A few years ago I wrote an article on Tristan, and found myself captivated by eerie, metaphoric linkages with, of all things, the Grand Canyon. The year 1857 was the year Wagner began to compose the opera, and also the year of the first attempted navigation of the chasm of the Colorado River. Before 1857, the canyon was nothing more than an obstacle to the occasional traveler --- unknown, unextraordinary and ignored. By 1883, the year of Wagner’s death, the navigations of John Wesley Powell, the geological analysis of Charles Dutton, and the landscape painting of Thomas Moran had exposed and validated the canyon and made it Grand --- an international icon of both science and art, revealing new treasures of human knowledge and human sensibility.

By the same year, 1883, Tristan and Isolde had been recognized as musical icon, no longer unsingable and unplayable, but widely regarded as the beginning of modern music.

The view from the Canyon’s rim had revealed much: a new conception of time --- geologic time; and a new and disturbing conception of where we had come from; and also a new perspective on beauty --- downward, into the chasm. Tristan offers similar gifts ---a new way of looking over the landscape of human existence --- downward, into ourselves, beyond time. Into the abyss, but also into a sound world of such beauty never heard before. Over the next two days we will explore this dramatic and musical landscape, and its unprecedented views of love and longing, illusion and the subconscious.

It has fallen to me to initiate this Seminar by talking, not about Tristan --- we have splendid experts to do that --- but about the remarkable historical and cultural contexts in which it was composed. My conceit in doing this was inspired by my hope that our approach to Wagner will some day be “normalized.” In the largest sense this means taking Wagner’s operas on their own terms, irrespective of both the events of the composer’s outsized life, and the things that he wrote in twelve volumes of prose works.

But for my remarks this morning, “normalization” also means the reminder that Wagner, like all creative artists, lived at a certain time and place --- that he was, to a considerable extent, “historical,” shaped by, and a shaper of, that time and place. This is not exactly the way Wagner, or the early Wagnerians, wanted us to see him. It is a commonplace to say that Wagner was reluctant to credit those who influenced him. He insisted that his artwork of the future was as timeless and spaceless as the myths upon which they were based. From there, it was a short jump to the assertion that his was an altogether transcendental genius, without mother or father --- or equal.

This claim of “non-historicity” was itself a sign of the times. Wagner’s life spanned a period in which the status of the creative artist evolved from hired craftsman to center of attention and highest regard. Haydn labored on the domestic staff of the Esterhazy, and Schubert and others composed eternal masterpieces they never heard performed. But Wagner insisted that it was the creative artist who would redeem society, and thus deserved fame, fortune and esteem. Against all odds, this is exactly what he accomplished. As Jacques Barzun wrote, Wagner “provided the spectacle of an artist who … had died wealthy and revered in his own country. Accounts of him pictured a lord receiving tribute in his castle and a demigod worshipped at Bayreuth. He was the emblem of vindication for every artist.”

Wagner succeeded as a result of talent, ambition and a prodigious and dominating will, but also within the context of powerful historical changes. In an absurdly broad view, the nineteenth century might be seen as having been shaped by the emergence and triumph of the bourgeois middle classes. Through the course of Wagner’s life, spanning most of the century from 1813 to 1883, society was forever transformed by urbanization and industrialization, by the establishment of modern financial institutions, including the validation of debt and the algebraic power of capital. Increasingly, manufactured goods and their distribution were accomplished on massive scales, and wages substituted for barter and subsistence. (All of this, of course, was duly regretted by Wagner in The Ring of the Nibelung).

This transformation of economic conditions resulted in an explosion of middle class wealth and power, with inevitable impacts on the business of art, too. Appreciation of high art became an emblem of social mobility, a prerequisite for ascendance from middle/middle to upper/middle. High culture found its place less in the small, private palaces of the rich and royal but more in the stupendous public palaces of the modern concert hall. (One remembers that the lovely Margrave theater in Bayreuth was not large enough for Wagner’s populist ambitions.) In addition, the source of art revenue evolved away from royal patronage and toward the box office, so that the creative artist could be tempted by the expanded possibility of economic, and so artistic, independence. In all of this, Wagner was the paradigm.

As night follows day, economic and social transformation brought unbearable strains on unresponsive political structures, and things fell apart in 1848. The uprisings of that year and the next constitute the most violent, and traumatic, episode in Europe between 1815 and 1914. No artist was more involved than Wagner who, even while in the pay of the Saxon King, manned the Dresden barricades with his friend and political mentor, the great anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin.

But no matter how colorful the barricades, 1848 was not a landmark of proletarian ascendancy, or even the extension of liberal or democratic institutions. Events across the continent scared the kings and large landowners to a fare-thee-well, and those who did not flee fought back thinking, rightly so, that their lives might depend on it. Critically, the military forces and the nouveau riche remained generally loyal to the ancien regimes.

By the second half of 1849, the revolutions had crashed like so many houses of cards, whether by disarray --- as in Italy; or by ethnic jealousy --- as across central Europe; or by being still-born --- as Chartism was in England; or by the attraction of dictatorship, as in the France outside of Paris; or by procrastination --- as in the Frankfurt Assembly. The denouement was traumatic for Wagner, too, who, condemned and narrowly escaping capture, fled into Switzerland and exile.

Outside of a few small states, reaction, autocracy and absolute power actually made net gains. Some formerly liberal leaders, such as the Pope, turned away from progressive ideas, now considered dangerous. And that was the trouble: the undoubted surge of popular sentiment was a surge of ideas, of idealism, without the sustenance of either economic interest or force of arms.

In the view of the historian, R. R. Palmer, “the most immediate and far-reaching consequence of the 1848 revolution was a moral orientation. Idealism was discredited. Ideas themselves were seen in a new way … It had been shown everywhere, but most clearly and unmistakably in Germany, that no political aim could be accomplished without power. People therefore became interested in power itself, in what it was, and how to obtain it.”

This passage at once brings to mind Wotan, the archetype of the lust for power and of moral disorientation, and it was in the very aftermath of political failure and disillusion that Wagner wrote the Ring poems. Wagner did more than withdraw just from Germany; like other idealists, he simply withdrew from political participation. He might later in life have trumpeted a kind of triumphal Germanism, tastelessly celebrated the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and exploited the patronage of Ludwig II, but after 1848 Wagner turned inward, wholly focused on his own artwork and personal success.

The period between 1848 and 1854 was the time of great moral re-orientation for Wagner, and esthetic re-alignment, and artistic maturation. During these years, Wagner wrote no music, but thousands of words, as if he were forcing himself to articulate his innermost creative impulses. When he recommenced musical composition, on The Rhinegold in 1853, he was a very different artist than the composer of Lohengrin, completed in 1848, and perhaps the last testament of romanticism.

Wagner was not alone; idealism gave way across Europe. Again, R. R. Palmer: “After 1848, men prided themselves on being realistic, emancipated from illusions, willing to face facts as they were. Whether an idea was ‘right’ became a somewhat irrelevant if not unanswerable question. The question was whether it was workable.”

In the 1850s, these conditions sparked an explosion of new thinking in every walk of intellectual life. In philosophy old masters were given new leases on life. Hegel had died in 1831, but the concept of the dialectic would take center stage--- the concept that reality is an evolutionary, constantly changing process, fueled by the conflict of opposing states of affairs. Today I need reference only what are patently the two most influential economic and scientific arguments of the nineteenth century, bracketing the period that Wagner composed Tristan.

Karl Marx, born five years after Wagner, published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, just before the uprisings. In 1857, he completed a massive manuscript that would appear in 1959 as the Critique of Political Economy. Marx died in 1883, twenty-nine days after Wagner.

Hegelian dialectics found equally monumental expression in the same year, 1859, when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Darwin was born four years before Wagner, and died in 1882.

Schopenhauer’s master work, The World as Will and Idea, was written in 1819 and “ignored for thirty years,” but now, in the 1850s, many paid attention to the notion that the underlying reality is the will, and that men are driven by “interests, urges and drives.” No one paid more attention than Wagner. Bryan Magee has demonstrated decisively that Wagner’s immersion in Schopenhauer beginning in 1854 was the central intellectual adventure of his life, and one that played a critical role in allowing Wagner fully to realize himself as mature artist, especially in Tristan.

It would not have surprised Hegel that the emergence of new and conflicting forces in society would produce new and challenging art works. In French painting, emancipation from illusion took the form of realism. This was a conscious rejection of both the romantics and the Academy. The way was lead by Courbet, who exhibited The Stone Breakers in 1850, and then, rejected by the Universal Exhibition of 1855, opened his own pavilion.

Manet, following Baudelaire’s advice to paint the modern life, the real life, painted The Absinthe Drinker in 1858, and in a final blow to the moribund Academy, exhibited the scandalous Dejeuner sur l’herbe at the Salon des Refuses in 1863, just two years before the first performance of Tristan. Manet, likeWagner and Marx, died in 1883.

In literature, the most towering figure is the realist, Zola, but the most compelling is the “anti-realist,” Baudelaire. Reviled as a drug-addicted and syphilitic dandy, this supposed proponent of withdrawal and quietism was, like Wagner, on the barricades in 1848, and again in 1851 fighting against the coup of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1857 --- there’s that year again! --- Baudelaire published the most influential poem of the century, and what has been called the first “modern” work of European literature, Les Fleurs du Mal, for which he was promptly convicted of both obscenity and blasphemy.

Baudelaire turned conventional values upside down. Society was appalled by his decadent vision of unrepressed will, sensual pleasure, even satanism. But perceptive readers realized that he was exposing us to his own long journey downward and into darkness, a journey of self-exposure as dreadful, and courageous, as Wagner’s. For both Les Fleurs du Mal and Tristan project the possibility that, after all, the phenomenal, observable world, the so-called “real” world, and the world of the Christian God and ethical values, might in fact be nothing but illusion.

For Wagner and Baudelaire, Marx and Darwin, Schopenhauer and Hegel, the realists and impressionists --- all attempted explanations of our physical and emotional lives in a way that, even if they did not deny Him, simply did not require the Christian God. I think that Wagner’s art is very much about the search for redemptive meaning in a world without God. And I think that is what Michael Tanner meant when he wrote that Tristan is one of the two religious masterpieces of western music.

The European world of the 1850s, the world after 1848, was a period of crucial change in the way we have come to think about life and about ourselves. So too the Grand Canyon, for Whoever, or whatever, created it --- God or gravity --- The Canyon stands as a silent but sublime symbol of that age. And the stupendous chasm is alive still, for the waters of the river are constantly carving downward, revealing anew our ever more distant past.

Wagner was astonishingly entangled in both the events and ideas of that age, and created what is perhaps the greatest symbol of it, Tristan and Isolde. Unlike the Canyon, it is hardly a silent one, for what Wagner gave us in 1859 was a new world of music, the very sound world of his times. Tristan is still alive, too, for listening to it today, we can hear the beginning of the modern world.