Forbidden Love I: Tristan and Isolde

Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde is considered his ‘most perfect work’ (Scruton). Nietzsche, at a time when he had already fallen out with Wagner, referred to it as his non plus ultra (meaning not to be surpassed) and said that he was ‘still looking for a work that equals the dangerous fascination and the gruesome and sweet infinity of Tristan and Isolde’.

The opera was based on the ‘great European myth of adultery — the Romance of Tristan and Isolde’ (Rougemont). Wagner’s principal source was Gottfried von Strassburg, ‘who wrote his Tristan and Isolde at the beginning of the thirteenth century, at a time when chivalry was being taught to the nobility as an expression of the Christian way of life’. However, despite the moralistic motive, Strassburg and the other medieval Tristan epics ‘set out to show an erotic love that could not be extinguished or subdued by the conventions of society’. The point is not to denigrate repressive institutions, but to demonstrate how a powerful passion can break through them… at a cost.

The basics of the story are as follows: Tristan, a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, is sent by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to bring Isolde, the princess of…