1 - ‘Wo sind wir?’ Tristan Disorientations

Summary

Keeping track of how appreciation and understanding of Tristan und Isolde has evolved, in live performance, recording and scholarly studies, is a formidable task. One path through the labyrinth is opened up by Wagner’s poetic text, in which the title characters express their disorientation, their alienation from communal norms. Stage directors and musicological commentators alike have found ways of dramatising the particular tensions between conformity and nonconformity that encapsulate the drama’s representations of love and death, in settings that balance magical interventions (the love potion) against the worldly intrusions of King Marke and his entourage. Surveying and critiquing accounts of the role that Tristan und Isolde has played at the heart of fundamental changes to musical form and style since the 1860s reinforces the value of arguing that the continued presence of modernist qualities in contemporary music – works by Schoenberg, Nono, Henze, Andriessen and Anderson are instanced - is a direct consequence of Wagner’s materials and methods, particularly in Tristan.