Tristan Times 2 There are some composers in whose music emotions are so near the surface and so intense that, if you don't encounter theses works in adolescence, you are ever after puzzled by the strong hold the music has on people whose opinions you otherwise respect. Tchaikovsky is one such. And Liszt. And Mahler. But above all, Wagner.** Why such composers and such music exists is a fascinating question. My guess is that it has to do with your basic bourgeois sublimation which set in in Europe bigtime around 1800 and then had a run of about a century and a half. Notice that the composers I mentioned are all heart of the 19th century kinds of guys. One can easily conjure a list of artists in other genres who produced similarly conflicted, over-emoting work. Coleridge, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and (above all) Thomas Mann come immediately to mind. (Yes, yes, Mann is 20th century, but the wise world-citizen never forgets that the repressed we shall always have with us.) As the bourgeois repression-ethic filtered downward in society, finally locking whole generations of Euro-American youth in bonds of industrial strength anti-masturbation, anti-copulation guilt, those youth adapted and rebelled in their own ways. In England, we saw the rise of institutions devoted to chthonic sexuality of a rather perverse kind; those institutions still exist and are known as public schools. In Germany, well, we all know where Germany wound up. In America, ever the trend-setter in anything that smacks of puritanism, the system wasn't broken until the late 1950s with the little pubescent rebellion that became known as rock and roll. All you can say about Americans is: when a large group of them gets really fed up, the resultant creative tantrum/outburst is something to see (and hear). And still is. The 19th century was different. Genteel repression after all was the name of the game. While Liszt occasionally threw off the shackles of repression publicly, it was only for a few minutes in this or that allegedly Hungarian rhapsody. Even poor Tchaikovsky, late in the century, managed only the briefest of musical orgasms (the last movement of the 4th symphony, the slam-bam, thank-you-sir of the Marche Slav, and the sort of gloppy, where's-the-Kleenex squirt-squirt in the Romeo and Juliet overture). As for Mahler, well, Mahler is enough to give coitus interruptus a bad name. Still, for all their short- (or fast-)comings, Franz and Peter and Gustav were (and are) pretty accessible. Orchestras and pianists all over the globe have kept their wet dreams wet for decades now. Wagner is another matter, mainly because it takes a lot of people and a lot of money to do Wagner. Which, even now, lends a certain sense of occasion to any live performance of a Wagner opera. I became an adolescent casualty in the Wagner wars (changing the metaphor) at the age of 15, when I strolled virginally into a Met performance of Tristan and Isolde, and emerged five hours later feeling. . . well, I'm not sure what. Ravished? Maybe. Fulfilled? Maybe, or at least as fulfilled as you can feel at 15. In any case, I "got" Wagner, at the adolescent hormonal body-fluid level. In the immediately following years, a 6-LP recording became scratchier and scratchier as I relived that long, long quivering moment in the dark, dark theater. Time passed, my interests musical and otherwise grew and changed, and Tristan gradually lost its magical, chemical hold on me. One afternoon recently, a half century after the first encounter, I found myself sitting down in another dark theater ready for another 5 hours of you-know-what. Not the Met, this time, but Houston Grand Opera, Christoph Eschenbach conducting. And a good thing it was too. Somebody long ago observed that the real protagonist in every Wagner opera, but especially in Tristan, is the orchestra. The people on stage are mere puppets, whose movements and vocalizations are in the total control of the massive god hiding in the pit. So if you're going to have a late-in-life Wagner encounter, it's essential that a skilled acolyte is present down there to draw the god out of hiding. Darkness. Eschenbach gently wakes the god, and that damned prelude starts, and there it all is again: night and death and sublimation and "love" and horniness and bottomless yearning and want-want-want, need-need-need, so beautifully wrought that you wish it would never stop. I left after the first act. Why? The easy answer: One time through adolescence is enough. A harder answer involves dangerous and tricky talk about "emotion." I put the word in quotes to indicate my doubt about accepting it at surface value. We speak casually about "love", but any life leads one to a realization that that which is depicted in Tristan is no more than hormonally induced puppy love, an "emotion" so instinct-driven (gotta fuck NOW! the god keeps shouting) that it has hardly any elements of what we might like to think of as humanity in it. I left after the first act because the opera seemed to me a visit to a kind of emotional zoo, or museum, displaying a primitive artifact that I knew well and had no interest in re-visiting. But, take away the stage, and the singers with their laughably clumsy words, leaving only the music, and you still have something. Quite a lot, in fact. Because, while the puppet story of puppy love is dreadfully clear and shallow, the music is--continues today to be--profoundly ambiguous and resonant, full of insistent, paradoxical hints of mortality and even immortality, of a love, even, so large that it has no name because words are finite while music is somehow, mysteriously, more than finite. Next time, I'll know to leave after the prelude. END **There is a small sub-cateogry of human beings who, having never encountered this kind of music as adolescents, are as adults suddenly smitten. This odd, delayed behavior may be compensatory or perhaps even retributive, but any brief attempt to explain it would get us into the far, far reaches of analysis where even the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--Fourth Edition) fears to tread. For info about a good recording,
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