Now to join the last links in de Rougemont’s chain, and to see if that will support a performable interpretation of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He arrives at his chapter called “Wagner, or Completion,” about two-thirds of the way through his book, after a number of chapters that deal chronologically (and often quite sketchily) with Tristan-related phenomena since the time of Gottfried of Strasbourg. In this chapter, he makes several assertions, some of which opera devotees will find agreeable. He states that the Tristan myth could find its consummation only in music: “Music alone speaks worthily of tragedy . . . music alone is equal to conveying the transcendental interaction, the wildly contradictory and contrapuntal character of the passion of Darkness, which is the summons to uncreated Light.” (De R’s italics and initial-cap “D” and “L”—CLO.) And: “A composer of Wagner’s calibre does not put ‘ideas’ to music”—rather, Wagner carried the myth’s meaning “pulsating within his own breast,” just as he did with the symbols of the Minnesänger, the “Manichaean legend of Parzival,” and the Christian legend of the Holy Grail. He also takes note of the difficulties encountered in attempting to present the work onstage by realistic means, and in the 1956 edition speaks approvingly of Wieland Wagner’s relatively spare 1954 Bayreuth production: “It is now possible to sit through the second act  with one’s eyes open.”

But de Rougemont also makes a more radical claim, to wit, that Tristan und Isolde is a dramatic representation of the Cathar initiation rite. He maintains that Wagner, drawing on Gottfried and intuiting the myth’s true meaning, laid out in his three acts the three “mystic moments” of the tale—initiation, passion, and fatal fulfillment. The initiation is the drinking of what the lovers believe to be the fatal draught, in which de Rougement finds the Cathars’ Consolamentum; the passion is not a worldly, sensual one, but the pure passion of the Perfect that negates the sexual kind; and the fulfillment is the lovers’ attainment of the Light through the mutually chosen pathway of death. This interpretation carries through de Rougemont’s logic well enough, perhaps, but also brings him up against specific passages in the music, which are hard to hear without attaching sensual meaning to them. (De Rougemont attributes our “misinterpretation” to middle-class sentimentality and our need to preserve our social norms against a meaning that undermines them. Let’s not let this provocation throw us off track.)

Crucial passages in Wagner’s score throb with sexual implications. These start with the great sweep of the Act 1 music following on the imbibing of the “Love Potion,” at Tristan’s “Du mir verloren?” and Isolde’s reply, “Du mir verstossen?“, etc., just as their ship lands and King Marke is hailed—what an ending for the act!—but mostly in Act 2, and most specifically in the climactic pages of the love duet, unmistakably in the writhing of the strings, with their repeated sforzandi on the downbeats, leading into the famous dissonance of “O ew’ge Nacht!“, and on into the buildup to the suddenly truncated ending. I don’t think one needs to be a middle-class sentimentalist to hear sexual ecstasy interruptus in all this. Nonetheless, throughout the Liebesnacht there is verbal language that can be taken as supporting either of the two proposed kinds of passion, and the score is soaked in a harmonic and timbral idiom that exerts a mystical magnetism. Is there a way that de Rougemont’s interpretation could be staged coherently, and with the emotional impact this masterwork intends to make? I’ll suggest one.