← Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
Wagner: Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde w/Case Scaglione
00:50:37
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- [00:07]
A
Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein, I'm a conductor and I'm the music director of the Orchestra Nacional de l' Isle and the chief conductor of the Aalborg Symphony. This podcast is for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive in to this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank all of my new Patreon sponsors, Donato, Sarah, Andrew, Isa, George, Vanessa, Sheila, Matthew, Simon, Jenny, Per, Tim, Ellie, Vasilios, Richard, Lewis, Human, Alessio, Matthew, Moritz, Jill, Christopher, Kevin, and Alejandro for all of their support, and all of my Patreon sponsors for making season 11 possible. If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com stickynotespodcast and if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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B
It is greatly appreciated.
- [01:10]
A
So, as you can tell, there are a lot of new Patreon subscribers this week, and that is because over on my Facebook page I announced this, but I haven't announced it on the actual show yet. I am starting a new Patreon exclusive series, a mini series on Schubert's Dienemullerin, the incredible Song cycle. Every week I'll go through one of the 21 songs in the cycle. So it's going to be a series that's going to last about six months, so I'm really excited to get that started. I think the first episode will go up next week, so head over to patreon.com stickynotespodcast to learn a little bit more about that. I also wanted to welcome any new listeners because it was a big surprise, a fantastic surprise to find my podcast featured in the New York Times Last week about six classical music podcasts. I was in some great company as well, so this was really exciting and welcome to all of those new listeners. We've got some really exciting episodes coming up on the Liszt Faust Symphony, Mozart's Dissonance Quartet, Dvorak's Piano Quintet, and in the Archive, basically the entire standard symphonic repertoire is covered. There's also lots of new discoveries. You can search in any podcast app by composer and you'll see those episodes. Now the other thing that I want to mention in this longer than usual introduction is I got so much helpful feedback from my question about the sound of the show a couple of weeks ago. In my episode about Lily Boulanger's Psalm 130, there was some feedback that everything was fine. But also other feedback that basically my voice is generally a bit too soft compared to the music. And this is something that's really tricky with classical music because the soft dynamics are really soft and the loud dynamics are really loud. So what I've tried to do for this episode, there are less clips than usual in this episode, is to just basically raise the volume of my voice and keep the sound of the music the same. So if you can continue to send feedback based on this episode today, it'll really help me over the course of the next few episodes to I think, solve this once and for all with the sound level. And then finally to introduce today's episode. This is a continuation of the series I started with my friend Aram Demirjian on Handel's Messiah, where I, a friend, conductor, musician, come in and tell me a little bit about a piece that I just don't know that well. And longtime listeners of this show know about my very complicated relationship with Wagner and his music. So I was so thrilled to be joined by my great friend Kees Scaglione, who is one of the great Wagner experts and great Wagner conductors around, to talk me through the Prelude and Liebestode to Tristan and Isolde. You'll soon hear that we quickly left any sort of analysis and got into something a lot more. More metaphysical about Wagner, which is, I
- [04:07]
B
think, perfectly appropriate for the.
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A
The music of this seminal composer. Thank you so much for listening to this very long, but I think important introduction. And on to Quescaglion and the Prelude and Libestode from Tristan and Isolde.
- [04:25]
B
A big welcome to my good friend KE Scaglione, the music director of the Orchestra Nationale Ile de France and an amazing conductor and has been a friend of mine, what, like 20 years now?
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C
Oh my God.
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B
It's true. In Aspen, as conducting students at the Aspen Conducting Academy, we were basically like
- [04:48]
C
roommates and brothers ever since.
- [04:51]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly so. And for 20 years, Case has been trying to get me into Wagner in different ways. And so to continue this series on pieces that I don't know as well as I should. I thought Case, who is like one of the most passionate people about Wagner that I've ever met. I've already done an episode where I talked about why I don't like Wagner with my brother in law, Raphael. So I'm not going to do that, but just to as a sort of way into the Prelude and Libistad from Tristan and Isolde. Why Wagner?
- [05:30]
C
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I came to classical music through my Parents bringing me to a performance and it was a, it was a. You know, I was seven or eight years old and, and we went to, to Tristan because of a kind of a babysitter cancellation. And needless to say I had absolutely no idea what was going on as a kid hearing this music, but I found it so intoxicating and even in my, my, my young brain, the music sounded important to me and, and I was drawn to it and I, there were years when I started that I would order Wagner scores and kind of thumb through them and I didn't really understand and it was, this was actually the prelude in Leave a Stude was one of the first pieces that I conducted in, in graduate school. And it was very difficult for me. I didn't understand. The langu was something elemental. The way that it felt, that felt important to me. And it's been a lifelong journey and all of these years not only has it continued to be fulfilling and moving to me on the level of Bach and Mozart, but the profundity and the bottomlessness of it is so generous. It's a lifelong thing.
- [06:54]
B
Yeah. Even with my often expressed skepticism about Wagner. When you start to listen to any of this, I mean, I think actually for me especially this piece, there's this sort of feeling in your stomach that you get from no other composer that I have to admit is there all the time.
- [07:13]
C
Well, I mean even, you know, even in Brahms life when they had this rock and roll rivalry between the two of them. This might be apocryphal, but there was some sort of. I can't remember where I read this, there was some sort of interview, somebody was asking and Wagner said, I mean as we all know, he was a first rate composer and an 11th rate human being. You know, not, not only a racist, but probably some sort of antisocial personality disorder. You know, like the bad things about his, his, his person continue after racism for quite a while. But he said these horrible things, you know, about Brahms and someone talked to Brahms specifically about it and said, you know, what do you say about this? And this? And he said something along the lines of very with, you know, very humbly. What can I say about the person who wrote Tristan and Isolde and his absolute. Oh, I mean, but even people who hate him. I was. Thomas Addis was working with us at the New York Phil and he is someone who's not the biggest Wagner fan. He said something about Wagner corrupting notes which I don't agree with. But that's not, that is not an unfair, an unfair Assessment. And he even said the same thing. I mean, he said, you know, tristan is a perfect piece. You know, what can you say?
- [08:51]
B
So we're not going to talk about the whole opera because obviously we don't have 10 hours, but we're going to focus on the praline libestad. And I found a wonderful. Speaking of big names who said beautiful things about Wagner, Nietzsche wrote, I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music. Every nerve in me is a twitch. And it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture. And he was speaking about the prelude to Tristan. So you said you first heard this when you were 7 or 8 years old. Do you have like a tactile memory or a sound memory of that, of the. Of the prelude specifically?
- [09:33]
C
There's shreds of it, of what it felt like. There was a feeling in my chest that I. That I had again the first time I conducted it. I know you know what I'm talking about, where it's all it is. So. And you use this word, there is something narcotic about it. Where one has to go when we conduct, there should be a level of detachment. You really have to fortify yourself in this. Somebody asked Telemann once, you know, they were comparing Tristan to a. To a. To a kind of lion. You know, what do you do with this? And the interviews in German. But it's a. It's a brilliant interview nonetheless. And he says something along the lines of, I give the lion meat when it's time, but I keep my distance. Ich halte abstand, he says, and that is absolutely right, because it will eat you. And if it becomes this emotional thing, it'll be a mess. Nobody knows what's going on. So there's something about that, that we need distance from it.
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B
Yeah, I definitely want to talk about the pacing of it in a sort of conducting sense at some point.
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C
But.
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B
So the thing that most people, even if they don't know this opera or they don't know anything about Wagner, even they know the Tristan chord. And I've talked about it, like on the show before, because other composers used it. But what is its significance to the rest of the opera? This. This famous chord?
- [11:24]
C
Yeah, it's not only its significance in the opera, it's its significance in the history of Western civilization. You know as well as I do this piece was written in the late 1850s, performed for the first time in the 1860s. Nevertheless, if you take any 20th century music class, the 20th century makes no sense without these four notes. The significance of this chord in the piece is we had lived in a world before this opera of a kind of classical aesthetic, where everything on the level of a symphony or a sonata had to do with tension and with resolution. And in a classical sense, in a very, In a micro sense,
- [12:15]
B
the way
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C
that a phrase worked had to do with the way that we set up a kind of chord, that we move away from it and then we resolve that we resolve back again. The chord itself is wholly unremarkable. It's four notes that. That Mozart or Beethoven could have used. And that in itself, by the way, like that.
- [12:34]
B
This is the. The thing is that this chord is not some invention by Wagner. It's. It's a. It's a unusual but, you know, well used chord.
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C
Yeah. I mean, not only well used, it's. It's. It's. It's in the ABCs of the grammar of.
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B
Of.
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C
Of. Of harmony. I mean, you would use it in any. I would. I would venture to say that almost any Bach chorale has these four notes, But what it implies to our classical ears doesn't come to pass. It implies some kind of D minor chord or something in D minor, but it doesn't behave this way at all. So it moves from this kind of tension that we expect resolution to a different kind of tension. And the device in this entire opera is the not fulfilling of the promise of that chord. What this chord does is that it poses a kind of question, And there's a very Zen sort of thing about it, that by the end of the opera, it doesn't feel like a resolution, but rather a release into the infinite where the question itself is erased.
- [14:31]
B
I was gonna say actually that I'm writing a show which is gonna come out two weeks after this one about Liszt's Faust Symphony.
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D
Right.
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B
Now, I had a Patreon sponsorship because it's not a piece that I also another piece that I didn't really know, but that the, the quote, unquote, Tristan Court is all over that piece. And it was written seven years before Tristan. And it's. It's an amazing thing. I mean, it's really the, the kind of the. The revolutionary, quote unquote, revolutionary composers like Beethoven and Wagner and Schoenberg also, they take what is quote unquote normal and do something completely unusual with it. So that the first. But for me, what's interesting when I listen to this piece is I know, you know, from. From, you know, all of what we know about this piece is that you know, the idea of unresolved harmony and unresolved tension, but actually the appearance of that chord so early, also after these kind of the famously longing sixths going up and then coming back down again, there's. There's something so kind of unexpected about it in that moment as well. So it's not just that it doesn't resolve. It's that the way he uses it is completely unusual. It's almost like he uses it as a kind of resolution in itself.
- [15:53]
C
Yeah, that we accept. That's the thing, that. That the. The Prelude, if you're thinking about it in terms of the earlier 19th century, is wholly unsatisfying. And if you're waiting for the D D, this never happens. But somehow there is a kind of cathartic thing about it where the. The. The metaphysical ethos of the entire thing is set up with something that, on paper, should be frustrating. And this is. I mean, this is the interesting thing about it. It's just four notes. They don't mean anything.
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B
Right. And then continuing on from that, talk to me about, like, the harmony in general in the Prelude, because the idea of this unsatisfied longing and constant striving, which you never get the answer to, as you said, that is. I mean, in terms of a compositional sense, that's a huge risk to take, because people are.
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C
In what sense?
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B
Like, as you said, people are expecting a resolution at some point, and he just strings it out. I mean, not, of course, not only in the Prelude, but for another three hours to come. But how does. I mean, in terms of, you know, harmonically speaking? Like, how does he achieve that without, in a sense, creating a kind of frustration that you with. With this.
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C
Well, I mean, it's like I. Like I said before, the way that the chord. And of course, when you're talking about music, it's a little bit like dancing about poetry. It doesn't make any sense, you know,
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B
but thank you for devaluing the entire idea of this.
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C
All critics and your podcast is. You're wasting your time. Yeah, no, no, it's. Yeah. I mean, it's. Somehow our ears become accustomed to not getting the thing that we're after. And so not only is he doing this revolutionary thing, but at the same time, he makes us okay with it so that we forget what it is that we're after in the first place. That's why I said at the end, when we finally get this. This resolution, this B major chord at the end, it is an erasure of the question itself rather than the Answering of it. And this ties very much into, like I said, conducting the thing. And what I've found in my own life is that it doesn't need help. It speaks by itself. If you can create the conditions where it needs to happen. I find that non interference with the thing actually allows it to. Allows it to speak properly.
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B
Yeah, and that's the. You know, we're going to be listening to your recording interspersed with this as. As we. As we go. But in terms of, you know, how to pace this piece. When I talk about pacing for people who don't know, I mean, the idea that you don't overplay early climax is the idea that you don't go. As you. As you were talking about this kind of sense of detachment, always kind of knowing where you are in the structure of the piece of something that I. You just did Mahler 9, so you'll be very familiar with this. I watched a video of Leonard Bernstein rehearsing Mahler 9, and he said that when he was younger, he tried to underplay early climaxes and then he realized it's impossible and you have to give. What did he say? Everything. You have to bar 31 and then eight bars later, even more. Which is a great Bernstein thing to say, but it actually implies a kind of pacing which is that you go to the maximum and then you just keep going from there. And how do you feel about Wagner in that sense? Do you feel like you've got to wring every. Every drop of it out from the prelude or you have to keep going?
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C
One can't.
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B
Yeah.
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C
It's just not possible. And of course, you know, what can we say? I mean, Lenny is all of. As American conductors, he is our father. He's the. He's the Godfather. And I must say, it's a very Lenny thing to say, you know, that you give all and then six measures later. I know what he means by that. But in the case of Wagner, conducting in general is something. It's like an alligator. The more you give, the more it will take. And if one put themselves 2000% into every measure, you'd be wasted by the time you got to the actual singing part. I think in Wagner there is an implied sort of tempo and a way that the thing unfolds. And I find it very much connected to, like, Schubert songs. I think we often think of it as this sort of massive thing, but I think if we can keep the clarity of text and of pacing in a very classical sense, that it speaks for itself. Yeah, There is an implied tempo and A pulse of every measure. Brahms prepares us for this a bit. You can't play a Brahms symphony in the same tempo all the time the way that you would a Beethoven symphony. And in Wagner, I think it's taken to an even more degree. But I think if we can find the simplicity and the plain speakingness of it and the classicism in it, this is something that allows it to go so that we become sort of facilitators for this river to take its natural course. I just find it really dangerous in any music, but particularly in Wagner, to get over involved. Like I said, it feels and sounds so good that in any interpretation there needs to be this balance of heart and of intellect. And the risk in Wagner is that it goes 2000% heart and no intellect so quickly because the music is so intoxicating. And while it feels good, the tendency will be for it to not make any sense to who's listening to it.
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B
Yeah, I've had a few experiences where I've been not happy with myself after. And I don't conduct very much Wagner. But this is general.
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C
I'm trying to change that.
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B
This is.
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C
I know this is a plot.
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B
This is the show. The point of this show is to make. Like next year I'll be doing 10 performances of the Ring. Exactly. Okay, let's start with Tristan the Ring. I, you know, we have. I have other issues with. But I've had performances of very emotional music, you know, especially like Rachmaninoff or something or. Or Mahler, where I've felt a little bit personally detached and it's been more difficult for me. And then those are always the performances where people are the most moved. And it's this kind of amazing. Again, it's actually the opposite of something that Bernstein was. Would say that when he felt his greatest performances were when he was very far away and he was in another world and how long it took him to come back to the world. Actually, there's something very strange psychologically about how if you have this sense of slight detachment, the emotion of the piece almost goes over your head and into the audience. And that's kind of the magical thing about it.
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C
Well, I mean, it's the disillusion of the ego that I think is necessary for any artist, whether you're a poet hoping to write a true word or for us that would like to. To give a moving performance, one does require. And I think that if we have this feeling that it is us that's doing it, somehow we're destroying the thing. This doesn't mean to be passive, of course, to be absolutely present. There's a wonderful quote in T.S. eliot, I forget where it's from. Something that between the thought and the act lies the shadow. And the extent of, to which we have good technique, so to say whether one is painting or writing is that there is no difference between the intent and the doing of it. You know, I imagine Michelangelo on his back painting the Sistine Chapel. And he was, I suppose, half a meter from this thing, in no way able to see what this perspective from the floor would look like. But the technical artistry was so sophisticated that when we stand on the floor we have a sense of space and of three dimensions in a way that's masterful and you know what it's like on the podium, we can hear things. But it's very warped, you know, and it does require that level of kind of repose to be able to give the thing. I just think with Wagner it's a complete other level. One really runs the risk of becoming over involved in it.
- [25:04]
D
Sam.
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B
Well, and it goes to actually a paragraph that I found of Wagner writing about what he was going to do with this opera. He said, never in my life, having enjoyed the true happiness of love, I shall erect a memorial to this loveliest of all dreams in which, from the first to the last, love shall for once find utter repletion. I have devised in my mind a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest yet most full blooded musical conception imaginable. And the, the use of the word simple when these are for its time, you know, the most harm, most complex harmonic language. I mean, to not resolve chords for hours and hours is, takes a harmonic sophistication that is remarkable.
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C
But, but there is a simplicity to it. Also. Ostensibly it's supposed to be pretty easy to stage. There aren't that many characters, the choir's not too involved. Now, ironically, you know, people like died trying to sing it the first time after he said that it was simple. It's very, it's very Wagner. And something else that I find really disturbing about this Wagner I have always thought was probably a sociopath or something of this kind of how awful is it that someone who did not probably experience true love in the way a normal human being does writes this thing. And I think you, Josh, knowing you, one of the things I love about you is your, is your, is your idealism. And this just, I mean, this is disturbing. I mean, even for me, you think how is this possible? But I mean, the artistry was so great that he succeeded in doing it that Even non Wagner fans say, my goodness, this is a pretty good piece.
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B
Yeah, it's inescapable. And it is one of these mysteries about how someone who was really, as you said, just such a completely awful person in almost every way, not, as you said, not speaking about just the anti Semitism and all of the things that we know famously about him, the non famous parts of this man's personality were also quite disturbing. And yet, yeah, you get this sense of a kind of worldly, this intoxication from listening to this music. And I'm curious because I know how much you know about philosophy and how much you've dived into it in the last years. But obviously one of the main influences on this music and the idea of this music was Schopenhauer. And talk a little bit about his influence on Wagner and on this piece.
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C
Yeah, I mean, this is an interesting story because what he learned is quite antithetical to how he was in the world. I think this is, you know, for anybody that's, that's a literature fan, I think the most interesting characters are ones who are contradictions because we as humans don't behave how we're supposed to, based on what we profess to believe. Yeah, I mean, before Schopenhauer, Wagner was very much into this direction of the hero's journey and this kind of resolution that the hero goes through trials and tribulations and ends up winning. He's in the middle of writing Zigfried and comes into contact with Schopenhauer also the Upanishads, indirectly, things like this very, very Eastern thought. And Schopenhauer basically talks about this idea that what it is that we truly want is something that we have, that we have no sense of. It's something that we can't know that there is this unknown will that powers us. So he leaves Siegfried and I think he even wrote over Zigfried's line wherever he was writing until we meet again or something like this. Interestingly, I mean, he continued to work on Zigfried after that. But there is a. He did make a decision to go, to go and do this. And in a metaphysical sense, this, this opera is about longing. And it is, it is, it is the feeling of desire. And he comes back to the ring. And the ring is not this hero story anymore. It completely changes the gold ends up right back where it started again. It melts and goes down to the bottom of the river, River Rhine, and nothing is resolved. All of this pain and suffering and we're back to square One in Tristan, particularly in act two, this is the most Schopenhauerian of all of it. The idea that daytime represents the lie and that nighttime is the truth. Meaning that Schopenhauer talked about this idea of phenomenon in Noumenon. Kant talked about it a bit, but Schopenhauer sort of took it a step further. Phenomenon in Schopenhauer's world is everything that we can kind of see and touch. Our titles, our stations, the story about the world, the noumenon sort of represent something much deeper. Well, in the light of day, Tristan and Isolde are not possible. Tristan is King Mark's right hand man. He has obligations. Isolde is supposed to be marrying King Mark. All of this stuff. In Act 2, Branghaina is waiting out front with Isolde. And the sign is supposed to be to let Tristan to come and see her, that the light gets extinguished. This is a phenomenal metaphor. And Isolde says something along the lines in this huge climax in Act 2, because Brangana is warning Isolde the whole time, this is very dangerous. You shouldn't be doing this. And Isolde, under the influence of the potion, which by the way, in Wagner's opera serves a complete different purpose than in Gottfried von Strasbourg's version. But that's neither here nor there. The potion in Wagner's Tristan sort of unmasks something that was already there. Whereas in the original story it's actually a potion that makes them feel like
- [32:44]
B
magic kind of thing.
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C
Exactly. And in this it's a sort of, how do you say, a stripping down to the. To the real noumenon of what's going on. Isolde says something along the lines of holding this, this, this, this. This lamp that when it goes out, Tristan's gonna come. Brangana says, don't do it. Don't do it. Brangana's music is very agitated. Isolde, you can hear the murmur of the waters. And she's. She's seeing the world as it is, so to speak. Isolde holds up this light and says, I wouldn't save this light if it was the light of my life. And throws it down. Sa. And then they have this beautiful scene where ostensibly they make love. And it's not just. It's not a longing in a traditional kind of Shakespearean sense. It's more that they talk about Tristan, Isolde, the idea of them together. They don't just want to be together. They want to destroy the conditions that make them separate. By the end of the opera, talking now about philosophy, it's unclear whether she dies or what's going on. It's very weird. She talks about being able to see him breathe even though he's just died. And it's never fulfilled. Right. He doesn't see her at the end. He's there bleeding for what seems like three days, you know, in Act 3. And. And. And that longing never gets. And that longing never gets fulfilled. It is the. It is, like I said, the erasure of the question itself. And it's a catharsis at the end, but a release from the need for resolution. And that's what's so profound about it.
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D
Sam.
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B
Yeah, so one of the things that, in my research about this, for. For our. Our conversation is that I never knew this before, is that Wagner, you did not call the end of this piece the. The end of the opera, the leave stood. He called the Prelude leave a stood and the end, the Transfiguration. And it's exactly what you're talking about. And it does seem more accurate to me to talk about not as a love death, because as you said, it's. It is. I mean, depending on the staging, you see, it is unclear what happens at the end. It's. It's fascinating. She kind of dissolves into the music. And it's. And that's actually something, if we get into talking about the. The, what we now refer to as the Libestod, the. In a concert performance of this, often you will hear it without the voice, which is, if you think about it, completely remarkable that the piece works 100 as well without the voice as with. And there is a sense when you hear it with the voice that the. The soprano is kind of dissolving into the orchestra, kind of in, in and out. And there's a. There's. Well, she's also.
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C
She's also dying because it's the most awful thing to have to sing after three days of going through this opera, you know.
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B
Exactly, exactly.
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C
The poor thing.
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B
Yeah. And in.
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C
And the.
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B
The orchestration remains exactly the same whether you play it with or without the voice. And I think that that's something really remarkable and also kind of part of this philosophy that you're talking about.
- [38:43]
C
I don't know if you're a James Joyce fan, but, like Finnegan's Wake is completely unreadable. However, this nonsense that, that it speaks, you know, the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring one. A child knows that Joyce is talking about Humpty Dumpty, the round sounds. And there's something about the Wagner that is exactly the same way you don't need to know the text to feel what it's talking about. And I think that's what makes it truly great, is that it requires no explanation. You know, she's talking about being. It doesn't translate well into English. Welt. Atman, you know, to be in the. In the world, breath, to be sinking, drowning, unconscious. In German, it's so beautiful. But all of that is in the music already.
- [39:54]
D
Sa.
- [40:22]
B
I. I was reading Wagner said before again, the. He wrote the. The opera. He said, I. I've become exclusively preoccupied with a man, albeit only in literary form, who has entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven. Talking about Schopenhauer, his principal idea, the final denial of the will to live, is of terrible seriousness, but it is uniquely redeeming. And I was reading that very interestingly. Schopenhauer did not like Wagner's music at all and found it. He much preferred Rossini operas, also good pieces, by the way, also great pieces. But you would think that Schopenhauer would prefer something like Wagner.
- [41:03]
C
Yeah. Let me tell you, him being a Rossini fan was not on my bingo card for today, having read his literature, really.
- [41:12]
B
Yeah, exactly. But I think it really shows that Wagner was trying to do something with music that. I mean, it's a cliche to say it's ahead of its time, but it was ahead of its time, not just for the regular audience, go. It was ahead of its time for one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, which is quite remarkable.
- [41:30]
C
Well, I think, yeah. Somehow the things that are so metaphysically and philosophically serious, like this piece, go to this kind of, for lack of a better term, a very Buddhist place. I don't know if you know, the four quartets by T.S. eliot. This matters here, because T.S. eliot was a devout Anglican. This poem that he wrote, which is perhaps the greatest poem written in English, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it and then never wrote another poem again afterwards. It reads like a Zen koan. And the reason is that if you go far enough in any direction, whether it's existentialism or Anglicanism or whatever, you ultimately get to this, what Schopenhauer calls the denial of the will to live. I have to say that's very German and severe, but in the Buddhist sense, it's that desire is the source of all suffering, and that the only way to become free of that is to be desireless. Now, the problem, and why this is a very simple but a difficult idea to grasp, is that if you want to get Rid of desire, then you're desiring to get rid of desire. You're caught in this horrible jujitsu match, you know, and that is, that is what Tristan is about. It is a release from desire itself and the recognition that there is no self, that we are bundles of nerves, we are systems in which emotions are happening, but that the story of us being a fixed person that wants this or that thing is ultimately a fiction that is the source of all of our suffering.
- [43:30]
D
Sam.
- [43:56]
C
Sa.
- [44:24]
B
So as a last question, what do you. Somebody who's coming to this, let's say, listening to this for the. Who has never heard this opera in its entirety, who doesn't really know Wagner other than what you read about him, which obviously you mostly read about his personality. Where, where do they start? Do they start with this conversation and trying to find, to learn about philosophy and Schopenhauer and Buddhism, or do they just dive right in?
- [44:50]
C
Absolutely not. All of these things are just stories. What they should start with is the torrent of emotion and feelings that is this piece, and particularly the Prelude and love, Death. The best thing one could do is forget everything about Schopenhauer phenomenon, noumenon, desire, all of that stuff, and just go with the waves. That is, I think, ultimately what makes this such incredible music is that it is such a tactile and, and physical experience. And that's what makes it. That's what makes it great. You know, like all art, we obviously we can have an interesting conversation about philosophy and Schopenhauer and how that changed Wagner. None of that is necessary in order to, to feel the, the singular experience of this, of this emotional ride. And I think that's what makes it so interesting is that, you know, they say if you can't explain something to a six year old, you don't understand it. And I think it's true. You know, whether it's quantum mechanics or Wagner, there is a world where we can just sit back and enjoy the thing and marvel at it. Of course it's interesting to have this conversation, but the fact of the matter is we will never get to the bottom of it. That when you get to the heart of the thing, it defies explanation somehow.
- [46:12]
B
Is it. How do I put this? Is it less. Okay, I know, I feel like I know how you're going to answer this, but I'm still going to ask you anyway. Is it less satisfying to conduct this piece than it is to listen to it?
- [46:34]
C
Absolutely.
- [46:35]
B
Not even with that sense of detachment. Because you're talking. The reason I'm asking is because you're talking about a listener coming into it to follow the torrent of emotions that it creates. But as we have been saying, as a conductor, one has to not fall into that. You can't, or else you're destroyed by it. So there's. There's definitely a different feeling conducting it versus listening to it. That's obvious. But the emotional side of it's very different, too.
- [47:02]
C
Yeah, I mean, but I think there's something. I think there's something.
- [47:08]
B
I can see the smile on Case's face right now as he is talking about. I can see him conducting this piece in his head right.
- [47:14]
C
Right now. Yeah. There's something very satisfying about. This goes for all music. But I've said again, with Wagner, it's particularly dangerous. You know how long we study these things? I mean, I just did Mahler 9. I've had it for a year. The instinct is to hug every single note. You got the coffee stains and you've sat and poured over. What does this chord mean? But the danger of it is that we want to hug it too tightly and we destroy the thing. And this goes back to the ethos of the opera itself, the idea of letting go of this desire. We pour over these notes for a long time. But I think that in the performance of something like Tristan, there is something very satisfying about having looked at this ocean of material and of notes and of allowing it to speak for itself. We are servants of the composer, and to be able to get through something like this without hugging on to each measure, I think that in and of itself, of allowing it to speak is enough of an accomplishment that conducting it is much more satisfying than listening to it. For me, in spite of the fact that if we conduct a good performance of it, there is that level of detachment which is. Which is, you know, is Zolda at the end, dissolving the need for desire itself.
- [48:51]
B
There you go. Well, as always, it's so great to chat with you, and it's nice to share one of our long discussions because this is pretty much how we talk on the phone. So you know people.
- [49:02]
C
Exactly. This is me and Josh on a random Tuesday.
- [49:05]
B
Exactly. Or Saturday morning, in this case. Thank you so much, Case. And as I've been saying, we've been listening to Cases recording of this piece with the orchestra National Dealer France. And this is on Spotify, on basically anywhere you can get classical music. And it's a. It's a fantastic recording. And thank you so much for joining me.
- [49:28]
C
And may I say, I've always loved how you talk to talk about music. And I have been a fan of sticky notes from the get go. And it's just an. It's an honor to be here with you.
- [49:39]
B
Thank you,
- [49:58]
D
Sa. Sam.