Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 2)

I want to say a bit more about text in opera and its importance for the listener/spectator. First and foremost, opera is complex and takes practice. The untrained eye can't follow everything afoot at a football match, so why should we expect a four-hour opera to be any different? And I'm actually really bad at opera. I've sat through at least a dozen operas wondering why I was there and what I was looking for, accessing close to nothing that was occurring on stage. I've at least once gotten angry at a production (Carmen, 2001 in New Orleans) while sitting in the audience and cursed opera's ridiculousness as having nothing to offer me. As a kid my mother would take me to the New Orleans Opera company's productions and I usually relished it, but still was very much an outsider looking in. It wasn't rapturous. Those Thomas Mann salad days spent listening to Lohengrin in Lübeck? Weren't happening.

Still, the disadvantage of opera to a lay person -- it's so complex! -- is an advantage too. Just focus on what you can, because there's so much there. If the story is your entry point, focus on the story. Or focus on the singing. Or get lost in the music. But lots of people (most of my friends, say) really don't get it. The stories in operas are ridiculous! And singing criticism is for experts. And getting lost in music is precisely the problem -- twenty minutes into a performance they're left grasping at things to focus on. Never mind that our modern age makes focusing on anything for more than twenty minutes nigh impossible. Kleiner Mann, was tun? 




Turn to critics? It doesn't help that critics are often so smug, insider-y and eager to hide their own ignorances. Of all the opera critics I've read I like Micaela Baranello the best because she reviews many different things in the same article: the orchestra, the singing, the original work (yes!), and the staging and set design. If the Kunstwerk is gesamt then the critic should have some sense of moving parts fitting together, explained to the lay person. And it should all have some spiritual or aesthetic aim, no? All those trappings of costumes and high notes should lead back to the original work and its question -- "what is this opera about and what can we learn from it?" Singers are then handmaidens to that end, if the opera itself isn't just some placeholder-excuse to play dress-up. And the story is clearly the first point of entry to considering the question of what we can learn from an opera. Almost every newspaper critic summarizes plot (same for films and plays) for at least a third of the word count. So let's focus on the story.

As a listener/spectator, the reason I've hesitated before to get my fingernails dirty in the libretto and plot is that I've been led to think of opera as something so beyond the sum of its parts that the story is beside the point. Opera buffa plots are notoriously complicated, and the music of, say, Figaro just isolates the tender or comedic from the absurdity and uses plot as a means to an end. Spending hours on story is a waste of time; just listen to the tender melodic beauty instead.

I honestly don't care what she's saying.

Wagner's stories aren't much less absurd from a 2015 literalist point of view, but the fact that they're usually sagas makes them easier to digest as stories, at least for many people. The stories in Wagner's operas serve quite a different purpose than those of Mozart's or Donizetti's. They're much less a vehicle-pretext and are instead more central to an aesthetic/philosophical aim of the artist. Wonderful! Problem is, I've never cared much for myths, legends, fables and the like. I'm one of those people who is a bit tone deaf for what's epic, can't extrapolate easily, doesn't like symbols, has never touched sci-fi, didn't touch the comics page of the paper as a kid, forgot who Ares is, reads far more Alice Munro than Tolkien, etc. I'm too selfish to read books about people (or non-people) who I can't imagine to be a little like me. So I've got my work cut out for me to find something viscerally relevant to my own life in the struggles of gods and heroes and heroines. It's worth doing, but it's work.

Focusing on the music is supposed to bypass this little defect, little illiteracy of mine. Wagner's music psychologically underpins the story, you feel the story as you hear the music, the leitmotifs lead the way into the character's motives and selves and into the work's aesthetic statement. So I've tried ditching the libretto and embracing only the music. This worked pretty well for Der fliegende Holländer the last (third) time I saw it live. I literally did not even bother to study the details of the plot because it's too strange and contrived. A sailor is cursed by God for invoking Satan and cannot return to land, must sail eternally, unless a pure-hearted woman loves him? And he is allowed to seek that woman every seven years because an angel let him? And there's a father-sailer (Daland?) and a former boyfriend (Eric) of the daughter (Senta) of the father and some misunderstanding between the Holländer who is disguised as a stranger and Senta, the heroine? Right. Music. My stubbornness took me three tries -- including a listening in Munich where I made so few connections between music, story and sung German without supertitles that I might as well have been trying to read Proust in Occitan -- but by the third try I won. Senta's ballad pierced me, her love-myth freshly personal, manifested by the music alone. I was ecstatic.

Three performances of an opera (in the case of Dutchman, 1996 in New Orleans, 2007 in Munich, 2010 in New York) is too many; there must be a quicker way to make something majestic become something meaningful and, clearly, my approach to all this doesn't work. So for Tristan und Isolde I've gone back to the text and the story. I'm reading the German libretto, which is lovely in parts, and treating it as a good play. That layer laid, I can go into the theater with a working understanding of what is going on, and bathe intelligibly in sublime sound.

***

As for my project to learn Swedish words for German ones (while brushing up on Wagnerian German all the while), it's a waste of time. Quizlet doesn't have three columns for three languages, so I found myself entering words in German for the sake of the Swedish, and vice versa, and not knowing how to list the English. The list grew too long. If Wagner uses Grund for 'earth' then does that mean I need to know the Swedish word djup, which means 'depth' (cool cognate!), just because ONE poetic translation uses it? Unlikely. It wouldn't really help me, even if the etymology makes a nice triangle with German and English. Same goes for:

• entartet -- degenerate -- eländige (cognate to elend, or 'miserable')
• die Herrin -- mistress -- drottning (queen)
• zerschlagen -- destroy -- slå (cognate to 'slay')

Instead, I've been enjoying the libretto as a story and as a bit of poetry. I've also been learning or re-learning some great German words:

• hurtig -- spry or sprightly, and etymologically related to 'hurt' (!)
• die Huld -- benevolence
• die Fehde -- vendetta, fued
• das Tau -- rope
• sonder Wank -- without flinching
• die Schmach -- humiliation
• der Nachen -- a small boat, a bark (like 'embark'!)
• die Tücke -- peril
• das Los -- fate
• die Unsitte -- nuisance, bad habit
• sich erkühnen -- to embolden, to have the audacity to do something

Part 3: An enthusiastic review of the performance