The Love-Death Opera: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde

The following interrelated papers offer four different disciplinary perspectives on Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. They examine in turn the opera's medieval sources, the famous `Tristan chord' and its impact on the history of both music and morality, and the opera's contemporary German Romantic literary and philosophical contexts. The collective aim is to demonstrate how in Tristan Wagner establishes formal and conceptual oppositions which are subverted and ultimately transfigured. The `Tristan chord,' for instance, mingles desire with death from the inception of the opera, but does not disclose the full, contradictory meanings of that chord until the opera ends. The ambiguities of the desire that flickers between the protagonists are embodied in the ambiguities of harmonic and melodic entanglements located in the chord itself.