Robert Gauldin
Eastman School of Music
Our familiarity with the succession of events in many masterworks of music often produces such a pronounced sense of inevitability that we find it difficult to imagine the possibility of alternate versions. One such instance occurs in Isolde's Transfiguration that concludes Tristan und Isolde. Although the Ab and B-major sections in the Transfiguration constitute musical reprises of the two corresponding portions in Act II Scene 2, several of its passages underwent considerable reworking in Wagner's Preliminary Draft. Yet in his complete score the composer swept these revisions aside and instead opted for a literal repetition of the Love Duet Music. this talk will address the possible rationale behind his eventual rejection of these reworked portions of the Draft.Robert Bailey goes to great length in detailing the nature of the changes in the Preliminary Draft of the Transfiguration. Nevertheless, his discussion fails to address the essential question underlying these radical modifications--why did Wagner go to all the trouble to sketch out a draft that he would later discard in favor of a literal reprise of the Love Duet music? The reason lies, not surprisingly, in the text for the Transfiguration, which existed in finalized form prior to the composition of the Preliminary Draft.
Following a detailed voice-leading analysis of the Final Version of the Transfiguration, I will outline the changes in the Preliminary Draft, and then attempt to demonstrate that although they originated from the new text setting, they proved unsatisfactory from a musical standpoint. Therefore Wagner subsequently scrapped the draft in favor of his original Love Duet music and adjusted the text to fit it as best he could. His eventual solution shows the happy result. Not only is the music still intact, but the various stanzas and refrains were now conveniently accommodated within the previous thematic and tonal framework. In the final analysis, it is the music that proved to be the master and not the hand servant to the text, yet another vindication of Schopenhauer's principle.