There is music of
Wagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create great
warm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had come
to his art to find something in which he could envelop himself
completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion.
For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast,
cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divine
messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry,
driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come
toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into the
fathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the complete forgetfulness.
Through each of them there sounds the insistent cry:
"Frau Minne will
Es werde Nacht!"
There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and
women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter
consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in
the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void
mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing that
enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distant
horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever that
chains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain.
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