Act III Tristan und Isolde

Instantly, the tragic music in the prelude to Act III plunges us into the deep mystery of transition from earthly life to eternity. Kurwenal has been watching over Tristan, who has been lying in a coma since Melot wounded him. The Tristan Progression is now funereal, an F minor plagal progression sounding impossibly deep in the strings. The Tristan half diminished chord is sunken, to G natural, a half step below its usual tone of G#. The progression repeats three times—as it did at the beginning, as it did when it cast its love spell—and then the violins in thirds climb together to celestial heights, representing a final escape of the soul. This is precisely what Richard Strauss imitated in Death and Transfiguration. The gloom of the opening is the place Tchaikovsky went to for his Symphony Pathetique. Mahler as well hearkened to this Act III Tristan opening in The Farewell, his own sublime masterpiece from Das Lied von der Erde. It is also the music Wagner himself composed in his earlier song Im Treibhaus (In the Greenhouse) from his Wesendock Lieder, a song that imagines lush tall plants in a greenhouse drooping in sorrow of mortality.

Wagner’s imagination in Act II was in overdrive. Like a magician, he kept pulling musical rabbits out of a hat in an inexhaustible wealth of ideas that express the love’s deepest emotions. You have to wonder, in a final act focused on dying and instantly begins in a cloud of gloom, where can he possibly go to sustain that for any length of time? He answers with a fabulous and original idea: to explore musically the boundary between consciousness and oblivion, between the pain of eternal yearning and the release of that pain in death. He imagines sublime devices for this task. An extended offstage lament from a solo English horn that pierces the soul with the fate of mortality, new exotic resolutions of the Tristan Progression that represent a journey to the spirit world, and ultimately, the resolution at long last of the progression in the transcendent key of B major during Isolde’s final poem of ecstasy, a dramatic and musical transfiguration of love and death.

Act III Scene i
The first scene of Act I began with a sailor singing a cappella a mocking song. The first scene of Act III also begins with a solo song, but one that needs no words, a lamenting shepherd tune played by an offstage English horn. This solo is an entire piece in itself. More than providing symmetry with the sailor’s song from Act I, it mirrors musically the hunting horn calls that opened the first scene of Act II. But here the open fifths take on piercing sorrow as they transform to a falling tritone.

While Kurwenal awaits news of Isolde’s arrival by ship, the shepherd tune awakens Tristan from his coma. In this extraordinary passage, Tristan recounts his experience of being in a coma, being in the land of Death.

We hear once again the potion of the Tristan Progression as Tristan recounts how his yearning for Isolde brought him back to the world of the living.

Tristan tells Kurwenal he can’t know how much the yearning for Isolde painfully sears him. The Love Theme now has a maniacal twist. The passage builds as Tristan hallucinates seeing the arrival of Isolde’s ship. And then he collapses.

The Shepherd Tune has threaded through this entire scene. Now as the tune reappears, Tristan explains its associations. This tune accompanied news of his father’s death before he was born, and news of his mother’s death at his birth. Now, he perceives this tune sealing his own fate.

Tristan exclaims his fate with the terrible potion that won’t let him escape eternal yearning. The strings wail in a elaborate variant of the Shepherd tritone lament.

Next comes an ultimate moment of self-realization. Tristan declares the potion of love consuming him was of his own brewing. That from his father’s grief, from his mother’s woe, and from love’s tears through the ages, he distilled his own brew of love poison. And he devoured it blissfully.

The music tells this whole story: a remarkable blend of the four note ascending Tristan motive and the fateful Shepherd’s Tune. The full Tristan Progression plays when he exclaims “Cursed be he that prepared you!” and then he falls unconscious.

As Kurwenal awaits to arrival of Isolde’s ship and its symbolic transition to carry Tristan to the realm of eternity, Wagner discovers new exotic resolutions for the Tristan Progression: E flat major, F# major, and a tease of B major that hints at the final goal of the opera. These resolutions precede Tristan regaining consciousness and imagining Isolde’s arrival. 

Act III Scene ii
Isolde’s ship has arrived. Delirious Tristan tears off his bandages awaiting Isolde to heal him. He leaps from his bed eagerly. Wagner’s heroic music builds upwards in frantic sequences to Isolde’s arrival, when the violins shriek downward portending Tristan’s fatal collapse.

Isolde reaches Tristan just as he is dying. The Love Potion motive now sequences downwards instead of upwards. We hear the Love Realization motive and it’s final melodic tone lingers an eternity with an entrance of the cellos. Then they play the Love Theme, Tristan utters “Isolde” and then dies.

Act III Scene iii

A second ship arrives with King Marke, Melot, and Brangäne. Kurwenal is sure they have come for battle. The Shepherd Tune is transformed into a vigorous battle drama.

As usual in Tristan und Isolde, all the worldly action happens in a blink of an eye. Kurwenal slays Melot, but receives a mortal wound. Brangäne explains to Isolde with all the Tristan Progressions that she had told the King about the magic love potion and that he had arrived to bless and marry her to Tristan. Isolde, though, is already in another world as we hear at the end of this passage the beginning strains of the Liebestod.

Isolde quietly begins her final poem, the Liebestod (Love-Death), asking whether everyone can see Tristan smiling.

Isolde continues, asking if everyone can see Tristan glowing and rising to the firmament.

Isolde works herself to a pitch of rapture as she continues to hear Tristan’s melody of transcendence. The music reaches its final destination, a tonal arrival on B major. Incidentally, this music reveals the source for all the powerful climaxes in Mahler’s symphonies!

Affirming the B major tonality with the Supreme Bliss motive, Isolde speaks of drowning in utmost rapture. And she herself dies.

The final measures of the opera reveal the ultimate goal of the Tristan Progression that has burned in our hearts and minds for the past four hours. The Tristan melodic motif ascend that before mostly ascended just four notes (G sharp, A, A sharp, B) now ascends from G sharp all the way to D sharp while the bass and harmony descend in an “Amen” cadence (iv-I) from E minor to B major. It took four-plus hours and the death of both Tristan and Isolde to at last reach a true tonal resolution of the Tristan progression, and it is a moment of supreme bliss and satisfaction. Composers following Wagner sought dearly to imitate this representation of rapture, searching for new ways to delay resolution. This search essentially ended in the early 20th century when Schoenberg and Stravinsky embarked instead on a journey to avoid resolution altogether, ushering in the modern musical era and atonality.