professor Vallence), and eventually, I don’t know, the Smiths? (Hey, I never claimed to be an academic!)

Which is not to say Tristan will hammer you over the head—for most “contemporary” (such a horrible word, ruined by furniture catalogs and bad radio stations) listeners, it’s a more subtle form of annihilation. (Speaking of which, I ordered you a copy: listen to it, ideally more than once—SEE ABOVE, REGARDING RISK OF INSANITY.) Take note of the instrumental section at the beginning (the famous first-act prelude), the quiet call-and-response of the cellos and winds, the pizzicato burst of strings that will (after you’ve acclimated) strangely dictate the beat of your heart to match the languid tempo of the piece. And once you’ve listened a few times, I guarantee the music will start to “infect” you (but in a good way), so that—if you’ll allow me to play “rock critic” for a few seconds—you’ll start to hear Tristan echoed everywhere, in the