One of the most vividly interesting, to musicians, of all the
Wagner-Liszt transcriptions, is the death scene from “Tristan und
Isolde,” known as “Isolde’s Love Death.” It is not a number easily
grasped, or usually enjoyed by the general audience; and the elemental
power and intensity of the passion it so forcefully expresses have been
often criticized as morbid, unnatural, and exaggerated, by those, the
mildly tempered milk-and-water of whose stormiest passions never exceed
the moderate, decorous fury of a tempest in a tea-pot. But to those who
can sympathize with and appreciate its irresistible, volcanic outburst
of emotion, its overwhelming sweep of life-rending anguish, it is one of
the strongest, grandest lyric utterances in all the realm of music,
thrilling and overpowering the heart to the degree of pain and terror.
It is a lyric in form, in treatment, and in subject-matter, dealing
exclusively with emotion, not action, though its breadth of outline, its
somber strength, and its passionate intensity give it a decidedly
dramatic effect. Here is no pink-and-white pet of the modern
drawing-room, grieving for her missing poodle, or another’s failure to
wear the most up-to-date tie; but a glorious primeval woman, with the
fire of youth and plenty of good red blood in her veins, a goddess in
the unreserved frankness of her feelings, the boundless strength of her
devotion, sublime in the might of her passion and the majesty of her
doom.
Her life is her love and must end with it. Her hero-lover, Tristan, lies
beside her, dying of a mortal wound received in combat for love of her,
however dishonorable in the world’s eyes; and he is the more to be
cherished because despised and hunted to his death by his king and
former comrades for her sake. Further attempt at flight with him is
hopeless. Fate and their foes are closing swiftly in around them. The
end is inevitable. Their brief, wild dream of stolen happiness is over.
The first black, crushing moment of despairing realization, portrayed in
the opening measures in sober chords, is followed by a strain of sweet,
tender, but plaintive reminiscence of what love was to them and might
have been. Then comes a long, steadily growing, tremendously impassioned
climax of impotent protest, of desperate love, of vehement,
heart-breaking sorrow, all mingled in one glowing lava stream of
frenzied anguish, merging at last into a soft, half-delirious vision of
reunion and happiness beyond the grave, in which her spirit takes its
flight, to realms, we will hope, where hearts, not crowned heads, were
the arbiters of her woman’s destiny.
Those who have no sympathy with a really great passion which sweeps all
before it, flinging the pretty policies and cut-and-dried conventions of
life aside like straw in the path of a cataract, had better let this
music alone. It is not for them either to feel or to render. It requires
exceptional intensity of treatment, a broad, strong, yet flexible
chord-technique, and an absolute mastery of the tonal resources of the
piano.