Tristan without Tristan

Abstract The early Nietzsche claims that to listen to Act III of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde ‘without any aid of word and image, purely as a tremendous symphonic movement’ would be to expire ‘in a spasmodic unharnessing of all the wings of the soul’. This essay asks what, behind the hyperbole, he might have meant by this. The answer is that he is concerned by the possibility of subjective overload, an overload that might lead to a curse against life. And this curse is different, at least apparently, from the potential curse that the later Nietzsche is more obviously troubled by—namely, the curse brought on by the worry that life might be meaningless. But the author argues that, despite Nietzsche’s official position, the former curse in fact underwrites the latter until the very end.