Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 1)

I'm an American who teaches South Koreans German in Vietnam. I'm also an American who, from time to time, goes to German operas in Sweden. This leads to a number of delights in life, and a number of concomitant linguistic puzzles. I attended Parsifal in Stockholm last year, was taken aback by the quality of the performances and intensity of the music, and was a bit sullen at the number of things I couldn't parse (if all of the text had been in English, it still takes practice and wit to focus on music where the music is foremost, and text and story where they're necessary, to say nothing of the meaning and philosophy). Today's puzzle: how do I get the most out of Tristan und Isolde when I haven't read the German libretto and can only glancingly follow the Swedish supertitles?

Now, I'm of two minds about working through the text in opera. A friend of mine doesn't pay much attention to the words when he listens to opera, doesn't even see the need to attend operas live. The music is sacrosanct, the staging a distraction. His way sounds noble, but I can't manage it. I need the text to thread the music together, I need the story to access the sound. I agree that stagings are a distraction from accessing the highest spheres of music -- I find it hard to get excited about Regietheater -- but then again, nearly everything is a distraction from accessing the highest spheres of music. If I can't 'feel' Wagner, if I can't hear something mystical at all times throughout all four hours, then at least I have the story and the words to focus on. With a little luck, the words will be familiar enough that I will have mind to spare to devote to feelings and philosophising. Even if those words are Swedish.




The internet does not have a Swedish translation of the German. Luckily, the Stockholm library does, translated by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger and published by the Royal Swedish Opera (in 1970?).

My job now is to:

1. Read the libretto in German and read summaries in English and German. This will be a good excuse to brush up on some German vocabulary, e.g. schweifen ('to flow, rove, roam').
2. Pick out the German words that are least familiar to me but important to the opera
3. Start (uggh) learning Swedish vocabulary so that the supertitles can link me back to the sung German, which will be hard to follow. To do this, I am creating a set of words on Quizlet, an online vocabulary trainer that I use in the classroom sometimes.

My project is at least slightly insane, as I don't have the Swedish skills I need to get libretto words into lemmas easily, and, more importantly, the libretto is a poetic translation anyway, so learning 1:1 equivalences between German words, often obscure or used obscurely by Wagner, and Swedish words, might be useless, a distortion, or a distraction at least. For example, schweifen means 'to roam', which a ship might do; the Swedish uses flyr, which is not an infinitive (fly appears to be) and means 'to flee'. This may or may not ruin any later attempt I will probably never make to learn good Swedish.

Whilst I'm doing this, I'm listening to the opera online, a production from Munich from which I admire the singing and staging.

Part 2: What are we really hearing when we are listening to words and music at the same time?