SOURCE: R. Kilbourn, J. A. “Redemption Revalued in Tristan und Isolde: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche.” University of Toronto Quarterly 67, no. 4 (fall 1998): 781-88.

In the following essay, Kilbourn discusses the theme of redemption via the “conjunction of love and death” in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

This discussion of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde shares with the previous three chapters the recognition of Wagner's propensity to invert and even subvert his materials: formally, logically, musically, and ideologically. And yet, in a seeming contradiction, the ultimate movement of Tristan is one of completion and resolution, in terms of the redemption Wagner sought to embody in the crucial conjunction of love and death. My aim is to address this apparent formal and thematic disjunction (on the basis of Wagner's professed intentions, rather than any specific production), through a close look at the opera's final tableau, Isolde's Verklärung, or ‘transfiguration’ (Bailey, 41-43). In this...