Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner enters the discussion through Tristan, an opera whose music seems to give direct expression to the lovers’ movement toward ecstatic self-annihilation. The book reverses that apparent hierarchy: the opera’s truth lies not in music’s overwhelming emotional current but in the supposedly disruptive events that interrupt it. Wagner’s drama thus becomes an example of how an artwork’s formal accidents can matter more than its most powerful affect.

Tristan and the Promise of Music

The music of Tristan appears to do what words can only indicate: carry the lovers inexorably toward the fulfillment of their passion and the highest joy of annihilation. This makes the opera a supreme example of music as the expression of an excessive enjoyment beyond ordinary language. The account sets that impression against the claim, associated with Arthur Schopenhauer, that music renders emotion with exceptional force. The question is whether the music’s apparent metaphysical message—the lovers’ drift toward self-extinction—is really the work’s truth.

The Intrusion of Ordinary Events

The opera repeatedly breaks that slow, consuming movement with fragments of daily life. The finale makes the interruption especially conspicuous. Just before Brangäne arrives, the music could seemingly proceed directly to the lovers’ final transfiguration, dying entwined. Instead, a second ship arrives, and the action suddenly accelerates: Melot and Kurwenal die, among other events. In a few minutes, more happens than across the preceding scenes. The book compares this compressed rush to the ending of Verdi’s Il Trovatore, where a whole sequence of events also occurs in the final moments. The contrast makes the interruption seem almost ridiculous beside the opera’s sustained passion.

Dramatic Necessity and the Opera’s Truth

These abrupt events are not merely a delay before the lovers’ expected self-annihilation. They are presented as an immanent necessity: their intrusion of reality enables Isolde to perform the final self-obliterating act. Without it, Tristan’s agony at being unable to die would continue indefinitely. The reversal is central to the book’s reading of Wagner: the truth is not guaranteed by the music’s most intense emotional movement, but emerges in the narrative accidents that interrupt it. The grand metaphysical affect, precisely because it seems to speak beyond ordinary reality, is the element that lies.