Tristan und Freud

"This Tristan is becoming something terrible!" wrote Richard Wagner while working on the third act of what was to become his most famous opera. "I fear the opera will be forbidden unless the whole thing becomes a mere parody by bad performance. Completely good ones will drive people insane."

For a time Wagner's fears seemed justified: at a turn-of-the-century Tristan performance the orchestra poured out music of such passionate urgency that one panting English critic found that he was "no longer artistically and morally a responsible being." The surging erotic melodies of the second act's Liebesnacht moved strong men to tears, and young girls swooned in the aisles.

Today, the tale of Tristan's illicit love affair with Isolde, bride of his uncle, King Marke, and of the lovers deaths--Tristan from a dueling wound and Isolde from grief--no longer packs the emotional wallop it had for Wagner's generation. Indifferently played, the familiar music sometimes has an almost soporific effect. But at the Bayreuth Festival last week, audiences responded to a stunning new Tristan und Isolde that gave Wagner's paean to love some of the shock value it must have had when its composer trembled for his hearers' sanity.

Looming Symbol. The composer's grandson, Wieland Wagner, had staged a new Tristan at Bayreuth in 1952, and Brother Wolfgang tried his hand at it in 1957, but neither version satisfied Wieland. As he planned the opera in this year's production, it became "yet another aspect of the ancient Oedipus drama, with its eternal correlation between Love and Hate, Death and Eternity, Father and Son." The most startling changes in Wieland's Tristan: 1) Isolde does not die at the final curtain, and 2) King Marke strangely becomes Tristan's father instead of his uncle.

Wagnerians received their first big jolt at the end of Act I, when Isolde (Soprano Birgit Nilsson) and Tristan (Tenor Wolfgang Windgassen) embraced in full view of King Marke, who usually does not appear --or suspect the illicit love--until the end of Act II. The second act, like all the others, was provided with looming, symbolical sets, dominated by a huge shaft ("Of course, I meant it as a phallic symbol," snapped Wieland. "This is what the entire opera is all about, isn't it?"). The enthusiastic opening night crowd gave the reconstructed Tristan an unprecedented 30 curtain calls.

Death & Transfiguration. How did Wieland justify his changes? "If you read the original score," says he, "you will see that Richard Wagner never mentions Isolde's death, but always speaks about her Veraerung (transfiguration). Death for Richard Wagner was never mere loss of life.

It meant a breakthrough to transfiguration. Isolde is experiencing a unity with the eternal night, which returns her to Tristan." And King Marke turning into Tristan's father? That came about, says Wieland, partly through archaeological research, partly from evidence in the opera itself. Scholars have discovered what they believe is Tristan's grave in southern Cornwall--and the inscription on the gravestone identifies the young lover as the son of the man historians believe to have been the historical King Marke.

While the operatic Tristan blames himself for the sufferings he inflicted on his parents, the orchestra plays the theme associated with King Marke. Wieland thinks that Grandfather Richard must have sensed intuitively what medieval prudes (who presumably altered the saga) could not stomach: the lust of father and son for the same woman.

Not all critics bought this Freudian analysis. But most agreed that Grandson Wieland had achieved as fine, and as gripping, a performance of Tristan as the modern opera stage has offered--although not a single fraulein collapsed in the aisles.

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