The Prelude [of the Tristan und Isolde] is an overwhelming evocation of longing, which nothing can appease. It is hard, listening to it, to believe that the body of the opera will sustain the same level of tension and intensity, but that is what it manages to do. The secret of the Prelude, which none of its innumerable imitators has grasped, is that its fabulous climax both clinches everything that precedes it and yet still manages to be a non-fulfilment. It is yearning, not consumation, taken to its ultimate point, and so if we are not to feel merely exhausted by it we need the whole opera. While we are still living, passion can lead only to ever increased demands to achieve satisfaction, so the only possible resolution is death. These are things the lovers work out for themselves during the action, but they are evidently what the Prelude adumbrates, with its harmonies that never resolve. Wagner had to revolutionise music in order to express states of being and consciousness into which no previous artist had dared enter.
Michael Tanner. Wagner, Faber & Faber (2010).
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