“TRISTAN”

Tristan towers like a mountain above all other love poems, as Wagner above all other artists of his century.  It is the outcome of a sublime conception, though the work as a whole is far from perfect.  Of perfect works there is none where Wagner is concerned.  The effort necessary for the creation of them was too great to be long sustained; for a single work might means years of toil.  And the tense emotions of a whole drama cannot be expressed by a series of sudden inspirations put into form the moment they are conceived.  Long and arduous labour is necessary.  These giants, fashioned like Michelangelo’s, these concentrated tempests of heroic force and decadent complexity, are not arrested, like the work of a sculptor or painter, in one moment of their action; they live and go on living in endless detail of sensation.  To expect sustained inspiration is to expect what is not human.  Genius may reveal what is divine; it may call up and catch a glimpse of die Muetter, but it cannot always breathe in the exhausted air of this world.  So will must sometimes take the place of inspiration; though the will is uncertain and often stumbles in its task.  That is why we encounter things that jar and jolt in the greatest works—­they are the marks of human weakness.  Well, perhaps there is less weakness in Tristan than in Wagner’s other dramas—­Goetterdaemmerung, for instance—­for nowhere else is the effort of his genius more strenuous or its flight more dizzy.  Wagner himself knew it well.  His letters show the despair of a soul wrestling with its familiar spirit, which it clutches and holds, only to lose again.  And we seem to hear cries of pain, and feel his anger and despair.

“I can never tell you what a really wretched musician I am.  In my inmost heart I know I am a bungler and an absolute failure.  You should see me when I say to myself, ‘It ought to go now,’ and sit down to the piano and put together some miserable rubbish, which I fling away again like an idiot.  I know quite well the kind of musical trash I produce....  Believe me, it is no good expecting me to do anything decent.  Sometimes I really think it was Reissiger who inspired me to write Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin.”

This is how Wagner wrote to Liszt when he was finishing this amazing work of art.  In the same way Michelangelo wrote to his father in 1509:  “I am in agony.  I have not dared to ask the Pope for anything, because my work does not make sufficient progress to merit any remuneration.  The work is too difficult, and indeed it is not my profession.  I am wasting my time to no purpose.  Heaven help me!” For a year he had been working at the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel.

This is something more than a burst of modesty.  No one had more pride than Michelangelo or Wagner; but both felt the defects of their work like a sharp wound.  And although those defects do not prevent their works from being the glory of the human spirit, they are there just the same.