Anam Cara

THE MUSIC OF WAGNER HAS A MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURE OF longing. His opera Tristan and Isolde explores the voyage of love in terms of longing and the search for fulfilment and union. Tristan and Isolde are deeply in love but their love can never find consummation or completion. The music constantly holds out the promise of ecstasy but never allows it to be realized. This structure of longing and its suspension makes up the intense drama of the music. The opening chord, known as the ‘Tristan chord’, famously holds two dissonances together; and from that moment on the music creates a continuous sequence of discord. As each emerging discord is resolved, the resolution creates another, new and deeper discord. Throughout the opera there is a cumulative increase in tension and it is not until the final chord is heard that the discord is finally resolved. Wagner was powerfully influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges says that he learned German for one reason: to read Schopenhauer in the original. Schopenhauer considered the world and its inhabitants embodiments of longing. The world and life in it is an expression of will. Wagner too saw music as the embodiment of this intense longing. For him, music was not simply another creative or aesthetic dimension of human experience and expression; it was the real expression of human nature. No other mode of expression corresponds as intimately and directly to who we are – to the longing that animates us and informs our presence in the world. The music of Tristan and Isolde articulates our huge craving for love. The real drama here is not the action or plot; they serve merely to render visible the depth, poignancy and craving of the invisible worlds of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner said of the opera: ‘Here I sank myself with complete confidence into the depths of the soul’s inner workings, and then built outwards from this, the world’s most intimate and central point, towards external forms . . . Here life and death and the very existence of the external world appear only as manifestation of the inner workings of the soul.’

Wagner’s music is charged with an incredible force of Eros. It is not the surface Eros of transient lust but the deepest Eros where soul and senses are awakened within the strain of primal longing. Tristan and Isolde is patterned with imagery of day and night. Usually in the world of the imagination, day stands for brightness, colour and goodness whereas the night represents the unknown, darkness and often evil. Wagner reverses this: day brings sorrow and night brings joy and rapture. This opera is a magnificent voyage into the Eros at the heart of the world; it is the call to life and creation that quickens the soul and captures the heart. When we enter the opera, forgotten sanctuaries open in the heart and neglected voices become audible in us. The magnificence of this music of Eros consists above all in the fact that it is a profound engagement with the other side of Eros, namely death. The glory of Wagner is the transfiguration of death and Eros in music. Wagner’s music has a profound, dark beauty that shores up against the great silence into which every life finally fades.

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EETHOVEN

GREAT MUSIC IS NOT A MATTER OF GREAT IDEAS OR INTRICATE melodies. It is not about difficult phrasing or complex harmonies. Truly great music brings to expression the states of the soul. This huge nobility enhances the heart and opens the imagination to the deeper mystery and riches of being here. The human soul is tested and exposed by suffering and there is an elegance in the way great music explores suffering. Beethoven created music out of his own suffering. It is one of the loneliest ironies in the Western tradition that this magnificent composer suffered illness precisely when he had reached the heart of his gift. For him, who had gleaned divine music from the depths of silence, all fell silent. He became deaf. For someone like Beethoven, for whom life was music, it is unimaginable what pain this caused. He wrote about this torment in the famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ which was only discovered after his death: