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Knights at the Opera, Part 3 - Wagnerian Knights

© Iris Bass

In two Wagnerian operas, knights who stray from their vows pay for this infraction with their lives, in morals tales that involve little in the way of onstage warfare.

During the 12th century, an ancient Celtic legend concerning the knight Tristan was finally written down -- and so it came to pass that an early 13th century version of the tale by Gottfried von Strassburg became the basis for Wagner's 1865 Tristan und Isolde. The opera opens as the Irish princess Isolde is on a ship bound for Cornwall, where she is to marry King Mark as a kind of war "tax." The Irish did not give her up easily, and Mark's nephew, Tristan, who had been sent to fetch her under a false name of "Tantris," had been wounded in a battle that had caused the death of her beloved, the Irish lord Morold. (In unusually precise operatic forensics, Isolde has in fact matched a nick in Tristan's own weapon to a particle lodged in the late Morold's head!) Although she had herself graciously nursed Tristan back to health, Isolde now scorns him because (a) he is her lover's murderer plus (b) despite her extraordinary kindness under these circumstances, he still feels honor-bound to fulfill his mission: to force her to marry his uncle. She asks her servant, Brangaene, to prepare poison for Tristan and herself: "Rache! Tod! Tod uns beiden!" -- "Vengeance! Death! Let us both die!" Instead, they are given a love potion that instantly transmutes their feelings to a turbulent but deep passion: while remaining fully aware that they still have "issues," they also realize they have been rendered powerless to feel anything but love toward each other.

In Cornwall, the lovers meet in secret to sing a rapturous duet while King Mark is out hunting, but they are spied upon and discovered by Tristan's fellow knight, Melot, who had till now been his dearest friend. In a long aria, Melot sorrowfully interprets Tristan's treachery against their king to be a personal treachery against himself, and stabs Tristan with a poisoned sword.

Act III finds Tristan removed to Brittany, where his wound festers. He yearns to see Isolde once again; his faithful servant, Kurneval, despairing at Tristan's condition, has already sent for her. As he waits for her ship to arrive, Tristan muses upon the love potion that he had been given -- how it had been a death potion after all. Isolde arrives and he breathes his last in her arms. The opera doesn't end there. King Mark and his knights have been hot on her trail and now rush in. Kurvenal strikes Melot dead, only to collapse and die as well. As Mark breaks down, sobbing, over the bodies of those men once dearest to him, Isolde sings the famous Liebestod ("Love-Death") and presumably expires in grief over her deceased beloved.