Between Worlds: The new Seattle ‘Tristan’ explores the threshold between life and death, reports Andrew Moravcsik

What are we to make of Tristan und Isolde’s paradoxical premise that romantic love is realised only in death? The couple’s amorous sincerity leaves no doubt that even ill-fated love permits us, if only briefly, to transcend the limitations of material and social life. Yet Tristan’s lacerating self-analysis in Act III, in which love seems just another burden to be cast aside, implies more sombre Schopenhauerian pessimism: we can transcend worldly desires, even romantic love, only through separation and death. To 21st-century ears, Wagner’s philosophical resolution of all this – death as metaphysical transfiguration – is so much mumbo-jumbo.