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{"id":17224,"date":"2015-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2015-05-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-01T00:00:00","slug":"wagner-tristan-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/05\/wagner-tristan-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Wagner, Tristan, Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

In an essay in\u00a0A Companion to Gottfried of Strassburg\u2019s Tristan<\/a>, Ulrich Muller argues that \u201cIn Tristan und Isolde <\/em>Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried\u2019s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. <\/em>As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love are censored, repressed, and finally defeated by the structure and rules of the society in which they are living, which is to say feudal society. Wagner\u2019s version on the other hand strives to demonstrate that love per se <\/em>cannot be fulfilled perfectly within the limits of the world, but only by escaping to the other world, to the mystical night, to nirvana\u201d (288).<\/p>\n

Roger Scruton (Death-Devoted Heart<\/a>) acknowledges the force of that argument, especially insofar as Wagner\u2019s opera was formed by Schopenhauer, for whom eros is <\/em>death. Night is, for Schopenhauer, a death, a loss of individuality, a \u201cmelting away into the ongoing stream that is the will behind appearances\u201d (13).<\/p>\n

\u00a0But this is not, Scruton thinks, Wagner\u2019s final assessment of erotic love: \u201cerotic love is essentially individualizing: its intentional object is the irreplaceable incarnate subjectivity of the other, as he is in himself, irreducible to his attributes or to any characteristic that he might share. Such indeed is the meaning of the Look shared by Tristan and Isolde, which sets the whole drama in motion. What is valued in erotic love is precisely the other person as an individual, and not the impersonal will behind appearances, which is equally manifest in us all. Erotic love is a defiance of death and death\u2019s dominion, both in its function as the progenitor of future generations and in its intentionality as the celebration and endorsement of the individual subject, when that subject becomes object of another subject\u2019s love. . . .\u00a0Wagner certainly was influenced by Schopenhauer\u2019s conception of death, of the individual\u2019s inherent tendency toward death, and of the final consolation contained in that melting away into the primeval stream. But he did not believe that the force of erotic love lies elsewhere than in the individual subject, or that it was directed toward anything but the individual object\u201d (130-2).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"