Wagner’s masterpiece, Tristan, has now a considerable literature of its own, with books devoted to its harmonic structure, its baleful influence on artists of various kinds, its philosophical significance, its sources in the mediaeval literature of courtly love, its phonographic history, and plenty of other things. Roger Scruton’s impressive new book is concerned with its dramatic content, and its relevance to a time when those aspects of humanity which should separate us from the rest of the animal world — the capacity for sacrifice, self-abnegating love, sexual activity seen as the urgent expression of a spiritual need rather than as merely biological or hedonistic — are either denied or ‘deconstructed’: even Scruton now uses that word, and without scare quotes.
He does give a fairly detailed account of the growth of the Tristan legend in mediaeval epics, above all in Gottfried von Strassburg, showing both that certain preoccupations were shared but also that Wagner’s transformation of a chaotic mass of unfocussed material into the taut three-act structure of his music drama is nothing short of miraculous. There is a long chapter, too, on the musical structure of the work, daunting to anyone who hasn’t studied music theory in considerable depth; but its main purpose is clear, to show how Wagner articulates the action of Tristan, almost all of it interior, and the way in which its central concepts of love, death, betrayal, loyalty, self-transcendence, are explored and often transformed through musical means. There is also, unfashionably but usefully, a table of leading musical motifs, labelled and with some of their interconnections indicated, which relative newcomers to the work will find useful.
From about halfway through the book the discussion moves on from internal illumination, as it were, to a consideration of what Tristan can mean for us in an age of materialism and pornography, how it can restore to us a sense of ourselves as beings who not only exist in the causal nexus of the natural world, but also as moral agents who take free and responsible decisions.
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