ROMANTIC LOVE IN RICHARD WAGNER’S TRISTAN AND ISOLDE
Introduction
For a long time, I have tried to understand romantic love more fully in order to come to terms with it. This powerful ideology within Western culture has unconsciously motivated many of my actions, so it needs examination. But why have I fixed upon Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde? Like many people, I have been taken by the emotional power of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, in particular, the Prelude and the Finale. But what is stirring me? I am aware of the tragic mode of the opera and the music brings much longing and yearning. Still, I’m not sure where I am being taken. So I have undertaken my own exploration.
My focus will be on Wagner’s intentions for his music drama and to evaluate the philosophy behind his vision. Does it inspire and uplift? Where can we situate Wagner’s portrayal of the tragic fate of the lovers within the history of Western notions of romantic love?
Interpreting and critiquing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is particularly valuable as a means of getting at the Western notion of romantic love. In We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love, Robert Johnson has made the myth of Tristan and Iseult his vehicle for explaining the psychology of romantic love, providing a Jungian interpretation of its symbols. He justifies his choice of this myth on the following grounds. “It is one of the most moving, beautiful, and tragic of all the great epic tales. It was the first story in Western literature that dealt with romantic love. It is the source from which all our romantic literature has sprung, from Romeo and Juliet down to the love story in the movie at the local cinema.”
But where does the Tristan myth come from? According to Denis de Rougemont’s mid-twentieth century Love in the Western World, it is the product of Catharism, a gnostic religious tradition based on a dualist vision in which this world is viewed as the realm of matter, evil, and the demonic while the nonmaterial world is considered the realm of spirit, good, and God. This religious movement, also known in Catholic circles as the Albigensian heresy, was popular in southern France until violently suppressed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.
Despite the suppression of the Cathars, De Rougemont maintains that its beliefs remained strong among many of the area’s inhabitants. Concretely, these notions were given continued life through the customs of courtly love and expressed in the troubadour literature, the Tristan story being the culmination of this development.
Wagner presents the Tristan myth based on the twelfth century German version by Gottfried von Strassburg in a way that brings out the complexity and ambiguity of the Western concept of romantic love. It is remarkable how Wagner has confronted so deeply and energetically many of the crucial issues raised by this Western notion of love. His approach also exhibits several common pathological symptoms that are worth exploring. Therefore I will offer a critique based on Jung’s depth psychology and Buddhism. Yet, in certain respects, Wagner recognizes some of the traps set by the ideology of romantic love for the individual and points to ways of overcoming its harmful impact. So I also want to touch on the positive aspect of his treatment of romantic love as well.
The philosophy of Schopenhauer can be used as a framework for understanding the ways in which Wagner expresses the metaphysics of love in Tristan and Isolde. Schopenhauer’s ideas have much in common with the religious philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism which adds perspective. Schopenhauer’s investigations of the unconscious mind predate Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung so an understanding of Wagner’s connection with this philosophy will assist the contextualizing of Wagner’s art within the history of ideas in the West.
Interpreting Tristan and Isolde
Wagner’s stated aim in his music dramas was to initiate a new myth for contemporary German culture, one based on the ancient Nordic and German stories. In this undertaking, he was inspired by the example of the powerful Greek tragedies of Aeschylus. His aim was to provide German culture with wholeness and unity, while asserting the primacy of instinct and innocence. The music drama as a total and complete art would allow the German people to experience their common hopes and wishes thereby renewing German culture. Although Wagner saw himself as building upon Greek tragic art to achieve his cultural quest, his artistic vision was also greatly influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which he first came across in 1854.
It was Schopenhauer who enabled him to clarify his aims, vision, and the underlying impulse of his music dramas. What he had only previously sensed suddenly became transparent. As a result, when he wrote Tristan and Isolde after reading Schopenhauer, the metaphysical dimension came even more to the fore than in his previous works. It is this metaphysical aspect of his music dramas that has attracted my attention.
The young Nietzsche grasped the importance of the metaphysical dimension in Wagner’s operas and in Tristan and Isolde, in particular. Sharing Wagner’s advocacy of music dramas as the foundation of a new German culture, Nietzsche saw these operas as vehicles for a worldview and metaphysics which posited the attainment of beauty through art as life’s ultimate meaning and purpose. What he treasured in Wagner’s operas was that opera was treated as a complete art in which music, song, dance, costumes, scenery, drama and poetry were present.
As Nietzsche saw it, Wagner’s operas would bring back and recreate the great universal themes of the most profound human experience. Instead of conventional entertainment, it would provide the occasion for the whole community to have a religious type of experience that transported its members far above the mundane world. For Nietzsche, music drama was capable of revealing the innermost core of our being and myth was the preferred way to express it, dealing with the deepest archetypal situations.
It is worth noting that Nietzsche extravagantly praised Tristan and Isolde and maintained a life-long admiration for this work, despite his later critique of Wagner’s operas as decadent and as the summation of modernity. He proclaimed: “Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan — I have sought in vain, in every art.” Nietzsche saw Tristan and Isolde as “the real opus metaphysicum of all art” that expressed an “insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death.” He found it “overpowering in its simple grandeur,” and was particularly intoxicated by the Prelude: “I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is a twitch, and it has been a long time since since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture.” As Nietzsche was well aware, in Tristan and Isolde Wagner treated central human concerns with a gravity that was unprecedented in opera.
Wagner’s Encounter with Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
Schopenhauer asserts that the will to live drives all human action and striving, and love is the most powerful expression of this will. Wagner agrees with Schopenhauer that human desire is the expression of a blind will at the core of human existence. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics influenced not only Wagner’s view of human nature but also his social and cultural views. Wagner encountered Schopenhauer’s thought at a time when his social and political ideals seemed unlikely to be realized. In addition, his love for a married woman was causing him much suffering. One of the likely motivations for Wagner to choose the Tristan story as the basis for an opera was his need to better understand and resolve the conflict in his heart that this love created as well as to express his deep emotional suffering.
In the early 1850s, Wagner was highly receptive not only to Schopenhauer’s ideas but also to Eastern philosophy. This is not surprising since they share a similar outlook to a considerable degree. Schopenhauer was the first Western philosopher who viewed the philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism in a positive and enthusiastic light, proclaiming that they had grasped universal truths that the great sages of the world have understood. He went so far as to declare that a new renaissance would come into being with the study of Indian spirituality and its integration into European culture.
In accord with both Schopenhauer and Eastern philosophy, Wagner’s focus in Tristan and Isolde is not on the outer world and the ways in which it diminishes human potential for happiness. Rather, he is exploring the inner dimensions of consciousness which gives his music drama a spiritual orientation. Therefore the obstacles to the satisfaction of the love of Tristan and Isolde cannot be solely reduced to social ones such as her marriage to the king.
What hinders the earthly satisfaction of the love of Tristan and Isolde is inherent in life itself. In Schopenhauer’s philosophy as well as in Hinduism and Buddhim, the goal of life is to let go of the ego-mind in order to experience life in its ultimate unity. This state beyond the chains of illusion is experienced as an overcoming of suffering. The way of the saint is the most well-known vehicle to reach this state, but for Schopenhauer, two other means of escape from the tyranny of will, desire, and ego are available, the way of aesthetic contemplation and the way of compassion.
For Schopenhauer, compassion is the foundation of ethical life, based on the human experience of oneness with other beings; it is the way of the saint. Aesthetic contemplation was Wagner’s own personal response to the tragic nature of life that Schopenhauer had so persuasively outlined. But in Tristan and Isolde, he is not putting forward art as his preferred means of coping with human suffering. Instead, he is offering the idea that mystical union can be achieved through romantic love which ends in death, an approach that Schopenhauer did not believe to be viable.
The reason why Schopenhauer took a quite different approach to love has to do with attitudes toward sex that suggest Freud. His view was that love is sexual desire for the sake of the propagation of the species. Individuals who believe in romantic love have been deceived as to the real motivation of their love due to the power of the sexual instinct and the corresponding weakness of their intellect in relation to that instinct. This view is not so different from how Freud conceived the relation between the id and and ego. The ego struggled to be master in its own house due to the ferocity of the sexual urges that were repressed in the unconscious mind.
In Wagner’s opera, it is clear that the physical consummation of love is not the aim of the lovers. When the Tristan myth appeared in the literature of the Middle Ages, courtly love was based on the worship of an idealized woman who was married and unattainable. So physical satisfaction was not the goal in most cases of romantic love, although there were also many exceptions. This outlook is compatible with gnostic philosophy in which the realm of the world and the body are considered evil. But Wagner’s notion of mystical union reminds us of not just gnosticism and Schopenhauer’s philosophy but also of Eastern mysticism.
The Lure of the East
Wagner was surrounded by and attracted to Eastern culture. In his youth, East Asian ideas, customs, and artifacts were present: the Chinese impact on architecture and design, the making of porcelain, and the operas and dramas that were filled with Eastern themes. Although Wagner grew up within this milieu, he was not attracted by artists and musicians who viewed East Asia in a condescending way as charming and mysterious. His tendency was to search out the connections between German intellectual life and the thought of ancient India.
There is an important relation between Eastern ideas and Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer’s notions of renouncing the will to live and overcoming desire were not directly influenced by Eastern philosophy. But he was very pleased to find what he believed to be confirmation of these notions in the Upanishads which had just been translated into Latin from the Persian version. In Wagner’s case, he had already come across Hafiz’s poetry before reading Schopenhauer. In the Ring operas, Wagner created the god Wotan who is driven by the desire for power and success, but Erda, the bearer of ancient wisdom, explains to Wotan that nothing lasts in this life and everything must come to an end. She tells Wotan it is foolish to think that he is the master of his fate. Here Erda echoes Hafiz who says it is best to put the world aside and abandon it.
Both Wagner’s Ring operas and Tristan and Isolde reflect the influence of Schopenhauer’s thought and Buddhism. He intended to show nothing less that the breaking of the spirit of the proud god was not through encountering terrible misfortunes but through the complete overcoming of the will. This is what Schopenhauer referred to as the rooting out of our incessant desires, attachments, and longing that always end in disappointment and pain. The Buddha described this same process as giving up craving and desire which is the cause of suffering. The opening bars of Tristan und Isolde express this theme musically.
So Schopenhauer’s philosophy clarified for Wagner the new path he was taking as his enthusiasm for socialism and social revolution waned and his focus shifted to the inner life of individuals and their quest for happiness. The result was his attempt to penetrate the nature of human desire and romantic love through his music drama Tristan and Isolde.
Wagner agrees with Schopenhauer that human desire is the expression of a blind will at the core of human existence. In Tristan and Isolde, he shares Schopenhauer’s pessimism to the degree that he does not believe that romantic partners can find satisfaction through sexual love and a long-term relationship. The reason can be found in Schopenhauer’s analysis of desire. Sex can provide momentary satisfaction which produces pleasure but it does not endure. Instead, boredom comes and lack is once again experienced, after which desire rises up again to overcome the deficiency. The futile cycle then begins once more.
There is a radical negation of the world on the part of the lovers in Wagner’s opera that is in keeping with Schopenhauer’s outlook. Whenever the external world threatens to impinge upon their preoccupation with each other, they attempt to ignore its goings-on even at the risk of their own well-being. When Isolde’s handmaid warns them of impending danger, they pay no attention to her. Soon the king, Isolde’s husband, intrudes upon them while they are embracing. The events which ensue upon this discovery give Tristan an opportunity to voluntarily choose death. For him, death is the only way that he can escape the immense suffering that his all-consuming love brings him.
Schopenhauer, Music, and Metaphysics
In Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is highly useful for understanding the emotions and ideas that the music is conveying. Wagner uses the technique called “suspension” in which the music moves restlessly and roams about, creating deepening tension, while never achieving resolution until the very end of the opera. For Schopenhauer, by going against our expectations of resolution through consonance and instead inserting dissonant chords as the music appears to move towards resolution, Wagner has expressed human feelings at the mercy of the will. Since the will continually creates desires that cannot be fully and completely satisfied, we can only experience temporary respite or the appearance of satisfaction on the horizon. What we are hearing is the sound of the lovers’ unappeasable longing.
In “The Unbounded Eros of Tristan and Isolde,” Peter Kalkavage describes Wagner’s emphasis on emotion as a significant departure from Schopenhauer’s musical ideal. In the Finale, Isolde’s song provides emotional relief after we have heard the “haunted and broken Tristan music.” Wagner himself stated that he strived to achieve “the emotionalizing of the intellect” in his music dramas. In another shift away from Schopenhauer, Wagner also gives precedence to harmony because it is the source of feeling, whereas Schopenhauer prized melody as representing the rational will.
The metaphysics that can be used to explicate Wagner’s opera come from several sources. In addition to Schopenhauer, Wagner was also deeply influenced by Eastern philosophies such as Vedanta and Buddhism. Peter Bassett shows that Wagner employed Eastern concepts such as the unity of being to resolve Isolde’s suffering, since mystical union is the only way that the yearning for each other can be resolved. “Some of the most beautiful and poetic imagery in Tristan is drawn from the Upanishads, which Schopenhauer praised for their recognition that our senses are only able to grasp a representation of the world, and that this representation stands like a veil between the subject and the hidden world of timeless reality — Tristan’s wondrous realm of night.” Bassett then adds, “Interestingly too, Wagner equated Nirvana with ‘untroubled, pure harmony,’ the most perfect example of which comes in the final bars of Isolde’s Liebestod when she is joined at last with her Tristan in mystical union.”
Bassett’s reliance on Eastern concepts for interpreting Tristan and Isolde raises an important issue in relation to Wagner’s attitude toward romantic love. Was he celebrating, condemning, or expressing ambivalence toward it?
Kalkavage argues that Wagner departed from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics by having the lovers confront the tyranny of the will to live through the pursuit of romantic love. One piece of evidence is Wagner’s own description of the final act of the opera as “real intermittent fever — the deepest and most unprecedented suffering and yearning, and, immediately afterward, the most unprecedented triumph and jubilation.” Since the feeling of triumph comes from mystical union in death, I believe Wagner is offering romantic love as an additional path to transcendence of the will by becoming one with the beloved and casting off all individuality. But this is only possible through death. So I question whether this is a viable path, an issue I will return to later when I present critiques of Wagner’s ideal of romantic love.
Wagner described his own experience of composing the opera in spiritual terms. “When I gave myself up to Tristan, I immersed myself in the proudest depths of spirit and fashioned the outer semblance of the work from the center of that inner world. Here in my music-drama, Life and Death, the whole meaning and experience of the outer world depend entirely on the hidden mysteries of the spirit life.” So it would seem that Wagner considers romantic love to be a spiritual path in which ultimate realization occurs through death. But can the philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism be validly interpreted in this manner?
Romantic Love As a Spiritual Path
A look at two later operas gives a broader picture of Wagner’s perspective on love. These are an opera about the Buddha called The Victors whose story Wagner only sketched and Parsifal, his final opera that contains much overt Christian symbolism. In his sketch for The Victors, the outcast woman Prakriti falls in love with Ananda, the Buddha’s leading disciple. She petitions the Buddha to admit her to the community of monks, and he admits her on condition that she renounce all sensual love for Ananda and have a chaste relationship with him. Despite tremendous heartache, she agrees to have a sisterly connection with Ananda. She achieves liberation by first experiencing her physical love for Ananda before renouncing the physical aspect. In so doing, she purifies and heightens her love through suffering.
Wagner’s Parsifal, despite a focus on sin and redemption of guilt, has many Buddhist elements. The character Parsifal has been brought up by a mother who protects him from all knowledge of war and suffering so he grows up to be innocent, just like the Buddha whose family protected him from knowledge of old age, sickness, and death. As Bassett remarks, there is a shooting of a swan that replicates an early Buddhist story which teaches compassion to Parsifal. There is also the story of Mara who uses his daughters to seduce Buddha so he will not achieve liberation. The behavior of Klingsor and the Flower Maidens toward Parsifal follows the Mara legend. Then there is the tormented Kundry who fiercely desires peace and death but is continually reborn for having laughed at Jesus as he was dying on the cross. Here is the Buddhist theme of karma and reincarnation.
The philosophical core of Parsifal is the ethics of compassion. The lesson of the opera can be summed up in the lines often recited during its course: “Made wise through compassion, the pure fool.” In Parsifal, the Buddhist theme of universal compassion and love for all humanity takes precedence over the search for love at the individual level as Parsifal journeys toward redemption. Although Parsifal suffers much on the long road to spiritual maturity, he affirms his life and his mission. His path is that of service to humanity in which compassion for others provides enduring satisfaction and contentment.
Wagner also gives us a glimpse in Parsifal of a living religion in which spiritual growth takes place through the use of the myths and symbols of Christianity and Buddhism. By renewing and revitalizing the meanings which they once evoked in people’s hearts, Wagner demonstrates the faith that brings a life of wisdom and compassion. Even though Western institutional religions were losing their power to inspire and guide, the artist could rescue from the debris, the myths and practices that contribute to cultural revival.
In both The Victors and Parsifal, Wagner, while not minimizing the strenuous nature of the spiritual quest, offers us a view of life considerably more optimistic than that of Schopenhauer. Wagner followed Schopenhauer in his depiction of life as suffering and in viewing individual existence as being at the mercy of the merciless will to live in Tristan and Isolde. But he departs from Schopenhauer by offering romantic love as a path by which the tyranny of the will can be overcome, the path of mystical union with the lover in death. This solution is largely in accord with the gnostic philosophy that underlies the conception of romantic love which flourished in the Middle Ages. But in The Victors, pure love for another does not require death of the lovers. And in Parsifal, the path of compassion for humanity is outlined. In these two works, the intense pessimism that Wagner once shared with Schopenhauer has been softened as he suggests how romantic love can transcend itself and he opens up the spiritual potential of the path of compassion, utilizing the insights of Buddhism.
Evaluating Wagner’s Approach to Romantic Love in Tristan and Isolde
As I have already stated, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde displays much of the confusion found in the ideology of romantic love while also pointing toward a way out. The reason for this apparent confusion in Wagner’s operatic portrayal of love is that in some ways he was able to transcend the limitations of his culture while in other respects he was still bound by its assumptions. In the case of a highly creative visionary like Wagner, we can applaud the extent to which he was able to open up new cultural space for appreciating love, while taking advantage of our current historical location to point out where he has fallen short.
There are several key themes that are present in the classic versions of the Tristan myth and in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde: love for a married woman, devaluation of the physical dimension of love, the need for obstacles to maintain love’s intensity, the embrace of suffering, and the attainment of the highest love in death. The presence of these themes places Wagner’s opera in the mainstream of the Western tradition of romantic love that has endured until the present day.
Johnson shows that we have forgotten the need for simplicity in human life. To be simple means to find “meaning and joy in the small, natural, and less dramatic things.” The art of simplicity requires penetrating “the confusions we invent to the essential, uncomplicated reality of life.” Tristan lacks the wisdom of simplicity, the ability to experience satisfaction and contentment in the pleasures of ordinary life, even though there is little drama, excitement, and exaltation. He does not really live and has no real-life experience of an actual loving relationship. Instead he prefers to pursue an impossible and ideal love that leads to much suffering and then death rather than to find a less than perfect love on this earth.
In addition, the love of Tristan and Isolde never loses its intensity because the hindrances to its realization are immense. Isolde is married to the king and the king’s party is approaching them as they embrace. Then Tristan is separated from Isolde and he desires above all her return to him as he dies. At the end Isolde feels passionate longing for Tristan, although he has already died. What this demonstrates is the inability of the lovers to love each other as they actually are, as real people of flesh and blood. As a result, they each give up the chance to experience the real joys and sorrows of a love relationship while they are alive in order to suffer and die for the ideal of romantic love. De Rougemont perfectly captured this syndrome when he pointed out that the two lovers are in love with love, not each other.
Obviously, romantic love appears to satisfy a fundamental human need. The source of its tremendous power is our religious need for meaning and purpose in life. The intensity of the passionate love we feel for another human being convinces us that we have discovered life’s deepest secret. Now we are complete and fulfilled, our truest self, as our ecstasy brings us into another dimension of life from the one we have always known. This fantastic upliftment is what intoxicates Tristan and Isolde and makes them willing to give up their lives for this feeling. Ordinary life pales so greatly in comparison!
Johnson asserts that this need for meaning and purpose is spiritual in its essence. But it cannot be met through romantic love, for it requires a transformation of consciousness. And such transformation involves suffering. “To suffer consciously means to live through the death of ego, to voluntarily withdraw one’s projections from other people, to stop searching for the divine world in one’s spouse, and instead find one’s own inner life as a psychological and religious act. It means to take responsibility for discovering one’s own totality, one’s own unconscious possibilities. It means to question one’s old patterns — to be willing to change.” Have Tristan and Isolde put their egos aside through the purity and intensity of their love? Or have they only stimulated their egos by wrapping their imagination in fantasy?
For Johnson, the confusion of the human and divine realms is overcome through a transformative process in which the ego experiences death. But this is not a physical death; it is the sacrifice of old ways of thinking, old attitudes and beliefs, old perceptions and values. To be specific, we need to give up our romantic fantasies and to stop looking outside ourselves for salvation. We will not find what we seek in a romantic partner or a God in heaven. Ultimate meaning is found in the inner world, not the outer one; that is, in the realm of soul and spirit. Once again, it is not clear whether or not Isolde’s experience of mystical union with the dead Tristan is an experience of a transcendent realm or a mere fantasy.
Are Tristan and Isolde trapped within the conventions of romantic love, even though they have freed themselves from the bourgeois conventions of socially approved marriages and strict gender roles?
I believe that Wagner’s confusion about the nature of love comes not only from the influence of the romantic vision that underlies the Western notion of love but also from the philosophy of love found in Schopenhauer and the interpretations of Eastern philosophy that prevailed in his time. Wagner’s interpretations of metaphysical notions led him to reinforce mainstream cultural attitudes toward romantic love. I want to emphasize, though, that Wagner’s metaphysical bent also allowed him to transcend these cultural limitations in some important respects as well.
Unfortunately, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics based on renunciation of the will to life led him to interpret Indian thought in a way that provided confirmation of his own metaphysical premises and orientation. In his pessimistic interpretation, the Indian philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism are world-negating and life-denying philosophies. Yet, Buddha gave the world a philosophy whose ethics was based on loving kindness and compassion toward all sentient creatures. This doctrine appears to affirm both life and the world. But that is not how Schopenhauer viewed the religions arising from Indian soil.
David Loy’s Buddhist Critique
Western religions have promoted a more active stance toward changing the world in order to realize ethical ideas than Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. However, David Loy in Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism shows that this is due more to the lack of democratic ideals in Asia than to any deficiencies in the philosophies that originated in India. Asian social conditions did not permit any expressions of dissent from prevailing social conditions, whereas in ancient times, the Hebrew prophets expressed criticism of political leaders whose conduct was inimical to the welfare of their societies and opposed to God’s will. Then in ancient Greece and later in the modern West, democratic ideas took root which encouraged people to attempt to realize spiritual ideals in this world.
Schopenhauer is accurate when he depicts Hinduism and Buddhism as saying that the unrestrained pursuit of desires leads to suffering and unhappiness. Love based on passion is inimical to life, because it impoverishes life rather than enriches it. Striving for perfect love often leads to an obsessive fixation on attaining the goal, accompanied by a willingness to suffer. This is clearly the case with Wagner’s Tristan.
In contrast, the acceptance of life and the world brings happiness. Loy interprets Buddha’s message in this-worldly terms. Buddha wants us to recognize right here and now that there is no self that is born and dies. Consequently, the idea of a self that is having such experiences is a construct that Buddha wants us to deconstruct (to use a modern expression). Belief in a separate self is the cause of our most painful suffering. Wagner’s lovers recognize that desire is a terrible master but they are not aware that they need to let go of the self while still alive. Only in this way can they be delivered from endless and useless suffering without having to die.
When he composed the music to Tristan and Isolde, Wagner, like Schopenhauer, equated Eastern philosophy with the belief that insatiable desire is inherent to human existence. This mistaken view meant that his music could not point towards a satisfactory way to address human suffering. The emotional comfort that he provides in the Finale through the musical resolution of dissonance is only possible by having Isolde experience mystical union in death. A more helpful resolution would have been for the lovers to see romantic love for what it is, an ultimately futile attempt to compensate for repressed feelings of lack.
The fascination with suffering and death in the pursuit of romance is accompanied by dissatisfaction with the ordinary experience of life. But Loy shows that once we address our feelings of lack and understand the relation between self and world, we experience this world as holy and recognize that the secular world is sacred. “It should not be assumed that this puts us in touch with some other transcendental dimension; according to Mahayana Buddhism what it reveals is the actual nature of the world we have understood ourselves to be in yet always felt ourselves to be separate from. That sense of separation from the world is what motivates me to try to secure myself within it, but according to Buddhism the only satisfactory resolution is to realize I am not other than it.” With this realization, we are ready to positively engage the world and experience compassion for people because they are us and we are them. This possibility was outlined by Wagner in Parsifal, although not sufficiently explored.
