Death drive: Eros and Thanatos in Wagner'sTristan und Isolde

Abstract

In their different ways, a series of Germanic artists and thinkers – the poet Novalis, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and, most powerfully, composer Richard Wagner – all espoused at one point in their lives the view that death should not only be welcomed but ardently desired, even sought after as the final rest after a life of striving and suffering.

The wish for annihilation in ‘love–death’ as collapse of the need for recognition, in Wagner'sTristan und Isolde

“…In this, Wagner is often described as offering us Freudian interpretations before Freud (Bergmann, ; Hutcheon and Hutcheon, ; Magee, ).…”

“…Wagner manages to be: in touch with some kind of primordial force in the human psyche … [and] through art is putting us in touch with something beyond our conscious selves. (Chessick, 1990, p. 477) In this, Wagner is often described as offering us Freudian interpretations before Freud (Bergmann, 1995;Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 1999;Magee, 1988). The similarities of Schopenhauer's philosophy with Freud's thinking has been extensively commented upon (e.g.…”

“…The opera is sometimes described as a 'religious opera' whose religion is death (Adorno, 1981;Chessick, 1990;Kerman, 1988;Scruton, 2004). Hutcheon and Hutcheon (1999) describe the opera as structured around the characters' repetition compulsion. But they, like Zizek (Zizek and Dolar, 2002), also describe the desire for death as a paradoxical wish for life and for the liberation from the death drive.…”

“…These are such that Freud even made the effort to clarify that he read Schopenhauer only late in life (Freud, ), in itself a point of contention (e.g. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, ; Young and Brook, ). In his presentation of his ideas on the death instinct, Freud also points out the similarities with Schopenhauer's thinking (Freud, ).…”

“…King Mark is an obvious father figure for Tristan, adopting him as a baby following his mother's (Mark's sister's) death. The Oedipal theme may be seen to be inserted into the texture of the music, as Tristan's motif may be seen as an inversion of that of King Mark (Cicora, ; Dahlhaus, ; Hutcheon and Hutcheon, ).…”