The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (review)

Abstract

The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. By Eric Chafe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [viii, 330 p. ISBN-10: 0195176472; ISBN-13: 9780195176476. $60.] Bibliographical references, music examples, index. The early years of the new millennium (if one takes the millennium as beginning in 2000 rather than 2001) witnessed a flurry of books that take on the much-discussed but always slippery topic of the relationship between Wagner's Tristan and Schopenhauer's philosophy. First was The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), by the British historian of philosophy Bryan Magee. Although the book is about Wagner's engagement with philosophy during his whole career, not just his appropriation of Schopenhauer beginning in 1854, its central chapters offer an intelligent and useful discussion of the philosopher and his influence on the composer, especially with respect to Tristan. Then came Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), by Roger Scruton, who like Magee has written compellingly about philosophy, but who also has a far deeper grasp of music (see, for example, his Aesthetics of Music [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999]), Scruton's fundamental claim is that Tristan is literally a sacred work-that it offers us a model by means of which we, as contemporary human beings, can enrich and ennoble our lives. In contrast to Magee, Scruton addresses in considerable detail both the literary work on which the opera is based, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan und Isot, and Wagner's music. Schopenhauer's philosophy plays a major role in his reading, but nothing like the commanding role accorded to it by Magee. In between Magee and Scruton is a strange (and massive) new biography by the German journalist and scholar Joachim Kohler, Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans (trans. Stewart Spencer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004; originally published as Der Letzte der Titanen: Richard Wagners Leben und Werk [Munich: Claassen, 2001]). Kohler's long chapter on Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Tristan (The Grand Passion, pp. 408-68) is noteworthy for its iconoclastic view that Wagner's undying acknowledgement of Schopenhauer's influence from 1854 to the end of his life is in fact proof that he was in fact no influence at all-the point being that the composer without exception hid the real influences on his work. Enter, improbably, Eric Chafe-a scholar known for his publications on the music of Monteverdi and Bach, not on nineteenthcentury opera, and indeed one who has no previous publications on Wagner whatsoever. Chafe's The Tragic and the Ecstatic dramatically trumps all the above works in every respect. This is not to say that they are not worth reading; they are, and one would do well to read them before attempting Chafe. But, in comparison with them, he offers by far the most detailed and persuasive account of Schopenhauer's influence on the opera. His discussion of the relation of Schopenhauerian philosophy to Tristan begins on the first page, and it is the central plank on which Chafe builds his entire interpretation of the work-philosophical, dramatic, and musical. Like Scruton, he engages Gottfried's Tristan in detail, but he argues convincingly that Wagner's opera is at bottom a Schopenhauerian drama with an overlay of Gottfried, not the reverse. Most important, he provides a magisterial analysis of the music, using Schopenhauer as his guide to develop dramatically and musically compelling readings of all levels of the work, from its global structure down to individual phrases, chords and notes. It is hardly possible to praise his musical acumen-his ear, his sensitivity to motive, harmony, tonal process, and line-sufficiently. And his musical skills are supplemented wonderfully by his philosophical, literary-critical, biographical, and archival ones. The Tragic and the Ecstatic is ultimately a work of synthesis, and Chafe's signal contribution is to tie all sorts of disparate threads-Wagner's pre-1854 philosophical and literary influences (Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Griepenkerl), Schopenhauer, Gottfried, the composer's aesthetic writings, his letters, his sketches, the past 150 years of Wagner scholarship, and musical analysis-together into a compelling and convincing interpretation of the opera. …