Tristan und Isolde is a perfect opera, but where are the perfect performers and, just as important, the perfect listeners to do it justice? What very often happens to me in a fine performance is that I am wholly caught up in the drama of Act I, which, for all its revolutionary musical means, is a readily comprehensible confrontation of two people who half-know what they feel but are determined to conceal it, until that is no longer possible. Then in Act II, when we meet a quite different Isolde, equally determined but now ecstatically lyrical, the exorbitant demands the work makes on me are ones I can rarely meet, because for the most part conflict is replaced by unimaginable rapture. And then, with any luck, in Act III, perhaps Wagner’s greatest and certainly his most gruelling, I am reabsorbed into the drama, half-identifying with Tristan in his unbelievable self-searchings, half with Kurwenal who realises that the love which is destroying his master is ‘the world’s most wonderful illusion’.
The only way that Act II is emotionally graspable is in its complete form — one might think that a truism, but the last few performances I have seen have all indulged in the savage cut shortly after Tristan arrives, which means that the lovers, after their initial intoxicated incoherences, reach a state where they can sing ‘I myself am the world’, without any explanation of how they have come to have such metaphysical insights. That quarter-hour passage, in which they move from their grasp of the delusions of the social and moral world into a resolve, initiated by Tristan, to reject it for the absolute claim of passion, is not only marvellous music but is also essential for us to feel what is happening to them.
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