Shepherd Calls the Tune: Arnold Whittall investigates a provocative reading of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ that centres on the Act III ‘alte Weise’

Review of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Musical Analyses and Musical Exegesis: The Shepherd’s Melody in Richard Wagner’s 'Tristan and Isolde', ed. and tr. Joan Huguet (University of Rochester Press/Boydell & Brewer, 2021).

November 2021, Volume 15, Number 3, 86–90.

If you believe that it is pointless to add to the vast mountain of Tristan analysis and exegesis without seeking to emulate the extravagance and extremism of the original music drama, Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s latest publication richly merits your attention, and does so despite its protracted and convoluted genesis. This means that some of the more recent texts concerning Tristan und Isolde, about which he might have been expected to comment in the process of setting out his own stall, are not mentioned. But Nattiez’s sense of what sources are most directly relevant to his own mode of enquiry has served him well in the past, and it is so again here, even though the immense range of aspects deemed relevant to his core objectives may call this or that facet of his approach into question.