Firstly, I would like to say how indebted I am as a Wagner novice to the YouTube channel ‘Wagner Leitmotifs’ which is well worth looking at.  It helped me find my way in to the operas.

Here is a link to all such musical themes that occur in Tristan und Isolde:

I didn’t take to Wagner naturally, I know lots of people do, but I also know that many people are like me; put off by the absence of ‘tunes’ so-to-speak.

The thing about me, is that I am also a geek, and the idea of getting into Wagner’s own sound world and playing spot the motif quite appealed.  Have a listen to all those little YouTube snippets.  Then you can listen to the opera with your ears pricked for them.  I’m not saying this is the best way to listen to Wagner but it really is a great game and a good way to understand what Wagner was trying to do with opera.

A quick word on Leitmotifs…

So, a leitmotif is a little snippet of music that is linked to a character, a place, an emotion, a couple etc. etc.  Wagner opera’s are built of such motifs and become like a sound map.  Every time you hear one of these sounds it is supposed to elicit certain feelings.  This way, either subconsciously or consciously (depending how deeply you study these things), the listener feels draw in by the orchestration rather than feeling alienated by its seeming lack of tonality.

Wagner revolutionised the musical scene with these new ideas, and they can be seen beginning to permeate other forms of operatic output of the period.  Puccini got in trouble with Italian audiences for being too Wagnerian in his use of leitmotifs.  They are particularly apparent in Tosca.

Back to Tristan und Isolde…The opera was composed during a rather turbulent period for Wagner.  He was 44 and had no money.  It was five years since his last opera, Lohengrin, had been performed.  He still had dreams of getting the Ring commisioned, but these were withering.

So he hit upon the idea of writing Tristan und Isolde.  He wrote to Liszt:

“As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall thoroughly satiated. I have in my head “Tristan and Isolde,” the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception. With the black flag which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die.”

Liszt was taken with this and wrote back encouragingly…further good news and encouragement came from the Emperor of Brazil, who told Wagner to write an opera, bring it to the Italian Company in Rio Janeiro, and he could have all the resources he needed to get it staged.  Wagner had to turn him down.  Italian opera singers, he believed, would never be able to get through his music.

Luckily (or not so if you happened to be Wagner’s wife, Minna), he received an invite to stay with his wealthy friends, the Wesendoncks.  He and Minna moved into the small cottage on their estate.  This is where he began having an emotional (if not physical) affair with Mathilde Wesendonck.  So while composing Act One of T & I  there was certainly a great deal on his mind.  Unrequitable love was definitely the theme of the hour.  By 1858 he and Minna were in a state and he left her, and the Wesendoncks, and headed to Venice, where the second act of the opera was composed.

Wagner had other troubles too.  He was wanted for revolutionary activity, and so had to travel carefully.  When he finally found a city he was safe in, with an opera house keen on giving T & I a go, Vienna, it turned out he had composed another Ring; an opera that it seemed impossible for singers to grasp in the time they had and impossible to stage.

He was utterly disheartened.  The tide didn’t turn until patronage arrived in the form of 18 year old Ludwig II, newly crowned King of Bavaria.  Wagner had grabbed his attention with a new (1863) edition of his Ring poem; in the preface of which he called for a “German prince” who might help him realise his vision for a new German opera. In 1964, shortly after his coronation, Ludwig answered Wagner’s prayers.  He commissioned the Ring and set about providing Wagner with as much money and as many resources as he could possibly need to ensure the first performance of Tristan un Isolde.

The opera was highly successful, and remains a firm favourite today.  For me, the key to it was allowing myself to get utterly lost in the music.  The overwhelming sound world is so beautiful and moving if you give yourself up to it entirely.

It also might help to have a look at some of Wagner’s writings to understand his project.  Here they (well some of them) are:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner%27s_Prose_Works_%28Wagner,_Richard%29