Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher born in 1788 who
died in 1860, had a very dark outlook on life. Though he held a bleak general
outlook, he loved music. He is attributed the quote:
Having said this, it is to be no surprise that he and the
highly regarded composer Richard Wagner are closely related in history. Though
there is no evidence that they ever met, with Schopenhauer being 25 years
Wagner’s elder, Wagner was introduced to Schopenhauer’s writing by his friend
Georg Herwegh, a German poet of Wagner’s time. Wagner shared Schopenhauer’s
dark, borderline pessimistic world view, which was evident in most of his
operatic works. The one that sticks out most, however, is his operas “Tristan und
Isolde”, “Parsifal”, and his famous opera cycle: “The Ring”. In all three
works, a theme of the futility and almost unimportance of human life is largely
present. It is worth noting that in “Tristan und Isolde” a chord now referred
to as the Tristan chord was created. It is a commonly held belief that the
Tristan chord is directly derived from Schopenhauer’s philosophies. The belief
is founded by Schopenhauer’s statement that: “music raises expectations in its
hearers and leads them to desire that its melody resolve itself in its tonic.
If this does not happen, we feel frustrated, as if the melody had remained
unfinished, interrupted.” The far more evident display of Schopenhauer’s
influence is in the plot of “Tristan und Isolde” itself. In the opera there is
a stark lack of actually meaningful events from an onlooker. Instead the action
is all psychological on the part of the characters, displaying futility above
all else. Another interesting comparison of the two is an interest in Buddhism
evident in Schopenhauer’s writing and in the fact that Wagner had started work
on an opera to be entitled “The Victors” about the Buddha, but never lived to
complete it.
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