Ladies and Gentlemen, my brief remarks today on TRISTAN AND ISOLDE must necessarily be subjective in nature because it is not as a musicologist or literary expert that I have come to speak, nor as a man of the relatively objective sciences, but as a man of the practical theatre--although of course one who makes use of the findings of academic research where possible and necessary. As such, I am concerned more with knowledge surrounding the question, rather than knowledge about it specifically. My intensive involvement, over several decades, with Wagner's oeuvre and his concept of the festival is, for me, what stands in the foreground--not any aesthetic or academic theory. It is not so much as a grandson of the man who created this extraordinary work TRISTAN AND ISOLDE that I feel I may address you, since my grandfather Richard Wagner had been dead for 36 years when I was born. Instead, it is my active work in Bayreuth as director of the Festival from which I draw such entitlement as I have to talk about Wagner's work.

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE is in more or less every respect, but most particularly in its music, a truly exceptional work, a landmark and high point in music theatre that still makes great demands on performers and audiences alike--all of this goes without saying, as I am sure you will all agree. Probably, indeed, in the one hundred and forty years that have passed since completion of the work, everything substantial that can be said about it has been said. And yet, how can one really get to grips with so highly emotionalized a work as TRISTAN just with words or logic? The work still has extraordinary suggestive force. Quite a few who hear it today in our comparatively sober age are still powerfully stirred, electrified, indeed overwhelmed. Whereas TRISTAN used to be the Wagner work which it was hardest to find a public for, today it is one of his most popular--not least of all in Bayreuth. Many Festival visitors are positively 'addicted' to TRISTAN's music and its heady effect. But, as is often the case with Wagner's works, layer upon layer of the most diverse emotions, half-truths, three-quarter-truths, legends and so forth have come to obscure the actual essence of the work and the original intention behind it. And therefore it might be of benefit to take a look at the roots and origins of TRISTAN AND ISOLDE.

One misconception which has doggedly refused to go away, and has therefore proved very influential, is that TRISTAN AND ISOLDE is the artistic expression of Richard Wagner's passionate and unfulfilled love for the wife of his generous patron in Zurich--for Mathilde Wesendonck, a woman who appears to have been beautiful, and was at any rate very youthful. Hence the work is widely held to be just a sublimation in music of the composer's feelings. He did after all set five of Mathilde's poems to music, quite against his normal practice, and two of them he described as STUDIES FOR TRISTAN AND ISOLDE.

This is the popular, and basically very banal, account of the genesis of TRISTAN. Such a version puts an ideal, a wishful image, in place of historical probability and reality; it seeks to explain the utterly inexplicable and unfathomable inherent in TRISTAN as in every outstanding masterpiece, covering it like a multifarious mask; and it seeks to make it more readily comprehensible by looking at it through the facile lens of gossip. Such a simplification is inevitably a trivialization. The actual history of the composition of TRISTAN, as can be reconstructed from the sources, is naturally a great deal more complex and multifaceted.

It was during his period as Kapellmeister in Dresden, at the latest, that Richard Wagner got to know the TRISTAN material--the lengthy medieval epic by Gottfried von Strassburg including its completions, as well as other European TRISTAN poems. The library which he assiduously put together there and which, for the eighteen-forties, represented the most modern state of learning, contained all three different editions of the TRISTAN epic.

The extent to which other stimuli might have had a direct or indirect influence, as archetypes or models, in the creation of TRISTAN is as difficult to prove as to disprove with any finality. Without doubt a great diversity of factors were involved--literary, philosophical and not least of all biographical--inseparably woven together and interdependent.

What is certain is that the works of German Romanticism, the plays of Calderon and Neoclassical French tragedy were all of considerable importance to TRISTAN. Mention should be made in particular of Friedrich Schlegel, whose novel LUCINDE Wagner is known to have read in his youth. LUCINDE contains a prefiguration of the famous day-and-night conversation later presented in Act Two of TRISTAN. Furthermore, there is talk of "the day's fruitless longing and empty blindness" which recurs almost word for word in Wagner. And it is in this novel too that the description of a pair of lovers as Nacht geweiht--"consecrated by, or to, the night"--originates. The poet Novalis is also commonly cited as a source for Wagner's TRISTAN with his ultra-Romantic HYMN TO THE NIGHT, which also contains the concept of lovers who are Nacht geweiht. In addition, we should mention the plays of Calderon which Wagner read with fascination. Their ethical rigour and logic and their exploration of themes such as 'honour', 'love', 'betrayal' and 'chivalry' clearly left their mark on Wagner's own work. Above all, however, Wagner borrowed from Calderon the genre designation Handlung (meaning "action"). If serious attention is paid to this very precise designation, it causes some annoyance, since it appears to be a paradox in the case of a work which has precious little external action and whose plot can be summed up in a few sentences. The fundamental drama is internalized, as it were, and what happens internally is above all the psychological development of the characters--a process which is expressed most eloquently by the music.

At this point I would like to emphasize how unprecedented TRISTAN AND ISOLDE was in the way its music and text are indivisibly linked and constitute one integral whole. Phrases of text are often 'born of the music', or function only as sound; the singers' voices are woven into the overall symphonic fabric and can scarcely be differentiated from the orchestral voices. Wagner himself was aware of this dense fusion of text and music, and was even somewhat perturbed by it. Certainly he never accomplished anything quite like it ever again, either before or after TRISTAN, and he would repeatedly wonder afterwards how he had ever managed to bring off such a work. In later years he considered it a mistake to have published the text to TRISTAN independently of the music, no doubt feeling that it would not be possible to comprehend the work merely through the medium of words.

From Neoclassical French tragedy Wagner chiefly borrowed the dramatic structure of TRISTAN: the first act is so to speak Isolde's own, the second belongs to the pair Tristan and Isolde, while the third is devoted to Tristan. This tripartite structure corresponds to the Classical pattern of day-night-day. And it is intriguing, in this connection, that day -hence light--does not signify good, or anything positive, but instead something dreadful and fatal. On the other hand night--darkness--is what makes life, and with it love, possible. The realm of clarity and reason is thus perceived as being deceptive and treacherous; while the realm of darkness and emotion is the realm of truth and deliverance, upon which all yearning is focused.

This, of course, raises the question of whether Wagner's TRISTAN is a work of the blackest hue, a work of darkness and pessimism. Such an interpretation is indeed quite possible--and yet so is its exact opposite, because many hold that the work is about the triumph of absolute love, in its passionate totality, over the restraints and conventions of bourgeois society. There can be no single 'right' or 'wrong' interpretation, because categories of this sort are completely irrelevant. Similarly, philosophical classifications are in my opinion only of limited relevance because what we are talking of is, first and foremost, a work of art--and it is as such, as a highly artificial construction, that one should approach it. Philosophy, psychology, et cetera, are welcome crutches we can support ourselves on when endeavouring to understand and interpret the work, but it is highly doubtful whether art--and in particular this eminently special art!--has ever illustrated a philosophical system. That is why the causal connection which Wagner in his autobiography MEIN LEBEN suggested existed between his reading of Schopenhauer's THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA and the creation of TRISTAN AND ISOLDE--a connection which Wagner left fairly vague but which certain scholars have strenuously asserted as a fact--should be viewed with considerable caution and distance. Wagner put it as follows: "It was no doubt in part the earnest frame of mind produced by Schopenhauer, now demanding some ecstatic expression of its essential traits, which gave me the idea for a 'Tristan and Isolde'."--The older Wagner, writing this, merely proposes a link: and one, moreover, that had more to do with mood and inner disposition than with actual comprehension or knowledge. And this should not be altogether rejected.

If one gives more credence to facts than to tradition, however, there are good grounds for presuming, in my opinion, that the reading of Schopenhauer and the conception of TRISTAN occurred simultaneously, but were not directly dependent the one upon the other. Both took place in the spring months of 1854. The immediate external impetus for Wagner's contemplation of a composition based on the TRISTAN material may have been provided by his friend Karl Ritter having a similar plan. Richard Wagner had, from the first, been gripped by the profound tragedy of the tale. His earliest notes to some extent set the tone for the final work: "the curse of love", for instance, and "night celebration" and Isolde's "sinking" at the end. The crux for the mood of the whole work was, paradoxically, the last act. However, the concept at this stage was still vague: it appears to have existed only in Wagner's mind and oral accounts, and it was a long way from attaining concrete form; the process of gestation and distillation was not yet complete. As was generally the case in Wagner's life, additional impulses were necessary to spur the process on--some more powerful stimulus, whether intellectual in the broadest sense, or material. Or best of all, both together.

In December 1854 Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt about Schopenhauer, in whose philosophy he had at long last found an effective "palliative". He went on to describe it as "a sincere and heartfelt longing for death: complete unconsciousness, utter non-being, the vanishing of dreams--absolute and ultimate release!" This, however, brings him on to his new idea:

"Since I have never in my life experienced the true joy of love, I will erect a monument to this fairest of dreams, where from first to last this love shall, for once, be properly sated: I have planned in my head a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; with the 'black flag' that blows at the end I will then cover myself- to die."

What had happened--apart from the shattering experience that reading Schopenhauer had been for him? In my view, very different factors, occurring concurrently, might together add up to an explanation. Virtually since May 1849, since the failed May Uprising and his escape from Dresden, Richard Wagner had been in exile. This, on the one hand, had brought him the freedom he had longed for while a Kapellmeister in Dresden; but on the other hand, the gain was offset by rootlessness, the loss of his homeland, and the worry of procuring his daily bread. The new freedom had, to be sure, triggered a tremendous burst of creativity in him: the Zurich writings on the theory of art (ART AND REVOLUTION, THE ART-WORK OF THE FUTURE, OPERA AND DRAMA, etc.) had been penned in the space of a few years, the complete text of the enormous RING tetralogy was finished, and by the end of 1854 THE RHINEGOLD and large parts of THE VALKYRIE had been composed. In the process he had arrived at entirely new forms of musical expression. He was fully aware of the novel quality of his work, a quality perhaps best described with the slightly old-fashioned-sounding word 'mastery'; and this prompted the idea of a future stage festival: his work, being so utterly new, demanded an appropriate form of presentation which could never be achieved by the 'normal' theatre and its structures. It was all set out in his imagination...

And yet, on the other hand, he had no realistic chance of staging the RING cycle in the foreseeable future, or of bringing to fruition his idea of a festival of his works - these were all just "pipe-dreams", as he bitterly noted. Even the world premiere of LOHENGRIN had taken place without his involvement. His artistic frustrations were matched, crucially, by political disappointment over the collapse of the revolution and the futility of social aspirations, as well as increasing erotic estrangement from his wife. In these circumstances of political disillusion and the hopelessness and emptiness it resulted in, Schopenhauer must truly have acted as a palliative, and Wagner accordingly was powerfully affected by the doctrine of overcoming and negating the will by renunciation and resignation. He sought to escape the erotic estrangement of his marriage by embarking on a desperate and foolhardy adventure with Jessie Laussot. Of course it is impossible to say which of these factors bore most heavily upon him, but I think we can sense how oppressive they must have been in combination, and how deeply Wagner must have longed for anything that lay outside this circle or that appeared, however unexpectedly, to promise a way-out. Nevertheless, after his flight from Dresden, visions of the destruction of the world occurred more frequently. Only art, music, seemed able, at least temporarily, to offer reconciliation as well as something like compensation for what was unattainable in his own life.

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE was born of this frustration, of this awareness of his new creative power, and of the need to produce a straightforward and practicable work. At this time he was still at work on the RING OF THE NIEBELUNG and did not break off from it until completing the second act of SIEGFRIED on the ninth of August 1857 (a hiatus that was to last 12 years!); but in spite of this, in December 1855 he noted: "Tristan more definitely conceived". And on the title page of the orchestral sketch for Act Two of SIEGFRIED he wrote: "Tristan already decided." The die had been cast.

At the outset Wagner had the intention of writing a comparatively light work which could take the opera world by storm. The RING, after all, had no prospect of being staged in any form. And moreover in his dispiriting circumstances, assailed by uncertainties, he had started to lose his taste for the RING project. He remarked later in life, no doubt correctly, that he had begun to feel increasingly constrained as a composer by the particular dramatic structure of the RING. At the end of June 1857 he wrote to Liszt: "I have conceived of a plan to mount Tristan and Isolde in reduced dimensions to make performance easier [...], for I believe I may anticipate that a thoroughly practicable opus--such as Tristan will be -will bring me good revenues quickly and keep me solvent for some time. I also have something curious in mind: I am thinking of having the work translated into Italian and of offering it as an Italian work to the theatre in Rio Janeiro [...J for the premiere performance; and I will dedicate it to the Emperor of Brazil..." It is slightly humorous, not to say bizarre, today to discover how Wagner originally imagined TRISTAN--of all works! Incidentally, the Emperor of Brazil whom Wagner mentioned was among the guests at the first Bayreuth Festival 19 years later.

Early in the year 1853 Wagner made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Wesendonck: Otto, a 37 year old businessman from Elberfeld, a partner in a New York silk company (Loeschigk, Wesendonck & Co.), enormously wealthy, and generous with it; and Mathilde, who was then just 24 years old. She was of a rapturous disposition; she was passionate about art and wrote verses herself; she was inclined to be reverential and was clearly captivated by Wagner's charisma, and she was thoroughly flattered and full of vanity about playing something like the role of Wagner's muse, especially since the necessary funds were hers to command. Whether relations between her and Wagner ever transgressed the narrow bounds of 19th century decorum, is open for speculation, although it would appear unlikely and is in any case of little significance for TRISTAN AND ISOLDE. Mathilde Wesendonck may have animated Wagner, but she was never an 'anima' as Cosima would become in later years. Wagner incidentally met Cosima as well, in 1853, although only briefly and their acquaintance remained for some time very superficial. Hans von Bulow, who married Cosima (Liszt's daughter) in 1857, journeyed with her to Zurich on their honeymoon to see Wagner, his discoverer and mentor. During their long visit, the sensitive Cosima must have had ample opportunity to observe the peculiar relationship between Richard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck. In addition, an extraordinary and bizarre roundtable took place in September 1857, when Wagner gave a reading of the just completed TRISTAN text. The Wesendoncks and the Bulows were present, and the constellation was truly remarkable: Minna, who was still Wagner's wife, Mathilde, Wagner's muse, and Cosima, in the end the most important of them all, sat round the same table. Wagner's past, present and future intersected, in a scarcely believable way, in the figures of the three women most influential on his life!

Just as TRISTAN AND ISOLDE is of course conceivable without knowledge of Schopenhauer's philosophy, so it is without Mathilde Wesendonck. I daresay, in fact, that the work would not have turned out any different if there had been no Mathilde. But there is little sense in arguing the point, and Mathilde's role as a stimulating muse for Wagner should be acknowledged. Wagner needed erotic frivolity as an artist ; only, other parties had a hard time understanding this. That he was just playing--playing with fire, to be sure--can be inferred from the forms of address, the stylizations, the histrionic declarations, the codes, symbols and abbreviations, the poems and notes they exchanged. But the game was rather one-sided. For Wagner was a true virtuoso in these matters: he could combine playfulness with earnestness, reality and fantasy, and still, most of the time, keep things in perspective. He was sometimes even able to be, simultaneously, the person pulling the strings and the figure whose strings are pulled. But none of the others knew the rules; for them, it was all meant seriously. This incongruence between the parties involved thus led inevitably to dire conflicts.

And what had been predictable did indeed occur: Wagner had to move out. He went to Venice, where in a kind of 'troglodytic' existence he composed the 'nocturnal' second act. TRISTAN was completed on the sixth of August 1859 in Lucerne. The first performance did not take place, however, until 1865 in Munich, with Hans von Bulow conducting. On the day of the first orchestral rehearsal, the tenth of the April, Wagner's and Cosima's first child together was born. They named her Isolde.

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE is perhaps Wagner's most radical work; it is at any rate his most consistent and concentrated, arising from a desire to indulge in one burst of "musical frenzy" at last, as he repeatedly emphasized. The naive opinion that he must have been very much in love to have written it earned only his scorn. In TRISTAN AND ISOLDE (incidentally, Wagner's only work to be named after a pair), drama was born for the first time fully out of the spirit of music. And this music of course, with that very first chord that hovers between major and minor, pushed open the door to modernism, which did not manage to assert itself until the following century. Even twenty years after the composition of TRISTAN, Wagner kept on coming back to it; it remained something of a mystery for him, an unfathomable marvel. He once stated in some perplexity: "This Tristan is a curious colour--it seems all violet, purple." He was keenly aware of the extraordinariness and singularity of the work, speaking of "the profound art of sounding silence" which he had applied in it, and of the "the art of the subtle, most gradual transition" which he liked to call his "finest and deepest art". He would have preferred most of all not to have worked on anything further. He knew it was "the summit of [his] art so far", and realized that "the fruit of Tristan is not easy to pick". When he was at work on Act Three of TRISTAN, he wrote: "I fear the opera will be banned--if it is not parodied by bad performances! Only mediocre performances can save me! Fine performances will surely drive people mad!" Others shared this impression and strove to find expression for their amazement or speechless rapture. For Act Three, the germ cell of the entire work, Friedrich Nietzsche coined the wonderfully apt phrase "the heart chamber of the world will" to which a person has put his ear. And to illustrate Isolde in her closing aria--still basically incorrectly and rather simplistically called the Liebestod--Wagner referred to Titian's colossal Assunta in the Frari church in Venice: "That is Isolde in her love transfiguration..."

Towards the end of his life Richard Wagner, conversing with Cosima about the future programme of the Bayreuth Festival, said that TANNHAUSER, TRISTAN and PARSIFAL would go well together. He did not expand on what he meant, and it is an idea that remains unresolved. There would appear to be something, beyond theatrical technicalities, that fundamentally links these three highly different works. Possibly it is the subject of love as a 'mortal illness' or as Wagner formulated it "love as fearful torment". This phrase occurs in relation to TRISTAN in a letter from 1856; and Parsifal in Act Two cries out: "Oh--the torment of love!" And Parsifal too, like Tristan, knows "the longing, the dreadful longing". We might add that Wagner originally intended to make Parsifal, wandering in quest of the Grail, appear at Tristan's sickbed. And Amfortas, he once remarked, was none other than the Tristan of Act Three, although of course"infinitely intensified".

Wagner wanted to make revisions to TRISTAN, as with all his other works. He considered parts of it "unacceptable"--above all too long and too densely orchestrated. He wanted to make cuts in acts two and three. Of course, the revision of TRISTAN does not lie within our brief- or our capabilities--but we do still try to take on board Wagner's concept of the work-in-progress in our much-cited "Bayreuth workshop" by giving an interpretation a chance to grow over the years, to acquire depth--not least through alterations.

Therefore, TRISTAN too we should approach not with false reverence, not encumbered by excessive learning, but with a broad and open mind and a receptivity to experiences. Richard Wagner complained of how uncomprehending his audiences were, which had no judgment but sat through TRISTAN in a sort of"fuddle of feeling". This should not apply to us today: we wish to be alert and receptive, even when, as with TRISTAN AND ISOLDE, what is being played out before us is "the true opus metaphysicum of art".