Aria Tristan and Isolde. Isolde and Tristan: a beautiful story of eternal love

Characters:

HISTORY OF CREATION

The legend of Tristan and Isolde is of Celtic origin. It probably came from Ireland and enjoyed wide popularity in all countries medieval Europe, spreading in many versions (its first literary adaptation - the Franco-Breton novel - dates back to the 12th century). Over the centuries, it has acquired various poetic details, but the meaning remained the same: love stronger than death. But he interpreted this legend differently: he created a poem about a painful all-consuming passion, which is stronger than reason, a sense of duty, family obligations, which overturns the usual ideas, breaks ties with the outside world, with people, with life. In accordance with the composer's plan, the opera is marked by unity of dramatic expression, enormous tension, and tragic intensity of feelings.

Wagner loved “Tristan” very much, considered it his best essay. The creation of the opera is associated with one of the most romantic episodes of the composer's biography - with his passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a friend and patron, who, despite her ardent love for Wagner, managed to subordinate her feelings to duty to her husband and family. Wagner called “Tristan” a monument to the deepest unrequited love. The autobiographical nature of this opera helps to understand the composer’s unusual interpretation of the literary source.

Wagner became acquainted with the legend of Tristan and Isolde back in the 40s; the idea for the opera arose in the fall of 1854 and completely captured the composer in August 1857, forcing him to interrupt work on the tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung”. The text was written in one impulse, in three weeks; Composing music began in October. The work was carried out with long interruptions; the opera was completed in 1859. The premiere took place on June 10, 1865 in Munich.

PLOT

For a long time, King Mark of Cornwall paid tribute to Ireland. But the day came when, instead of tribute, the Irish received the head of their best warrior - the brave Morold, killed in a duel by King Mark's nephew, Tristan. The murdered man's fiancée, Isolde, swore eternal hatred for the winner. One day, the sea carried a boat with a mortally wounded warrior to the shores of Ireland, and Isolde, taught by her mother in the art of healing, began to treat him with magic potions. The knight called himself Tantris, but his sword gave away a secret: it had a notch, which was matched by a steel fragment found in Morold’s head. Isolde raises her sword over the enemy’s head, but the pleading gaze of the wounded man stops her; suddenly Isolde realizes that she loves Tristan. Having recovered, Tristan left Ireland, but soon returned again on a richly decorated ship - to marry Isolde to King Mark in order to end the enmity between their countries. Submitting to the will of her parents, Isolde gave her consent, and so they sailed to Cornwall. Isolde, offended by Tristan's coldness, showers him with ridicule. Unable to bear his indifference, Isolde decides to die with him; she invites Tristan to share the cup of death with her. But the faithful Brangena, wanting to save her mistress, pours a love drink instead of the drink of death. Tristan and Isolde drink from the same cup, and an invincible passion overcomes them. Under the joyful cries of the sailors, the ship lands on the shores of Cornwall, where King Mark has long been waiting for his bride.

Under the cover of night, lovers secretly meet in the garden near Isolde’s chambers. Today Tristan was delayed by a hunt - the horns of the royal retinue are heard not far away, and Brangena hesitates to submit symbol- put out the torch. She warns Isolde that Melot is watching them, but Isolde is far from suspicious: for her, he is Tristan’s faithful friend. Unable to wait any longer, Isolde extinguishes the torch herself. Tristan appears, and passionate confessions of lovers are heard in the darkness of the night. They glorify darkness and death, in which there are no lies and deceit that reign in the light of day; Only night stops separation, only in death can they unite forever. Suddenly King Mark and his courtiers appear. They were brought by Melot, who had long been tormented by passion for Isolde. The king is shocked by the betrayal of Tristan, whom he loved like a son, but the feeling of revenge is unfamiliar to him. Tristan tenderly says goodbye to Isolde, he calls her with him to the distant and beautiful land of death. The indignant Melot draws his sword, and the seriously wounded Tristan falls into the arms of his servant Kurwenal.

The faithful Kurwenal took Tristan from Cornwall to his ancestral castle of Careol in Brittany. Seeing that the knight did not regain consciousness, he sent the helmsman with a message to Isolde. And now, having prepared a bed for Tristan in the garden at the castle gates, Kurvenal intensely peers into the deserted expanse of the sea - will a ship carrying Isolde appear there? From afar one can hear the sad melody of the shepherd's pipe - he, too, is waiting for the healer of his beloved master. The familiar chant makes Tristan open his eyes. He has difficulty remembering everything that happened. His spirit wandered far away, in a blissful country where there is no sun - but Isolde is still in the kingdom of day, and the gates of death, which had already slammed behind Tristan, opened wide again - he must see his beloved. In his delirium, Tristan imagines an approaching ship, but the sad melody of the shepherd again brings him back to reality. He plunges into sad memories of his father, who died without seeing his son, of his mother, who died at his birth, of his first meeting with Isolde, when, as now, he was dying from a wound, and of the love potion that doomed him to eternal life. flour. Feverish excitement deprives Tristan of strength. And again he imagines an approaching ship. This time he was not deceived: the shepherd gives good news with a cheerful tune, Kurvenal hurries to the sea. Left alone, Tristan rushes about on the bed in excitement and tears off the bandage from the wound. Staggering, he goes to meet Isolde, falls into her arms and dies. At this time, the shepherd reports the approach of the second ship - Mark arrived with Melot and the soldiers; Brangene's voice is heard calling Isolde. Kurwenal rushes to the gate with a sword; Melot falls, struck by his hand. But the forces are too unequal: the mortally wounded Kurwenal dies at the feet of Tristan. King Mark is shocked. Brangena told him the secret of the love potion, and he hurried after Isolde in order to unite her with Tristan forever, but he sees only death around him. Detached from everything that is happening, Isolde fixes her gaze on Tristan’s body; she hears the call of her beloved; with his name on her lips she dies.

MUSIC

"Tristan and Isolde" is the most original of Wagner's operas. There is little external action or stage movement in it - all attention is focused on the experiences of the two heroes, on showing the shades of their painful, tragic passion. Music, full of sensual languor, flows in a non-stop stream, without being divided into separate episodes. The psychological role of the orchestra is extremely great: to reveal emotional experiences It is no less important for the characters than the vocal part.

The mood of the entire opera is determined by the orchestral introduction; here they continuously replace each other brief motives, sometimes mournful, sometimes enthusiastic, always tense, passionate, never giving peace. The introduction is open-ended and goes directly into the music of the first act.

The motives of the introduction permeate the orchestral fabric of the first act, revealing state of mind Tristan and Isolde. They are contrasted with song episodes that serve as the background of a psychological drama. This is the song of the young sailor “Looking at the Sunset” that opens the act, sounding from afar, without orchestral accompaniment. Kurvenal’s ironic song, taken up by the chorus “So tell Isolde,” is energetic and courageous. Central characteristic the heroine is enclosed in her big story“The boat, driven by the waves, sailed across the sea towards the Irish rocks”; there is anxiety and confusion here. Similar sentiments mark the beginning of the dialogue between Tristan and Isolde, “What will be your order?”; at the end of it the motives of love longing sound again.

In the second act, the main place is occupied by the huge love duet of Tristan and Isolde, framed by scenes with Brangena and King Mark. The orchestral introduction conveys Isolde’s impatient animation. The same mood prevails in the dialogue between Isolde and Brangena, accompanied by a distant roll call hunting horns. The scene with Tristan is rich in contrasts of experiences; its beginning speaks of the stormy joy of a long-awaited meeting; then memories arise of the suffering experienced in separation, curses on the day and light; the central episode of the duet is wide, slow, passionate tunes glorifying night and death: the first - “Come down to earth, night of love” with a flexible, free rhythm and tense-sounding unstable melody - was borrowed by Wagner from what he wrote in the year he began work on “Tristan” romance "Dreams" to the words of Mathilde Wesendonck. It is complemented by Brangena's call - a warning of danger - here the composer revives the form of “morning songs”, beloved by medieval troubadours. One of Wagner’s best melodies - “So, let us die in order to live forever” - is colorful, endlessly unfolding, directed upward. A big build up leads to a climax. In the final scene, Mark’s mournful, nobly restrained complaint stands out: “Did you really save? Do you think so? and a small chanted farewell to Tristan and Isolde, “In that distant land there is no sun on high,” where echoes of a love duet are heard.

The third act is framed by two extended monologues - the wounded Tristan at the beginning and the dying Isolde at the end. The orchestral introduction, using the melody of the romance “In the Greenhouse” with lyrics by Mathilde Wesendonck, embodies Tristan’s sorrow and longing. As in the first act, the painful emotional experiences of the characters are shaded by clearer song episodes. This is such a sad tune English horn(shepherd's pipe), which opens the action and returns several times in Tristan's monologue; such are Kurvenal's energetic speeches, accompanied by a march-like orchestral theme. They are contrasted by Tristan’s brief remarks, spoken as if in oblivion. The hero's long monologue is based on sudden changes in mood. It begins with the mournful phrases “Do you think so? I know better, but you can’t know what,” where echoes of his farewell to Isolde from the second act are heard. Gradually, the drama increases, despair is heard in Tristan’s speeches, suddenly it is replaced by joy, stormy jubilation, and again hopeless melancholy: “How can I understand you, an old, sad tune.” Then light lyrical melodies follow. The dramatic turning point of the act is the cheerful playing of the English horn. At the moment of Tristan's death, the theme of love longing that opened the opera is repeated again. Isolde’s expressive complaint “I’m here, I’m here, dear friend” is full of dramatic exclamations. She prepares the final scene - the death of Isolde. Here the melodic melodies of the love duet of the second act develop widely and freely, acquiring a transformed, enlightened ecstatic sound.

With a libretto (in German) by the composer, based on ancient legends.

Characters:

KING MARK OF CORNWALL (bass)
TRISTAN, his nephew (tenor)
KURVENAL, squire of Tristan (baritone)
IZOLDA, Irish princess (soprano)
BRANGENA, Isolde's maid (mezzo-soprano)
MELOT, King's Courtier (tenor)
YOUNG SAILOR (tenor)
HELMMAN (baritone)
SHEPHERD (tenor)

Time period: the legendary times of King Arthur.
Setting: Cornwall, Brittany and the sea.
First performance: Munich, Court Theatre, 10 June 1865.

It is generally accepted - and with good reason - that Tristan and Isolde is the greatest hymn ever written in praise of pure erotic love. The history of the creation of this opera is closely connected with this passion. Almost the entire time that Wagner was writing Tristan and Isolde, he lived in the house of a wealthy Zurich silk merchant, Otto Wesendonck; Wagner was in love with the owner's young wife, Matilda. Later, when the opera was written, at least twenty-four rehearsals were held for its production at the Vienna Court Opera, but the production was eventually cancelled. The reason, perhaps, was that it was too difficult and a new style for the troupe - at least that was officially stated. However, love and politics (two great driving forces in Wagner's life) also played an important role in this development. Two camps formed in the troupe: pro-Wagner and anti-Wagner. The first was led by the soprano assigned to the role of Isolde - Louise Dustman Meyer. She, however, withdrew her assistance in staging the opera when she learned of Wagner's affair with her younger sister.

Even before the Vienna Court Opera undertook to stage Tristan and Isolde, Wagner had made attempts to have the opera performed in Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Paris, Weimar, Prague, Hanover and even in Rio de Janeiro, where it was to be performed in Italian ! None of these attempts were successful: the opera was never staged anywhere, mainly for political reasons. Finally, six years after work on the opera was completed, the premiere finally took place. It was carried out under the patronage of Wagner's great, albeit extremely unbalanced and impulsive, friend, King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

The conductor of the premiere was Hans von Bülow, an ardent promoter of Wagnerian music. Two months before the premiere, Frau von Bülow gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Isolde. It is very likely that at that time the conductor did not yet know that the composer, in addition to being the girl’s godfather, was also her real father. In fact, Cosima von Bülow (the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt) bore Richard Wagner three children before Hans eventually divorced her and she married the composer.

There is no need to look for a reflection in the opera of Wagner’s many own love passions for other people’s wives - the love of Tristan and Isolde is much more idealized and pure than any page of the composer’s shocking biography. At its heart it is a very simple tale, and the score, perhaps more than any other Wagner composed, drives home his theory of what musical drama (as opposed to traditional "opera") should be. Wagner refuses to clearly divide action into a sequence of numbers. In this opera, the world was first introduced to musical drama, in which the orchestra undoubtedly plays a leading role, commenting through a developed system of leitmotifs on every psychological and dramatic move in the development of the plot. Here Wagner realized his idea of ​​“endless melody”, creating a completely special style of arias, duets, quartets, with which everyone has since been familiar. This caused a fierce war of critics that has not subsided to this day.

INTRODUCTION

Wagner also refused to clearly define the tonality in which the music sounds here. The initial key designation indicates that the introduction is written in C major (or A minor); it begins with a fragment of melody that could also be considered F major (or D minor), and before the second bar ends we arrive at the dominant seventh chord of A major. At this point, we are also presented with two of the main motifs of the work, so intimately dissolving into each other that some commentators call them, respectively, “Tristan” and “Isold” motifs.

This is where I will end my musical and technical comments. This introduction, as everyone knows, is one of the most expressive, sensual and moving sound poems about love that has ever been written.

ACT I

Isolde is an Irish princess, the daughter of a famous sorceress, she perfectly knows poisons, drugs and the medieval art of healing. When the curtain rises we find her on the ship. She is being taken, against her will, to marry King Mark of Cornwall. The man taking her to Cornwall, the ship's captain, is Tristan, King Mark's nephew. Isolde, in a long story full of indignation, explains to the maid Brangene the reason for her anger. From this account it becomes clear that Isolde had a suitor named Morold, whom Tristan challenged to a fight to decide in a duel whether Cornwall would continue to pay tribute to Ireland. As a result, Tristan won. But he himself was wounded. Disguised as a harpist, he came to Isolde’s castle. Isolde, mastering the art of healing, healed him and restored his life, considering him a harpist named Tantris, as he called himself. But one day, on the sword that belonged to the wounded man, she discovered a notch that was exactly the same shape as the piece of steel found in the severed head of Morold, which the Cornish had recently sent to Ireland. This is how she found out who this harpist really was. She was ready to kill Tristan and had already raised her sword over him, but he looked into her eyes so soulfully that passionate love for him flared up in her. But now, on the orders of his uncle, he is taking her to marry him. No wonder she is indignant!

Isolde sends for Tristan, but he, unable to leave the captain's bridge, sends his squire Kurvenal in his place. Kurvenal, this uncouth and rude baritone (at the same time truly devoted to Tristan), very unceremoniously informs Isolde that Tristan will not come, and together with the rowers sings a mocking ballad about Tristan's victory over Morold. This completely infuriates Isolde, and she decides to kill Tristan and herself rather than marry Mark, whom she, by the way, has never seen. She orders Brangene to prepare a poisonous potion and again calls upon Tristan, declaring that she refuses to go ashore unless he comes to her. This time he appears because the ship is about to land on the shore. She reminds him with sharp reproach that he killed her fiancé. Tristan, in atonement for his guilt, offers her his sword so that she can kill him. Instead, Isolde offers him a drink. Tristan accepts the cup, not doubting that it contains poison. But Brangena, without telling Isolde anything, replaced the poison with a love potion. Tristan drinks the cup halfway in one gulp, and then Isolde snatches it from him and finishes the cup in order to die with him. But the result turns out to be completely unexpected. They look into each other's eyes for a very long time (the music from the introduction is playing in the orchestra at this time). And suddenly, as if maddened, they rush into each other’s arms, uttering ecstatic words of delight.

But suddenly the joyful singing of sailors is heard - the shore appears on the horizon. Kurvenal runs in and reports that a wedding procession led by King Mark is approaching. The lovers come out to meet him, completely unprepared to meet the king.

ACT II

The orchestral introduction conveys Isolde's excitement. The curtain rises and we see the garden in front of King Mark's castle. Isolde's rooms open here. (Whether or not Isolde’s wedding ceremony with King Mark took place between the first and second acts, Wagner does not clarify in any way; it is enough that Isolde considers herself - and so does everyone else - the king’s bride). The king goes hunting, and at the very beginning of this action we hear sounds behind the stage hunting horn. But while the king is hunting, Tristan and Isolde plan to meet secretly. A torch is burning on the castle wall. When it goes out, it will be a sign for Tristan to come to the garden.

Brangena, Isolde's servant, fears a conspiracy on the part of the king. She is convinced that Melot, a Cornish knight considered Tristan's best friend, will betray them. She advises Isolde not to extinguish the torch and thereby not give a sign to Tristan to come to her while the sounds of the hunting horn are still heard and the king and his retinue are close. But Isolde is burning with impatience. She refuses to believe that Melot could be so treacherous. She blows out the torch, climbs a few steps and, illuminated by the bright light of the moon, waves her light scarf, giving Tristan another sign to come to her.

The orchestra expresses feverish excitement with sounds, and Tristan bursts onto the stage. “Beloved Isolde!” - he exclaims, and Isolde echoes him: “Beloved!” This is the beginning of a huge love duet known as "Liebesnacht" ("Night of Love"), a long, heartfelt, touching expression of love, its transformative power - love that prefers night to day ("Go down to earth the night of love"), love that prefers death of life (“And so we will die in order to live forever”). At the end of this duet they sing the famous and extraordinarily beautiful melody "Liebestod", and, just at the moment when the development leads to a climax, Brangena, who has been on the alert all this time, utters a piercing cry. The king and his retinue unexpectedly returned from a hunt. They were brought back by one who was considered Tristan's friend, Melot, who himself was burning with a secret love for Isolde and, thus, acting from the most reprehensible motives. The main feeling of the noble king is sadness, sadness that the honor of Tristan, his beloved nephew, is tarnished. He sings about this in a very long monologue; Isolde, deeply embarrassed, turns away.

At the end of King Mark's monologue, Tristan asks Isolde if she will follow him to the land where there is eternal night. She agrees. And then, in a short duel with Melot, Tristan, exposing his chest to him, deliberately opens himself to a blow. King Mark intervenes and pushes Melot away, preventing him from killing Tristan. The seriously wounded Tristan falls to the ground. Isolde falls on his chest.

ACT III

Tristan was transported to his castle in Brittany; this was done by his faithful squire Kurwenal. Here he lies, wounded and sick, in front of the castle. He is waiting for a ship - a ship that is carrying Isolde, who wants to sail to him to cure him. Behind the stage, a shepherd plays a very sad melody on his pipe. The sad melody, the fever of the disease, the tragedy of his life - all this together clouded the mind of poor Tristan. His mind wanders somewhere far away: he tells Kurvenal about the tragic fate of his parents, about the torment that tormented him. All these themes (and others as well) pass through his fevered mind as he lies here and Kurvenal tries - in vain - to ease his suffering.

Suddenly the shepherd played another melody. Now she sparkles in a major key. A ship appeared on the horizon. He then disappears, then appears again, finally lands, and a few moments later Isolde quickly goes ashore. She was almost too late to find her lover alive. In passionate excitement, he tears off his bandage and, bleeding, falls dead into the arms of Isolde. She sadly bends over the dead body.

Another ship approaches the shore. This is the ship of King Mark and his retinue. The villain Melot also sailed here with him. Mark has arrived to forgive the lovers, but Kurvenal does not know about this intention. He sees in the retinue only the enemies of his master. Devoted to Tristan, he enters into a duel with Melot and kills him. But he himself receives a mortal wound and falls, dying at the feet of his master. Then Isolde lifts Tristan's dead body. Transformed by her feelings, she sings "Liebestod" and at the end she herself takes her last breath. Mark blesses the deceased, and the opera ends with two quiet, long B flat major chords.

Henry W. Simon (translated by A. Maikapara)

Wagner often turns to landscapes, elements and images of nature. His penchant for natural symbolism gives rise to magnificent and downright grandiose paintings. From the Swiss mountains to the stormy northern seas, to the sun-drenched southern vegetation, everything attracted this man with the taste of a director and landscape painter, like some kind of sensual magnet, overgrown and different ideas, including abstract and mystical ones (in Parsifal, Christ, giving up his spirit on the cross, dies against the backdrop of awakening nature). In “Tristan and Isolde,” this poem about love, about feverish passion, the brainchild of blind fate, high and inexorable, the main character among the background characters is the sea, personifying superhuman passions and impulses. The sea covers with its restless waves the soul, shaken to the very depths by uncontrollable passions. The land does not show itself, while the sea of ​​passion drags the listener from one storm to another. IN rare moments When it moderates its onslaught and calms down, painful memories emerge from the darkness of the night. “For the first time I breathe this unclouded, clean, sweet air... When I float in the gondola on the Lido in the evening, I hear around me the sound of trembling strings, reminding me of the gentle, long sounds of the violin, which I love so much and with which I once compared you; you can easily imagine how I feel in the moonlight, on the sea!” This is what Wagner wrote in one of his letters in 1858 from Venice to Matilda Luckmayer, the wife of the wealthy businessman Otto Wesendonck. The romantic relationship with Matilda, interrupted by Wagner’s flight to Venice, inspired the composer to write an opera about painful love, full of nostalgia for what was not only a thing of the past, but was not fully experienced and known, and from which feelings of unsatisfied desire and endless longing remained. . The libretto and music were written between August 1857 and August 1859; The premiere took place in Munich only in 1865 thanks to the support of Ludwig II of Bavaria. In Italy, the opera was first staged in 1888 in Bologna at the Teatro Comunale.

The biographical basis of the plot about lovers through the fault of a “magic drink” is layered with mystical and philosophical constructions. Such a carnal, sensual passion, elevated to an absolute, loses the character of sin or criminal pleasure (like any pleasure) in order to acquire the features of a cosmic law, according to which Tristan and Isolde love as gods, and not as people. Associated with this tension of passion is the use of an endless melody, an elusive, oscillating, meandering vocal and harmonic line that finds no support or shelter anywhere other than itself, and which has nothing but the impossibility of escaping from itself. "Child! this “Tristan” is becoming something terrible!.. I’m afraid that the opera will be banned. Unless a bad performance turns everything into a parody... Only a mediocre performance can save me, a completely good one can only drive the audience crazy - I can’t think otherwise ... This is what I've come to! Woe is me! And this is what I put the most passion into!" - Wagner wrote to the same Wesendonck. Flexible modulations and chromatic transitions, which due to their sharpness will become legendary, spread like an “infection” (to use Nietzsche’s word). In a sound whirlpool traditional forms weaken, disintegrate, only to be reunited in a narrative chain that is a continuous series of conscious and unconscious states. On the surface of various rhythmic and melodic flows there are key themes: in addition to the themes of love and death, there are many others here, connecting fragments of a moving mosaic that depicts various manifestations love feeling. Among the most characteristic: themes of recognition, longing, gaze, love drink, death drink, magic vessel, liberation in death, the sea, characteristics of Tristan's various states of mind, themes of the day, impatience, passion, love impulse, song of love, call to the night, theme Mark's suffering, the depiction of Kurvenal's mental states, the theme of Brangena's encouragement - during the duet of the second act (the largest vocal number throughout the history of opera). These leitmotifs appear and disappear like reflections on the waves, their beauty is that they are recognizable even as they dissipate. Due to the wealth of different musical possibilities, these leitmotifs are short-lived, like other stylistic characteristics: musical ideas, consonances, dissonances, intervallic changes. And not so much because (as it will be in the tetralogy and in Parsifal) that the thematic fragment is ready to almost dissolve in a complex search for rational or intuitive meanings, but because of the passion, unusualness of feelings, striving to absorb all the remnants of logic and becoming a new logic, beyond time and space. While the orchestra is distinguished by unprecedented mobility, colored by a single, fiery-ash timbre and rather hints at an erotic theme than depicts it, in the vocal part preference is given to “short and humble calls” (as Franco Serpa writes so well). And only in the duet does the lyrical structure rise, and the majestic hymn of the night, with some concessions to sentimentality, sounds. The death of Isolde will require a final tribute from the orchestra in order to crown her posthumous marriage with a solid sound in which the voice of a musical instrument cannot be distinguished. This is how it is brought last victim- the fear evoked in the soul of a selfish person by all beauty: too late, the good King Mark appeared with his wise word.

G. Marchesi (translated by E. Greceanii)

History of creation

The legend of Tristan and Isolde is of Celtic origin. It probably came from Ireland and enjoyed wide popularity in all countries of medieval Europe, spreading in many versions (its first literary adaptation - the Franco-Breton novel - dates back to the 12th century). Over the centuries, it has acquired various poetic details, but the meaning remains the same: love is stronger than death. Wagner interpreted this legend differently: he created a poem about a painful all-consuming passion, which is stronger than reason, a sense of duty, family obligations, which overturns the usual ideas, breaks ties with the outside world, with people, with life. In accordance with the composer's plan, the opera is marked by unity of dramatic expression, enormous tension, and tragic intensity of feelings.

Wagner loved Tristan very much and considered it his best composition. The creation of the opera is associated with one of the most romantic episodes of the composer's biography - with his passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a friend and patron, who, despite her ardent love for Wagner, managed to subordinate her feelings to duty to her husband and family. Wagner called “Tristan” a monument to the deepest unrequited love. The autobiographical nature of this opera helps to understand the composer’s unusual interpretation of the literary source.

Wagner became acquainted with the legend of Tristan and Isolde back in the 40s; the idea for the opera arose in the fall of 1854 and completely captured the composer in August 1857, forcing him to interrupt work on the tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung”. The text was written in one impulse, in three weeks; Composing music began in October. The work was carried out with long interruptions; the opera was completed in 1859. The premiere took place on June 10, 1865 in Munich.

Music

"Tristan and Isolde" is the most original of Wagner's operas. There is little external action or stage movement in it - all attention is focused on the experiences of the two heroes, on showing the shades of their painful, tragic passion. Music, full of sensual languor, flows in a non-stop stream, without being divided into separate episodes. The psychological role of the orchestra is extremely great: for revealing the emotional experiences of the characters, it is no less important than the vocal part.

The mood of the entire opera is determined by the orchestral introduction; here brief motives continuously replace each other, sometimes mournful, sometimes ecstatic, always tense, passionate, never giving peace. The introduction is open-ended and goes directly into the music of the first act.

The motives of the introduction permeate the orchestral fabric of the first act, revealing the state of mind of Tristan and Isolde. They are contrasted with song episodes that serve as the background of a psychological drama. This is the song of the young sailor “Looking at the Sunset” that opens the act, sounding from afar, without orchestral accompaniment. Kurvenal’s ironic song, taken up by the chorus “So tell Isolde,” is energetic and courageous. The central characteristic of the heroine is contained in her long story “On the sea, a boat, driven by a wave, sailed to the Irish rocks”; there is anxiety and confusion here. Similar sentiments mark the beginning of the dialogue between Tristan and Isolde, “What will be your order?”; at the end of it the motives of love longing sound again.

In the second act, the main place is occupied by the huge love duet of Tristan and Isolde, framed by scenes with Brangena and King Mark. The orchestral introduction conveys Isolde’s impatient animation. The same mood prevails in the dialogue between Isolde and Brangena, accompanied by the distant roll call of hunting horns. The scene with Tristan is rich in contrasts of experiences; its beginning speaks of the stormy joy of a long-awaited meeting; then memories arise of the suffering experienced in separation, curses on the day and light; the central episode of the duet is wide, slow, passionate tunes glorifying night and death: the first - “Come down to earth, night of love” with a flexible, free rhythm and tense-sounding unstable melody - was borrowed by Wagner from what he wrote in the year he began work on “Tristan” romance "Dreams" to the words of Mathilde Wesendonck. It is complemented by Brangena's call - a warning of danger - here the composer revives the form of “morning songs”, beloved by medieval troubadours. One of Wagner’s best melodies - “So, let us die in order to live forever” - is colorful, endlessly unfolding, directed upward. A big build up leads to a climax. In the final scene, Mark’s mournful, nobly restrained complaint stands out: “Did you really save? Do you think so? and a small chanted farewell to Tristan and Isolde, “In that distant land there is no sun on high,” where echoes of a love duet are heard.

The third act is framed by two extended monologues - the wounded Tristan at the beginning and the dying Isolde at the end. The orchestral introduction, using the melody of the romance “In the Greenhouse” with lyrics by Mathilde Wesendonck, embodies Tristan’s sorrow and longing. As in the first act, the painful emotional experiences of the characters are shaded by clearer song episodes. This is the sad tune of the English horn (shepherd's pipe), which opens the action and returns repeatedly in Tristan's monologue; such are Kurvenal's energetic speeches, accompanied by a march-like orchestral theme. They are contrasted by Tristan’s brief remarks, spoken as if in oblivion. The hero's long monologue is based on sudden changes in mood. It begins with the mournful phrases “Do you think so? I know better, but you can’t know what,” where echoes of his farewell to Isolde from the second act are heard. Gradually, the drama increases, despair is heard in Tristan’s speeches, suddenly it is replaced by joy, stormy jubilation, and again hopeless melancholy: “How can I understand you, an old, sad tune.” Then light lyrical melodies follow. The dramatic turning point of the act is the cheerful playing of the English horn. At the moment of Tristan's death, the theme of love longing that opened the opera is repeated again. Isolde’s expressive complaint “I’m here, I’m here, dear friend” is full of dramatic exclamations. She prepares the final scene - the death of Isolde. Here the melodic melodies of the love duet of the second act develop widely and freely, acquiring a transformed, enlightened ecstatic sound.

M. Druskin

"Tristan and Isolde" is the most original creation of Wagner the poet: it amazes with its simplicity and artistic integrity. The multi-layered storylines of the ancient legend, which dates back to the 12th century, are reduced to several scenes, big number participants in the drama - two main characters and three or four performing secondary functions.

In the center of Act I is the fatal mistake of Tristan and Isolde, instead of a cup of poison, they drained a cup with a magic drink of love (the scene is the deck of a ship on the high seas). In the center of Act II is the opera's best, symphonically developed love scene (the scene is a shady park in the domain of King Mark, whose wife is Isolde; here the king overtakes the lovers, and one of the courtiers mortally wounds Tristan). Act III, the most complete (in Tristan's castle on the seashore), is imbued with the languid anticipation of the meeting and death of the heroes of the work.

The surrounding life seems to reach the consciousness of the lovers from afar: such is the song of the helmsman, the exclamations of the sailors in Act I, or the sounds of hunting horns in Act II, or the lonely pipe of a shepherd in Act III. “The depths of inner mental movements” - this is what, according to Wagner, is expressed in his poem. The composer, first of all, strives to convey the diversity of feelings of love - longing, waiting, pain, despair, thirst for death, enlightenment, hope, jubilation - all these shades receive an amazingly rich and strong expression in music.

That is why “Tristan” is Wagner’s most inactive opera: the “event” side in it is reduced to a minimum in order to give more scope to the identification of psychological states. And even if an important dramatically effective moment arises, and this is the duel between Melot and Tristan (in Act II), Wagner characterizes it briefly and sparingly, while the love scene preceding the duel takes up almost more than half of the act.

It would be wrong, however, to believe that Wagner completely isolates his heroes from life. Yes, he will be less and less interested in depicting the external setting of the action. But in the dramaturgy of Wagner’s operas, the importance of pictures of nature and pictorial sketches increases accordingly. Trying to penetrate into the essence of folk myth, to discover in it that which is not connected with “random”, in Wagner’s words, historical layers, he shows the “true man” in spiritual communication with nature, in unbreakable connection with her. The role of this landscape factor is especially great in the dramaturgy of the tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung”. But even in Tristan it is significant.

The action of the opera takes place mainly in the evening and night hours. For romantics, night is a symbol of feelings freed from the shackles of reason. It is at night that elemental forces awaken; The night hours are full of fantasy, the poetic charm of vague, mysterious movements in nature, in the human soul. The clarity of the day is alien to romantics, it seems to them to be illusory, for the sun blinds the eye, does not allow one to see that hidden thing that is revealed only in the twilight season (This is the fundamental difference between the romantics and the classics of the Viennese school. The light of reason, in the minds of the latter, brought up on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, disperses the darkness of prejudices and superstitions. Therefore, for example, ideological concept Mozart's The Magic Flute is the polar opposite of Tristan: dazzling Sun shine kingdom of wisdom Sarastro confronts the personification of evil - the Queen Nights.) . That is why the German romantic poet Novalis sang the hymns of the night with such inspiration. Among composers of the 19th century century, no one sang “night romance” as much as Wagner, and above all in “Tristan”.

The music of the opera - this gigantic vocal-symphonic poem about the destructive power of all-consuming passion - is marked by the unity of dramatic expression, a huge tension of feelings; the entire work is engulfed in constant excitement. In-depth psychologism, “hypertrophied sensitivity” (the expression of Romain Rolland) - this is what is characteristic of “Tristan”. This dominant state is concisely stated in the orchestral introduction to the opera, in which its content is conveyed, as if in a clot. The introduction is a cyclopeanally expanded, unified musical period, the dynamics of development of which follow, as it were, in a circle, returning to the starting point at the moment of climax. "All in vain! The heart falls powerlessly to dissolve in languor,” Wagner explains the meaning of this introduction.

From the very beginning of the introduction, a feeling of extreme emotional tension is created. The first fourteen to fifteen bars represent a broad dominant prefix (the main key of the introduction is A-minor, only in the conclusion does C-dur and the minor of the same name appear). Stubbornly avoiding the tonic triad, in the development of the “endless melody”, concealing the edges of cadences, using altered harmonies, sequences, and constantly modulating, Wagner extremely sharpens the mode-tonal movement. In the initial theme, the decisive significance is that unstable consonance, which resolves into a dominant seventh chord, which further enhances the feeling of languid tension. (This third quarter chord with a dropped fifth ( f) and non-chord tone ( gis), going to the seventh, is the leitharmony of “Tristan”, permeating the entire fabric of the score.)

It is carried out three times (the fourth, incomplete execution echoes the previous ones), after which the second theme of love longing arises:

The development of these themes (after bar 16) gives rise to a more coherent dynamic wave leading to A major. Its peak is emphasized by the appearance of the third, frantically enthusiastic theme (bars 64-65):

From here begins the next, highest and most intense wave of dynamics (from bars 74 to 84), the culmination of which is at the same time the climax of the entire introduction! - marks a breakdown: a return to initial state(chord f-ces-es-as enharmonically identical to the chord f-h-dis-gis, with which the introduction begins).

The considered introduction concentrates the typical features of the opera score. Noting that the harmonies of Tristan in places achieve “astounding beauty and plasticity,” Rimsky-Korsakov pointed out that the music as a whole “represents almost exclusively sophisticated style taken to extremes tensions" This tension, as Rimsky-Korsakov aptly describes it, gives rise to a “monotony of luxury.”

So in Wagner's music, along with " Siegfried's", included " Tristanovskoe" Start. And if the first is associated with the deepening of objective, folk-national features in Wagner’s music, then the second causes an increase in subjective, subtle psychological moments. To one degree or another, these two principles coexist in works written in the post-Lohengrin period. “Tristan” occupies a separate place in this regard: “Siegfried” motifs are almost completely absent in it.

Despite this limitation of content, Wagner achieved great power of expression within the framework of the task he set himself. He discovered not only new artistic means for conveying complex psychological shades of emotional experiences, but also further developed methods symphonization operas, which contributed to the creation of a flexible and capacious in content, large through forms. The best passages of the opera captivate with true drama: the orchestral introduction and final scene death of Isolde. These two large passages form an arch that frames the entire work. (They are often performed back to back in the form of two symphonic pieces.) Their music complements each other: the thematic nature of the introduction, as the drama develops, gives way to the leading theme of Isolde’s death scene:

The last theme takes on dominant significance in the opera, starting with the love duet, which is the center of Act II. This is “a gigantic forest melody,” Wagner said about the duet’s music. “You won’t remember its melody, but it will never be forgotten; in order to awaken it in the soul, you need to go into the forest on a summer evening...”

Vagner Sidorov Alexey Alekseevich

"TRISTAN AND IZOLDA"

"TRISTAN AND IZOLDA"

Zurich remained Wagner's residence for ten years. Wagner worked a lot as a theorist, as a poet and as a musician; he recreated his worldview; as a person, he experienced grief and joy, friendship and love. The consciousness that he was “chosen” was born in him. He convinces his contemporaries of this as well. It was during these years that his name began to become a slogan. The musical youth of Germany are enthusiastically drawn to him; in distant Russia, in the person of Alexander Serov, he has a student and apologist. Liszt is not afraid to take on as many troubles and hostilities as he likes in his “apostleship of Wagner.” But he himself remains the same - hot-tempered, impulsive, naive and practical, selfish and at the same time capable of tender friendship. He lives on subsidies from friends, on “alms” - and at the same time he believes that this is how it should be - for doesn’t he give them in return the best he can? He strives for communication, for humanity, for the collective - and at the same time he realizes that his art is ahead of modernity, that he is surrounded by misunderstanding, indifference or hostility.

Beginning in 1850, the Swiss government removed Wagner's name from the lists of emigrants and considered him as its citizen. But Wagner does not care about his citizenship. The latest research into Wagner's biography leads to the conviction that Wagner remained a rebel and a man of revolutionary sympathies all this time.

In Germany, at this time, productions of his operas multiplied, and Tannhäuser became the most popular of his works. - “Lohengrin”, after Liszt’s production in Weimar, was performed mainly on provincial stages. Financial situation the composer has improved. He buys himself new furniture, some unusual curtains on the windows, his wife has new ones elegant dresses, although Minna would, of course, like to save money rather than spend it. Wagner gets himself a light pink hat. In the portrait made of him by his Zurich friend, Mrs. Stockar-Escher, he is sitting in a chair, with a cloak romantically thrown over his shoulders. He was not handsome, but his large skull, his eyes and the mouth of a spoiled child and stubborn, gave him a strange charm. Wagner was ill all these years, and he himself significantly damaged himself with his immoderate “hydrotherapy.” His illness is due to nervousness, and only in 1856 in the sanatorium of Dr. Vaillant, near Geneva, where Liszt sent him, Wagner finally begins to feel healthy.

He travels a lot around Switzerland, wandering through the glaciers with his friends. Minna Wagner, holding a lantern, lights the way for Wagner during his early morning walks. He travels to Lago Maggiore and to Mont Blanc in the company of his wife and Herwegh, the famous emigrant poet, one of the failed heroes of the revolution of 1848, who only recently experienced a tragic affair with Herzen’s wife, and was rejected except by Wagner by all his acquaintances. In Zurich, Wagner conducted subscription concerts for two seasons (1851-52 and 1852-53), for which he prepared special program announcements, explaining Beethoven and his own compositions to the public. On March 26, 1851, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” was staged in Zurich, with the text translated from Italian into German by Wagner himself; he conducts the operas of Weber and Bellini, and conducts The Flying Dutchman with great success. The culmination of his activities in Zurich were his concerts on May 18, 20 and 22, 1853, for which he, having secured a financial base from the Zurich musical society, managed to invite orchestra members from all over Germany. Excerpts from “Rienzi”, “The Dutchman”, “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin” were performed.

And at this time, in the Dresden “General Police Index”, next to the notices of the arrest of various fraudsters, under No. 652 and under the heading “Political dangerous persons”, an announcement was placed: “Wagner, Richard, former bandmaster from Dresden, one of the most prominent supporters of the revolutionary party, persecuted for participation in the revolution in Dresden in May 1849, has, according to information, the intention, from Zurich, where he given time located, go to Germany. To facilitate his arrest, here is attached a portrait of Wagner, who should, if he appears, be arrested and extradited to the royal city court of Dresden. belongs to a family that has the “blasphemous audacity” to support Wagner financially...

Wagner had no intention of returning to Dresden. Liszt came to see him in Zurich.

Wagner laughed and cried with joy. Liszt writes: “Twenty times a day he throws himself on my neck, rolls on the floor, caresses his dog Peps and constantly says nonsense... This is a large, overwhelming personality, some kind of Vesuvius, who, playing with fire, grows lilac bushes on the surface and roses." To stage The Ring, Wagner needs a million! - Well: Leaf is ready to find him! Herwegh will publish a magazine to promote Wagner's ideas...

Liszt, Wagner and Herwegh drink bruderschaft in the Swiss mountains from the three Grütli springs. On one of the evenings of this summer, the Zurich Singing Society presented Wagner with an honorary diploma and organized a solemn torchlight procession in his honor with touching speeches. Wagner is going to visit Italy. But, having reached La Spezia, he fell ill with dysentery. Lying on a hard bed. Wagner experiences a sensation that throws light on the psychophysiology of his musical creativity. “I fell into some kind of somnambulistic state: suddenly it seemed to me that I was plunging into fast-flowing water. Its murmur appeared to me in the form of a musical chord Es-dur. It flowed on uncontrollably... I woke up from my half-sleep with an eerie feeling that the waves had closed high above me. I dreamed of the overture of “Das Rheingold”...

On October 6, 1858, in Basel, at the Three Kings Hotel, Wagner suddenly hears a choir: the motif of the royal fanfare from Lohengrin. This is Liszt with young musicians from Weimar: Hans von Bülow, the future famous violinist Joachim, composer Cornelius, Richard Pohl, Dionysus Pruckner. This is a fun, noisy, festive time. “Liszt’s ladies” also come to Basel: Princess Wittgenstein, his friend and her daughter Maria, with whom Wagner would later have friendly correspondence. Wagner reads the text of "The Ring"; accompanies Liszt and his ladies to Paris. Here Liszt introduced him to his children from Countess d’Agoux, Blandina and Cosima Liszt: they would both later play a role in Wagner’s life. Wagner returns to Switzerland to his work “With what faith, with what joy I threw myself into music!”... “My music is terrible”...

But does she bring him the inner satisfaction he was waiting for? In Seelisberg near Lake Vierwaldstedt, where Wagner's wife was undergoing treatment for heart disease, he perceives the beauty of nature in such a way that he wants to die. Feeling new dissatisfaction with his work, suddenly again acutely feeling financial worries, experiencing his loneliness, he writes to Liszt: “I no longer believe in anything, I have only one hope: sleep, a sleep so deep, deep that all feeling ceases.” life's torment..."

Herwegh introduced Wagner to Schopenhauer's books at this time. The philosophy of pessimism is a revelation for Wagner. “Thanks to Schopenhauer’s book, I began to consciously relate to what I had previously treated only through the prism of feeling.” He sends Schopenhauer “as a sign of worship” a book with the text of “The Nibelungs”. But neither Schopenhauer personally, nor the representative of the circles of German poetic romance of the beginning of the century, Bettina von Arnim, responded to the requests of Wagner and Liszt to give a review of “The Ring”. Wagner feels again at a crossroads. “It’s bad with me, very bad,” he writes to Liszt on January 15, 1854. And in another letter: “For the sake of the best of the visions of my life, for the sake of young Siegfried, I must still finish The Nibelungs... and since, after all, I have never experienced the happiness of love in my life, I want to erect a monument to this most beautiful of all dreams, in which from beginning to end love could truly be satisfied: I made a sketch of Tristan and Isolde in my head, the simplest, but most full-blooded musical idea ; I will cover myself with the black flag that flutters in the window so that I can die.”

The solution to the problem of happiness and love given in “The Ring,” the theme of Brünnhilde’s final monologue, required a new revision.

Wagner wrote the text of Tristan between August 20 and September 18, 1857, having had his ideas in mind for the previous two and a half years. Music took him more than a year and a half. In July 1859, the third act of Wagner's most tragic musical drama was completed in Lucerne. "Tristan", like any work of world art, cannot be explained, as bourgeois science loves it, from the events of the personal life of its author. But taking these events into account is necessary, if only in order to put the personal moment in its true place.

Scenery for Act III of the opera "Twilight of the Gods". Dresden -1913

Matilda Vevendoni.

Wagner's wife is now about fifty years old. This is a proud woman, offended by fate, who has not taken a single step to understand Wagner’s ideas. Caring about the house and bread, about what they say. This is Wagner's past. Typical philistinism of his original environment, the routinism of provincial theater scenes.

Wagner, who had risen in his creativity and in his thought to the heights of his contemporary culture, who believed that he was ahead of everyone, that he had new words that had not been heard before - Wagner could only feel regret for Minna. Of course, he needed Minna as a housewife, as a housekeeper. It was clear to him that a woman had not yet entered his life. And when she came in - Wagner greeted new love, holding breath. This woman was Mathilde Wesendonck, tall, slender, beautiful woman in black, “with a tender and sad gaze, in the depths of which unexpected sparks sometimes flashed” (memoirs of E. Schure), is the wife of Otto Wesendonck, a capitalist associated with New York. Mathilde was twenty-four years old when she met Wagner in 1852 in Zurich. She was a very happy mother. In June 1853, Wagner wrote a piano sonata for her album - his first musical composition after a long break. Until then, no woman had been given the power to inspire Wagner’s music...

But before I turned around love tragedy Wagner, life opened new pages for him.

In 1856, Wagner conceived a new drama, “The Victors.” Its theme is the preaching of Buddhism. Schopenhauer's philosophy becomes Wagner's ideological guide. She embodied all the inertia, individual and social, of the German bourgeoisie, which was experiencing growing pains. To a certain extent, close to the early romantics, Schopenhauer with his Buddhism is the path to that mysticism that rejects science and all the achievements of civilization, which at that time for many was a kind of surrogate for a worldview. Wagner of the era of the growing revolutionary wave is a Feuerbachian, and in the era of the collapse of bourgeois-democratic ideals he is also a supporter of Schopenhauer.

Refusal of life's struggle, the path to peace through renunciation is a direct contradiction to the bold challenge to fate that Wagner embodied and Siegfried's duel with the snake. Now he dreams of a different victory. If suffering is inevitable, then let it be raised to the heights of the world principle. If it is the true destiny of everyone, then let it crown the earth. “The Winners” remained a sketch. The main content of the drama was Buddha's justification of women's love. Wagner again turned Schopenhauer's reactionary worldview into a personal problem.

Along with this, “Tristan” was brewing. Wagner wrote Tristan with enormous stress. The image of his beloved woman stood above him - close and unattainably far... These are the days of the “Shelter” on a green hill near Zurich. Here the successful capitalist Otto Wesendonck built himself a rich villa. Very close to it there was a small two-story house. Mathilde Wesendonck persuaded her husband to buy it and give it to Wagner, since the composer was endlessly burdened by the living conditions in his former apartment, dreamed of peace for creativity, and in the house he called “Shelter”, he thought of finding his homeland for the rest of his life. He spent a year and a half there.

“... I finished the text of “Tristan” and brought you the manuscript of the last act. When we approached the sofa, you hugged me and said: “Now all my wishes have come true.” On that day, at that hour, I was resurrected to a new life. Everything that happened before was “pre-life”; from that moment the afterword began for me... I lived real life only in that wondrous moment...”

Matilda lives with her husband and children in her luxury villa. Wagner occupies the second floor of the Shelter. His wife is the first. Minna Wagner views the relationship between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck with increasing hostility. Minna claimed that she was not jealous, that only gossip that began around, that only her pride forced her to interfere in the relationship between Richard and Matilda. But, on the other hand, Minna was firmly convinced that there was a real relationship between Matilda and Wagner. love affair. In fact, she wasn't there. Wagner's relationship with the Wesendonck family was complex. He speaks with bitterness about Wesendonck’s “lack of culture,” but he visited his house every day. We read Schopenhauer, Hindu legends, and Calderon together. Wagner's friends, Herwegh, Keller, and the famous novelist were here. In the winter of 1857-58, Wagner composed five romances based on the words of Mathilde Wesendonck, a former gifted writer. The last of these poems is called “In the Greenhouse.” “Poor plants! We share your fate”... Warm, under glass, but in captivity... Wagner writes to Matilda: “No, never regret them, those caresses with which you decorated my meager life with joys... And I still revel in this magical aroma of flowers, which your heart brought to me..."

Minna opened one of Wagner's letters to Matilda. It was no longer possible to live in the neighborhood any longer. The couple separated for a while, then met again at the Shelter. In July and August 1858, the Wagners had guests: his devoted student and follower, now a brilliant pianist and conductor, Hans von Bulow with his young wife Cosima, Liszt’s daughter. August 17, 1858 Wagner leaves the “Shelter” completely, having with incredible difficulty obtained money for himself and his wife. He's going to Venice. Here, in the huge rooms of the Giustiniani Palace for rent, he spends a lonely winter. He writes the music of “Tristan”, sends a letter to Matilda Wesendonck through a mutual friend, Mrs. Ville, and in the diary, which is intended again for Matilda, he enters his thoughts, his feelings, his sad dreams. “Life, existence, is more and more shrouded in a cloud of dreams.”

Tristan was completed in Lucerne, where Wagner moved from Venice in March 1859, because his Saxon homeland raised the issue with Austria, which then owned Venice, about the extradition of Wagner, a political criminal. He visited Zurich again, saw Matilda and left Switzerland. In Paris, prospects for staging his operas appeared. "Tristan" was sold to Breitkopf and Hertel, the score of "The Ring", not yet finished, was bought from Wagner by Otto Wesendonck.

For Wagner, a period of wandering began again.

What characterizes Wagner's new work is the cult of personal suffering, egocentrism, generalized to the point of complete triumph over the broad social themes of his first Swiss years.

Villa Wesendonk and the "refuge". Zurich.

“Tristan and Isolde Set design sketch by N.K. Roerich.

The legend about the unhappy love of the knight Tristan for Queen Isolde, another man's wife, was known to Wagner from the poem of the medieval German poet Godfide of Strasbourg (early 13th century). In Zimrock's translation, Wagner read it (not for the first time) in 1855. He was also familiar with the transcription made by Hermann Kurtz (1844). His sources according to mythological foundations“The Rings” also prepared him for the perception of “Tristan.” Old - much more ancient than Wagner thought, the myth lies at the basis of this legend. Modern Western bourgeois science is limited in its study of the roots of “Tristan” to indications of the Persian origin of the epic. The Persian poet Gorgani, in his poem “Vis and Ramin” in the middle of the 11th century, outlined all the foundations from which the European legend later grew. Soviet science poses this question more deeply and fundamentally. In the “Proceedings of the Institute of Language and Thinking”, the staff of academician N. Ya. Marr traced the path from “Isolde” to “Ishtar”, ancient goddess moisture. Tristan is one of the types of solar deity, like Siegfried. But these scientifically established roots were unknown to Wagner. He turns the meaning of the legend in his own way: his hero and heroine glorify the night and go to death through love.

The death of Tristan and Isolde resulted in his drama - and even more so in his music - into victory and the triumph of love over the world. Our reality, life, day - is depicted by Tristan as a mirage, unnecessary, evil, hiding the true meaning of phenomena. Night, death, immersion in the depths of the extraconscious, for him are the true truth. For Wagner, love in this reality is unthinkable other than in its tragic aspect. There is no doubt that the very immersion in these problems of the “personal” is a reactionary moment in art. But Wagner must be understood in the conditions of his existence. He generalized his personal tragedy to the extent of a huge “symbol”.

Wagner himself later said that he had never been able to achieve such a unity of words and music in his work. “Tristan and Isolde” is written in verses that form a departure from the requirements of “runic rhyme”—free alliterative verse—established in Wagner’s theoretical works. In “Tristan” there is a special melodiousness of short and flexible lines, completely subordinate to the musical element. “Endless melodies” are intertwined into a complex and at the same time unified whole. Wagner's musical compositional form is precisely different from all that preceded it, in that he makes it the bearer of all the contents embodied in the drama, and does this tangibly and almost sensually visually. In sharp oppositions of tonalities, the music conveys the contrast of love and death...

...Bend over us.

Night of love…

Let us forget.

What we are in life.

Into the bosom of the night

Accept us

From the universe

To die is an unspeakable happiness. Isolde's death switches to the motive of enthusiastic love ecstasy, dissolves in “world excitement, in world breath.” And this is not the dispassion of the Buddhist “nirvana”, but “highest pleasures”. And where death was the liberator for his heroes, for Wagner art played this role.

Tristan and Isolde freed Wagner from his bitter love for Mathilde Wesendonck.

In Tristan, Wagner most fully embodied his theories. Critics greeted “Tristan” with such expressions as “monster”, “absurd”, “chaos”, “monotony”, “cat music”. Hanslick, the Viennese critical dictator, considers the first act the crown of boredom and poetic impotence... “the killing of meaning and language, stuttering”... The protest of Wagner’s contemporary criticism was to a certain extent a protest against new forms of art, a protest of the ruling class groups against all attempts to budge the established canons taste. The main thing that musicologists, Hanslick, Riehl, and Naumann reproached Wagner for was the “destruction” of the forms of music. Music without melody - which was understood as a classical, complete and established "reprise" by tradition - simply did not seem to satisfy the most natural needs of the listener. Among Wagner's opponents were ardent reactionaries, obscurantists in art, but there were also supporters of musical progress, eager to point out that Wagner was following the wrong path. It is characteristic, however, that these latter blamed Wagner for his basic conviction about the fusion of the arts, defended pure “symphonic” music, the abstractness of the sound element, i.e., in essence, they were inclined to the equally reactionary theory of “art for art’s sake.” Criticism of Wagner the poet and playwright-thinker developed in other ways. It was easy to sneer at his alliterations, archaisms, and myth-making. But in general, criticism of Wagner more often admitted its misunderstanding of Wagner than refuted it. The strongest of Wagner's critics, Nietzsche, has not yet given his word.