Ava

Throughout Tristan, from beginning to end, acoustic effects replace the symbolic (i.e., written) structure of drama and music. This happens first of all to the voices and second to the instruments, because once again breathing becomes their common root. In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, his own Isolde, Wagner explained how the Tristan Prelude’s dynamics were simply laid out in the composition and thus materialized “the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world.” In the very beginning, before the first sound, there was endless silence or “nirvana” or “heavenly clarity.” Then, “the heavenly clarity darkens” with the cello solo, which is explicitly labeled “a breath.” Finally, the Tristan chord appears and the whole orchestra sound “begins to swell, becomes denser, and ultimately, the whole world in its impenetrable massiveness once again stands before me.” This is plain and simple; furthermore, as regards this massiveness, it is also a pure dynamic in the media-technical sense. From nirvana via an aboriginal breath up to the composed world, the orchestral Prelude to Tristan represents the first circuit of an acoustic feedback. The second circuit, this time a vocal one, opens with the curtain. A “young seaman” sings, first of all, without the actor being visible, and second, a cappella, that is, without orchestra. He sings of the “wind that blows freshly homeward,” thus sending the ship and seaman farther and farther away from his “Irish child.” Which is why the seaman, in his next breath, inquires of his distant love: “Are those the breezes of your sighs that fill the sails for me?” Distantly reverberating sighs […] should thus themselves create the distance they then bemoan: the paradox of a respitory erotics. Thus wind and breathing, natural sounds and the human voice become indistinguishable, even in the seaman’s puns. For everything he says and sings simply exploits the nearly perfect homonym in the German words weh (meaning woe) and wehen (meaning to blow). His song ends with the dreamily sad verses: “Wehe, wehe du Wind! Weh, ach wehe, mein Kind!” (Blow, blow, you wind; woe, oh woe, my child” [Tristan, libretto, 3; trans. modified]). Human voices as winds, winds as human voices––only the linguistics of a Wagner or Siegfried in his disdain for meaning allow such equations that are, moreover, acoustic puns. Yet for music-drama they are essential: they alone can hook up voices and instruments, text and score.

when the signal light in act 2 is a candle and isolde extinguishes it with a breath

I find it interesting how Guinevere and Iseult, the two primary female adulterers of Arthurian legend, are usually portrayed as childless queens, with a lot of ink spilled on the thematic implications of such, especially on the former.

Olivier PY: This state of night in which we live — we must learn to love it. That love of night in Tristan und Isolde is the love of our own night, the night of human beings.

How could Beethoven's Fidelio not be forbidden in the Germany of the twelve years? Fidelio, this festival opera made for the day of Germany's self-liberation! It was a scandal that it was not forbidden and that excellent performances of it were given, that singers could be found to sing it, musicians to play it, a public to listen to it. What dullness, what callousness was needed to listen to Fidelio in Himmler's Germany without covering one's face with both hands and rushing out of the theatre!

Would you believe, men of the eighteenth century, that there are damp subterranean prisons where men destined for death are suffocating in the darkness, where executioners torture prisoners at night? Do you know that there are horrible cisterns where henchmen dig graves in the midnight dark? Ravaged homes, where the prosecuted pant in mortal fear under the destroyed furniture? And prison courtyards where tortured lungs beg for air and sunlight and freedom? [...] And when the liberating goodness comes, the Valiant Spouse, the Faithful Friend, and the Just Authority, when Fidelio and the Minister come [...], bearing the royal letter of pardon - do they always come, and to everyone, and if they do, to they come still in time?

I can't make meaningful progress with Tristan und Isolde, why is it 4 hours long? I know, because it's Wagner, but I feel like this opera could really have used an editor. It's ok if it actually needs to be this long (Parsifal honestly didn't feel as long as it is), but this one just kinda... doesn't. Everything progresses so slowly. I watch half an hour and I'm exhausted. They're barely even singing, just talking slowly (at least in places).

“It is a mistake to regard Der Rosenkavalier as whipped cream and Sachertorte. It is a hard-iced cake – harmonically sometimes more advanced than Elektra. Something is wrong if it sounds too luscious. There is a citric tang in the harmony, an acerbity in some of the string-writing, disillusion in the celesta’s chime…The coldness Romain Rolland found in Salome and the detachment in Elektra are there in Der Rosenkavalier. As an example: at the end of the Presentation of the Rose in Act 2, everyone’s favourite bit of Strauss when the raptures of the young love of Octavian and Sophie fill the theatre from gallery to stalls, the E flat clarinet interjects a phrase heard earlier in association with Octavian’s sexual intercourse with the Marschallin and the same phrase, slightly varied, accompanies the subsequent primly proper conversation between Octavian and Sophie. Strauss is telling us, I believe, that Octavian is just as much a roué, though still in embryo, as Ochs. His love for Sophie will not last (the celesta tells us that). There is more, too, to the Marschallin than the grande dame whose looks are beginning to fade. She is capable of ruthless cruelty – in her treatment of Octavian when he returns in Act 1 and in her crushing rebukes to Ochs in Act 3. (She has, after all, given his recital of his amours in Act 1 tacit approval. She is certainly not shocked.) Yet she melts our hearts in the Trio, that marvellous vocal setpiece which – paradoxically, like the other great setpieces in the opera such as the Presentation and the three Sophie-Octavian duets – is still conceived instrumentally, the voices another strand in the orchestral texture. The legend in the Strauss family is that when Strauss was working on the Trio at the piano, searching for a way to continue what he had started, Pauline called from another room ‘Go on, go on.’ ‘Isn’t it getting too long?,’ he replied. 'No!’ she answered. 'Go on!’”