“TRISTAN AND ISOLDA”

Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of another), “I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music”; and though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner, the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and who stand every other music, so long as it is real music.  Immediately after listening to “Tristan and Isolda” all other operas seem away from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters.  This does not mean that “Tristan” is greater than “Don Giovanni” or the “Matthew” Passion—­for it is not—­but that it speaks to each of us in the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world, of oneself, of one’s own soul.  Who can stay to listen to the sheer loveliness of “Don Giovanni,” or follow with any sympathy the farcical doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being, and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a thing of life?  For one does not have to think what Wagner means:  so direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the meaning without thinking of the words that convey it.  Nietzsche is right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive generations as they arise.

“Tristan and Isolda” is one of the world’s half-dozen stupendous appeals in music to the emotional side of man’s nature; it stands with the “Matthew” Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart’s Requiem, rather than with “Don Giovanni,” or “Fidelio,” or “Tannhaeuser;” like the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the “Matthew” Passion, there are pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an overwhelming emotion.  That emotion is the passion of love—­the elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man; and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in his “Faust,” but in all its phases.  It is a glorification of sex attraction:  nevertheless, it refutes Tannhaeuser or Venus as completely as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth.  Tannhaeuser, we know, would have it that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the spirit.  That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner had learnt when he came to