Interactive Librettos

In the English-speaking world, the unity of word and sound so central to Wagner's vision is often overlooked. Many delight in the music while neglecting the text, not realizing what is missed. Wagner held, with all the conviction of a man who spent his life working out the implications, that poetry is never a servant to music nor music a mere embellishment to verse; the two are a single expressive organism whose separation is a kind of mutilation. His principle of unendliche Melodie ("endless melody") is the technical consequence of this conviction: music arises organically from the inner necessity of the text itself, rather than being poured into the prefabricated molds of aria and recitative that traditional opera imposes from without. To hear Tristan und Isolde as an orchestral tone-poem is to hear the beautiful skeleton of something whose living substance has been stripped away. To read the libretto without the music is to encounter a text whose sense was designed to be carried by tones it now lacks. Neither gets you there.

What I have tried to build on this site is the practical consequence of taking Wagner seriously on this point. Every libretto here is interactive: click any line and the recording jumps to the instant at which that line is sung; let the recording run and the text highlights itself in time with the voice. German and English are presented in parallel, the English translation aiming at a foreignizing, philosophically precise register that preserves Wagner's alliteration and rhyme where it can, matches the contour of the musical phrase where it must, and keeps faith with the archaic dignity of the original.

Most editions treat word and music as separable. The libretto sits in a booklet; the recording sits in your speakers; the scholarship sits in a third place entirely. The reader of the booklet follows words without knowing whether a passage is ecstatic or cold or suspended; the listener to the recording hears magnificence but loses the semantic thread; the scholar cites passages with neither the text nor the tone in front of her. The interactive libretto collapses these registers onto the same surface: the word is present, the tone is present, and the relation between them becomes audible as you read.

I use the word mystical in Wagner's sense, not as a slack honorific. At the climaxes of Tristan, of Parsifal, of the close of Götterdämmerung, the text says something the music simultaneously says and withholds, and the music says something the text simultaneously says and withholds, and what you perceive is neither the words nor the notes but their interference pattern. Strip either half and the pattern vanishes. Listen to the Liebestod without following the German, or read Isolde's final speech without hearing it dissolve into the B major resolution, and you get a moving fragment; together, they give you the thing Wagner was after.

That thing has a name in Wagner's own vocabulary: Erschütterung — literally, being shaken to the depths; the upheaval of the self from its ordinary moorings that he held, following Schopenhauer, to be the genuine work of tragic art. The Erschütterung cannot be reached through tone alone or poem alone; it requires their unity as its precondition, and it is toward that unity that this site is built. I cannot promise the revelation; I can promise only that the standard formats were getting in its way, and that these librettos are an attempt to get out of it.