Love and Death as One Theme in Tristan und Isolde
In Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde the themes of love and death are central to the narrative that Wagner creates. Throughout the opera the two themes are intrinsically connected, demonstrating that they cannot be separated from each other, in the eyes of the dramatical and the musical narrative. Wagner proves time and again within the opera that rather than existing to act as contradictions to each other as they do in many other narratives, the two themes exist in Tristan und Isolde because death equates to love, just as love equates to death and they are impossible to separate from each other. In the first act of the opera, Tristan and Isolde’s love dooms both of them to death, and in the final act of the opera, after Tristan’s death, Isolde’s love for him is what kills her. Through these demonstrations of the ideas of love and death within the opera— through the music and libretto of the opera, plot devices and elements used within the opera, and intentional changes that were made to the original myth of Tristan and Isolde when the libretto for the opera was written— Wagner proves that the two concepts cannot be separated from each other.
The demonstration of the deep connection between the two themes begins in the first act of the opera when Isolde and Brangäne discuss the potions that Isolde wants to give to Tristan. Isolde initially intends to give Tristan a potion of death and then drink the potion herself, but Brangäne switches the potion to one of love. This switch, however, despite bringing the love that Isolde and Tristan share to the forefront of the opera, also sets the two on an inescapable path to death, regardless of Brangäne’s intentions to save them from such a fate. The two are incapable of truly being together, due to their relationships to King Mark, but due to their deep love for each other, they disregard anything that opposes their love, which is the cause of their deaths. This is shown further in act two of the opera when Tristan and Isolde are discovered together during their secret meeting by King Mark and his hunting party. Throughout act two, Tristan and Isolde continually demonstrate that their love exists outside of the normal world. The duet that they sing within scene one of act two is extensive and ecstatic. It is continually reaching for resolution— especially by repeated use of the dominant chord— that the opera is unable to give the listener, as the love between Tristan and Isolde has not been consummated due to Isolde’s engagement to King Mark. Tristan and Isolde’s existence outside of the normal world is visible extensively throughout the scene, and not just within the love duet. Where Brangäne— who is keeping watch for the two— hears the horns of the hunting party, Tristan and Isolde hear nothing, and where Brangäne sees dawn coming, Tristan and Isolde can’t even realize the passing of time. Their love has put the two of them so outside of themselves that its all they see, leading to the hunting party’s realization of the two’s affair and their deaths, ultimately. Brangäne worries about the two throughout the scene, unable to comprehend why they’re acting the way they are. Their reckless behavior is completely incomprehensible to Brangäne, as she has no concept of the love they’re feeling for each other and how it is something that is so strong it cannot be contained or recognized within while the two are still alive.
The clearest examples of the connection between love and death in Tristan und Isolde, however, are seen in act three of the opera. As act three is the act in which the deaths of Tristan and Isolde actually happen, the act shows the viewers of the opera the deepest connections between the love Tristan and Isolde share and their deaths. Tristan is gravely injured at the end of the second act and spends much of the third act deliriously waiting for Isolde to arrive. Shortly after Isolde reaches him, Tristan finally dies. His death is due to the love he felt and openly showed for Isolde, and it is also his love for her that is the only reason he clings to life for as long as he is able to. When he believes that Isolde is coming, Tristan even frantically tries to tear the bandages from himself, despite this bringing him closer to death. He is so consumed by his love for her and his delirious state of mind that he has no concept of death. To him, it doesn’t matter whether what waits for him is life or death, as long as he is allowed to see Isolde again and express his love for her.
After Tristan dies, Isolde sings the Liebestod, which demonstrates another connection between love and death. The term Liebestod, which translates to love-death, represents the idea of “love as an eternal force that conquers death and survives lovers’ corporeal bodies” (Romanska). The Liebestod represents the concept that Tristan and Isolde will consummate their love, even if they are only able to do so after they die. It is not only the clearest demonstration throughout the opera of the connections between the ideas of love and death but also quite possibly the largest musical demonstration of these ideas and their similarities. The Liebestod is composed of a portion of the music that was sung earlier in the love duet that Tristan and Isolde sing together, which is also a transformation of music used earlier in the prelude of the opera. In the original love duet, the music of the Liebestod is sung in harmony at a much faster pace than in the Liebestod. When the Liebestod occurs in the last scene of the opera, Isolde repeats sixty measures of the love duet, at a slower pace, singing her own half of the duet without Tristan. Through this sequence, only the orchestra is heard with her. Despite the fact that Isolde is singing about her love with Tristan and musically demonstrating it, as well, due to the repetition of the love duet, all she really wants to do is die so that she can be with Tristan. At one point in the piece, Isolde even departs from the melody to sing a counter that harmonizes with the orchestra before returning to the melody that the orchestra is playing. This demonstrates that, while Isolde is often singing the melody, the orchestra is leading the Liebestod, which goes to explain why Isolde’s death is often described as her being consumed by the music. In the end, there is no clear cause of Isolde’s death. All that exists at the time that she dies is herself, her grief, and the music. So, in this sense, she is simply consumed by the music of the Liebestod, dying in order to be with Tristan again.
The Liebestod is one of the most discussed parts of Tristan und Isolde, largely due to the huge importance that it holds within the opera itself. In his article “Liebestod: On Love and Death in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde”, Brayton Polka discusses the concept of the Liebestod, which he translates directly as the death of love, and its contradictions to the biblical concept of the life of love, but focuses largely on the concept of the Liebestod and how Wagner developed his ideas on love and death. When discussing about the Liebestod in depth, Polka states:
Transfiguration is Liebestod, the death of love. The death of love is the love of death. Death is love. Love is death. To be conscious, in living in the day world of reality, is actually to be unconscious that you are dead to life. To live is to be dead. To be unconscious, in dying in the real world of night, is the true consciousness that you live as dead. To be dead is to live.
Death is, then, for Tristan and Isolde the realm of life and love. … In the world of death Tristan and Isolde dissolve into each other as one, without distinction, individuality, or singularity, without name. (Polka, 243-244)
Polka’s analyzation of the Liebestod is that love and death are concepts that are so intrinsically combined in the narrative that Wagner has created that they cannot physically be separated from each other. Death is the only place in which Tristan and Isolde’s love can become a reality, as it is only in death that Tristan and Isolde can truly be together and become one, so in this sense death is both life and love for the two of them. From the very beginning of their story, Tristan and Isolde are already doomed to death because of their love for each other.
There are several elements of the plot of Tristan und Isolde that point to the connection of love and death. Chiefly among them are the potions that Isolde and Brangäne discuss at the beginning of the opera. Originally, Isolde intends to give Tristan a death potion and then to drink it herself. Brangäne is alarmed by this idea and swaps the death potion for a love potion without realizing the implications that such an action will have. In some sense, it is as if the love potion is still a death potion for Tristan and Isolde, however, just a much slower acting one. Gunther Weitz discusses the idea of the love potion even being what truly kills Isolde at the end of the opera. Weitz argues that Tristan and Isolde’s death was caused “by a severe anticholinergic syndrome” (Weitz). Anticholinergic syndrome is a state that occurs due to a certain type of poisoning that inhibits the release of neurotransmitters at muscarinic receptor sites. Muscarinic receptor sites are found within the brain and serve many functions, such as regulating releases of certain chemicals and helping in the function of the somatic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. People with anticholinergic syndrome will display symptoms such as “agitated (hyperactive) delirium - typically including confusion, restlessness, and picking at imaginary objects… Peripheral inhibition is variable - but the symptoms may include: hot, dry skin, flushed appearance, mydriasis, tachycardia” (Victorian Paediatric Clinical Network). Weitz argues that the potion Isolde and Tristan drank poisoned them and resulted in both of them living with anticholinergic syndrome until Tristan dies from his wounds and Isolde dies from the syndrome. While Weitz’s point is extremely medically based and rather complicated, it does point to the idea that Tristan and Isolde were doomed to death the moment they consumed the potion. It didn’t truly matter whether or not the potion the two drank was the death potion or the love potion, as either one of them would have poisoned the two of them and lead to their deaths. The drinking of the love potion only succeeded in allowing the two a few more days to live and to truly acknowledge the love that they felt for each other.
One of the more interesting things to explore when it comes to Wagner and the writing of his librettos is how he changes the original stories or myths that he is working with to better suit the story that he is creating. There are several examples of this with Tristan und Isolde, and several of them point towards Wagner’s intentions to create the idea that love and death are one theme rather than two. In the original myth, Tristan marries another woman after King Mark discovers his affair with Isolde of Cornwall, despite still loving her. When Tristan is wounded in battle and unable to be cured, “he [sends] for Isolde of Cornwall, hoping that she could once again heal him” (Advameg), as she did in their original first meeting within the myth. He tells the ship that is sent to raise a white flag if it carries her and a black flag if it returns without her. His new wife— Isolde of the White Hands— is jealous of his love for the other Isolde and when the ship returns with a white flag raised, she tells him the flag is black. Tristan dies out of grief, believing that his true love has refused to help him. When she arrives, Isolde of Cornwall dies of grief as well, once she hears that Tristan has died. In the original myth, the deaths of Tristan and Isolde occur due to their grief at the loss of each other. While this is not completely separate from what happens within Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, there are some key differences. Within Tristan und Isolde, Wagner doesn’t have Tristan marry Isolde of the White Hands. Instead, Tristan is injured when he and Isolde are discovered together and act three opens with him deliriously waiting for Isolde to arrive and join him. While this is likely done to make the plot easier to follow, in some ways, it also demonstrates Wagner’s intention to show that Tristan and Isolde are so caught up in their love for each other that they are incapable of seeing anything outside of the other. Most importantly, however, Wagner’s removal of the character of Isolde of the White Hands changes the concept behinds Tristan’s death and, partly, Isolde’s. In the original story, Tristan dies solely from grief, in the belief that Isolde will not come to help him. However, in Tristan und Isolde, Tristan waits on his deathbed for Isolde in a frantic and delirious state, knowing that she will come to him. He even lives long enough to see her one last time and say her name, before he dies. This is a striking difference between the two versions of the story, as Tristan does not die from anything related to grief in Wagner’s opera, but instead, he dies from wounds that he received due to his love for Isolde, with the last thing he thinks about, talks about, and sees is Isolde and his love for her. While Isolde does, in some sense, die from grief in the opera as well, her grief is not from being unable to see Tristan before he dies, but a desperate need to experience death as well so that she and Tristan can be together again. Due to the changes behind Tristan’s death, Isolde’s own death becomes more about the love that the two feel for each other and how exceptionally powerful it is, rather than being about the ways in which their love will never be able to exist. In Wagner’s version of the story, the viewer of the opera understands that it is possible for Tristan and Isolde’s love to exist, but the only way that such a scenario is at all possible is through death.
The connection between love and death with Tristan und Isolde is not just an affiliation of two themes intersecting and opposing each other throughout a narrative, but one of two ideas that are so deeply connected that they are unable to be separated from each other. For Tristan and Isolde, there is no love that can exist without their deaths and no death that is not because of their love. The two ideas are so equal within the opera that Wagner demonstrates ways in which death and love are the same concepts rather than a separate one. Throughout the opera, Wagner creates the idea that the two themes are truly one theme through the music he composed such as the love duet and the Liebestod, the libretto he wrote, plot devices used throughout the opera, and changes that were made to the original myth of Tristan and Isolde. By looking at all of these elements of Tristan und Isolde, one can discern that love and death are more than two themes: they are one idea that cannot exist separately from each other, for the love of Tristan and Isolde only exists in death and death is the only way that their love can be made real.
Work Cited Page
Advameg. “Tristan and Isolde.” Myths Encyclopedia, Advameg, Inc., 2019,
www.mythencyclopedia.com/Tr-Wa/Tristan-and-Isolde.html.
Polka, Brayton. “LIEBESTOD: On Love and Death in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’”
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 44, no. 2, 2013, pp.
239-252. JSTOR, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594799.
Romanska, Magda. “LOVE DEATH, OR LIEBESTOD.” LOVE DEATH, OR LIEBESTOD,
Boston Lyric Opera, 20 Nov. 2014, blog.blo.org/love-death-or-liebestod.
Victorian Paediatric Clinical Network. “The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne.” The Royal
Children's Hospital Melbourne, Safer Care Victoria, Aug. 2017,
www.rch.org.au/clinicalguide/guideline_index/Anticholinergic_Syndrome/.
Wagner, Richard. Tristan & Isolde. Edited by Nicholas John, 2nd ed., English National Opera,
1993.
Weitz, Gunther. “Love and death in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde—an epic anticholinergic crisis”
British Medical Journal, vol. 327, is. 7429, 2003, doi: 10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1469.
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