Diane V. Silverthorne, Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’, Arranged Mahler, Roller: The Will Made Visible

November 2018, Volume 12, Number 3, 39–48.

At some point in the months preceding the notable 1903 staging of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna Court Opera under the direction of Gustav Mahler, the designer Alfred Roller (1864–1935), co-founder of the Vienna Secession, produced a series of black-and-white ink studies depicting the figures of the two protagonists. These drawings are representative of neither costume nor stage designs, although Roller, in his emerging role as Mahler’s stage director between June 1902 and the opening night in February 1903, created both for this ground-breaking production. They indicate a convergence with the ideas of the Wagnerian stage-design theorist, Adolphe Appia, notably Appia’s 1899 essay on this work. They are personifications of ‘heightened nervous sensibilities’ which might exist in an imagined dimension beyond the proscenium arch and the spaces of the stage.