Obsession

(This is one of my weekend non-political posts.)

Sometimes a piece of music lodges in the cranium and refuses to leave. The music may be sublime or inane: My ladyfriend once spent several days with the theme song from Flipper running (quite unwanted) through her mind -- "Either make it stop or shoot me...!"

For me, lately, the obsession has centered around the "Liebstod" ("Love-Death") from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, in which our heroine literally wills herself to death in order to do it (finally) with her fallen lover -- and to unite with the universe. It all has something to do with Schopenhauer. No, really. As Buddha said to the hot dog vendor: "Make me One With Everything."

That cruel remark "It ain't over until the fat lady sings" refers to this piece, since the cognoscenti hold that the greatest Isoldes in history were Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson. The latter, one must confess, could make an audience feel a little sorry for the guy playing Tristan, especially when the Irish princess slumps onto his dead body at the very end. (At least, that's how the stage direction reads.)

But those voices were astonishing. Flagstad was golden, dazzling, angelic, supernal, and -- well, we need another five synonyms for "supernal." (The link goes to a performance from the 1930s which I just heard three times in a row.) Nilsson transcended all human limitations, effortlessly embracing notes that no mortal should get near. The last word in the aria is Lust -- rapture -- and nobody makes love to it the way she does.

And yet my favorite performance is by Margaret Price, a Mozart specialist who never performed the role on stage. The recording she did with Carlos Kleiber, one of my favorite conductors, boasts superb digital sound which captures every nuance of a very nuanced performance. "Seht ihr's, Freunde? Säh't ihr's nicht?" -- when she sings/acts those lines in that heartbreakingly little-girlish fashion, you know that Isolde has both forsworn sanity and achieved the transcendental. To put it rudely, she's the IILF.

I don't know why I've been obsessing on this piece. I suppose because I've reached the age when one must put certain things in the past. Among them is the dream-state in which the erotic gives way to the mystic, and identification with the Other melts into identification with the All.

That hallucination is for the young. But one still remembers.