Rogelio de Egusquiza - Tristan and Isolt
I’m not going to talk too much about this piece specifically. It was hard to really discern it’s function and meaning from the version I watched. This version staged the piece like an opera, even though it’s an oratorio, with instructions from Frank Martin for it not to be staged. The english translation also gave it a very stagnant and obvious feeling about it. The chorus spent the whole time describing the action, which in an oratorio is fine but in this staged context was not successful.
Okay, I said I wasn’t going to write about the performance so NOW I WILL NOT.
The piece is a telling of the Tristan and Isolde myth. Made famous by the Wagner opera (funnily enough, this weeks video essay is about the legacy and work of Wagner) this tale of star-crossed, accidental incestual love is one that has been kind of creepily obsessed over by composers over the years. Wagner not only portrays it in Tristan and Isolde but this unsuspecting sibling love also forms the relationship of Siglinde and Sigmund in Act I of Die Walkure in the Ring Cycle. Olivier Messiaen talked about the myth being influential on his early large scale work Turangalila Symphony, along with other early large works forming an interconnected trilogy. Hans Werner Henze wrote in the 1970s a large work for piano and orchestra called Tristan. And of course Debussy’s opera Pellease and Melisande is a retelling of the French version of the myth. Now that I list these composers and works, some of my favourites, I realise this myth has also creeped into many pop and art pop songs too, including a song by Patrick Wolf called Tristan, an artist I wrote my honours thesis on. It has been popularised and pretty much fetishised by Game of Thrones and other medieval knock-offs. It’s an easy taboo to tap into - it generates extreme reactions, yet still step-parent and step-brother/sister porn is often rated as the most searched on the internet.
What is the appeal of this myth (and incest in general)? In this myth the couple meet and have an immediate connection and sexual tension. These feelings are strangely familiar and welcoming. They twist and turn throughout each version, usually resulting in an eruption of physical love. It’s then usually revealed, or discovered they are brother and sister and madness ensues. This depiction of physical love isn’t something that is unusual in music, and the added mystery of the unknown origins of these familiar feelings paint the differing interpretations with intriguing feelings of lust, longing and guilt. Many of these works capture this feeling and essence, and I think that is what the composers are probably most drawn to - trying to describe in music the mysterious attraction between these two.
However, a major taboo is still explored by major composers in major works, often on stage and often produced in times more conservative to our own. Perhaps there is a weird, twisted, almost Freudian working out of these sorts of sexual feelings by composers, especially with many of these works coming in before or on the cusp of women’s suffrage and the eventual sexual revolution. I explore sex a lot in my work, it’s one of the main motivators of my work. I am especially interested in finding humane and genuine depictions of homosexual and non-binary love and sex in my music, to try and broaden and diversify the depictions of sex in media. However, these school-boyish obsessions of incest and confused, guilt laden medieval bonking have always felt unauthentic to me. Pelleas and Melsande for instance - I adore this opera. I find the music intoxicating, and when done properly Melisande has this mystery and grace about her that’s really intriguing. However the sort of feminine ambivalence of her, the way she’s depicted by Debussy as a sort of forlorn, distant, mysterious femme fatale has more often than not got me wanting to yell at the singers on stage in frustration. “JUST MAKE A DECISION” or “JUST ASK HER WHAT SHE WANTS” or “JUST ASK WHO SHE IS. AND WHERE HAS SHE COME FROM” Often the women in these works are passive, and are usually won over by swash-buckling male bravado - he pulls a sword from a stone or a tree, or he kills his brothers, or finds a ring, or slays a bear and other such masculine, middle ages fare princes would get up to.
The inherent awkwardness of the love interest between these character always has me unconvinced. They always seem to be in love because of physical attraction and this “sense” of destiny. I think it would actually be more interesting to explore the political nature of men’s power over women in these times, rather then the old love at first site gag. One could argue it’s just an older style of story telling, and that this might be too revisionist and could end badly, but surely when Wagner or Debussy or Messiaen thought of reaching for these myths they would have in the back of their mind the fact these stories are kind of gross. Even for their time, they’re kind of yucky. Lindsay Ellis has some similar thought and discussions around the remake of Disney’s Beauty and Beast in this video, where she explores this idea of letting the myth be the myth, rather then to update the myth for our times.
Another example is Siglinde in Die Walkure - the tension of the first act is excellently done, but it’s always struct me as kind of awkward that she is literally living as a prisoner in this weird love triangle that somehow results in the phallic release of the sword from the tree and her running off with her brother. I can understand this sort of incest adoration in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as under the reign of Charles II, last Habsburg King of Spain. If you don’t know his story look it up now. One of my favourite party tricks is explaining that his mother is also his first cousin, his maternal grandmother is also his paternal aunty, his paternal grandmother is also his maternal great-aunt etc (see his family tree below). But these works are written in more modern times, and so for me, the incest side of things feels a little suss. They’re also often written in countries that were really conservative with laws, morals and religious beliefs that would have gone against depictions of incest. Clara Schumann said that Tristan was repulsive. Is old mate Dicky Wagner just vying for cheap reactions and scandal?
“Indeed some of the quotations from writers such as critic and later first Yale Professor of Music Gustave Stoeckel (who finds himself intoxicated by the Siegmund-Sieglinde duet while the music plays, only to feel guilty for that enjoyment of incest when the music ends). ”
What I’m getting at is that I can see why big artistic projects would want to depict and enshrine the political nature of incest in the middle ages and the renaissance - to show these highly inbred regents it is okay to be so genetically deformed - but in the works we’re talking about are far more modern. These characters are often depicted it in a way that is superhuman (in these depictions a Übermensch, chosen one type is born from the union of bro and sis), mystical and that there is some destiny at play with these two meeting and bonking. Sometimes it is something that is against the laws of natural, but often the lines are either blurred and it isn’t explicitly called out or it’s fantasised. There is always heavy helpings of destiny and magic to justify these relationships, and they’re always kings and queens, or hero’s or princes and have political influence.
But, how many dark ages royals do you know who accidentally lost a daughter and a son and they ended up being brought up by other factions, only one day to marry? I’m sorry I know these are myths, but they’re just implausible for me. I think it would make sense if these works came from an earlier time, where the political system enshrined incest more often, but many of these pieces are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, very much in the modern time. Perhaps this resurgence of incest came from Queen Victoria and her system of marrying off her many children to various crown heads, causing a resurgence of incest among monarchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? And perhaps these works are an attempt to appease these political forces and give them reassurance that it’s okay, its right for the political stability and perhaps will give the Kaiser some super human powers? However Wagner’s opera pre-dates German unification and so this reappearance of wide spread incest at the highest levels of the political class.. Though, it was obviously more prevalent in society, presumably in conversation and had a very important geo-political ramifications on the growing Nation States, and so maybe were in the minds of people more then in the past?
Who thought incest could be so interesting?
