Wagner in Tallinn - Mein Tristan

by Linnar Priimägi, Estonia

My love, yes, my penchant for Wagner was triggered by Thomas Mann. With his novella Tristan. “There are days in October that are like miracles,” and on one such day a German lit student was assigned to talk about this novella the following week. The assigner was head teacher Juhan Tuldava, rumoured to have once served as a Soviet spy in Sweden – and this tinged my literary assignment with a special thrill of danger. It felt like a sensitive reconnaissance mission.

Prepared with panache, the talk was a success. I spoke as though infused with the vocabulary, the characteristic prose style of the senator’s aspiring son. And I played to the auditorium the Overture to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. There... there it is! The Tristan chord!... But I could tell from their faces that the audience had failed to hear the absolute acme of all music. Alas, like the prodigy in another novel I should have twisted my head around backwards, I should have grabbed their attention by fainting – but that would have misled them onto a tangent of first aid and compassion, steering them even further away from the music to the profane – though perhaps much to the relief of some in the audience. So the two of us, the ex-spy and myself, unisono and in secret union, relished the sheer elegance of the diction: “ascendency”, “decadence”, “morbid”, “pining away” – and the predestination of musica wagneriana.

That was the beginning of a great and lasting love. I have loved and remained faithful to Goethe, Dürer and Hegel. These are shades whose goodwill is important to me. In front of them, I can always feel ashamed (!) – which I can’t necessarily do in front of my contemporaries. And now Richard Wagner had joined the pantheon of those great shades.

From his private library, the spy lent me Nietzsche’s diatribe contra Wagner. I enjoyed it with a particular feeling of triumph, since I had already chosen sides, showed my colours and emerged victorious. I saw through the disappointed philosopher, his empty rhetoric, which could hardly take the edge off his treacherous vindictiveness.

Wenn ich Wagnern den Krieg mache (“When I Wage War on Wagners”) is the title of a book I was given that midnight in Wahnfried by the author himself, museum director Manfred Eger. “There are days in October that are like miracles….” On that day I was conveyed to Bayreuth by the sweetest and loveliest woman in Franconia at the time, Christiane Zentgraf, the staffer at the Institute for Music Theatre Research in Thurnau. She was the main founder of the European Music Theatre Academy, and I was a co-founder. She was, moreover, close to Wolfgang Wagner through labyrinthine ties and had introduced us. And so it was that I found myself melting away one midnight in the Wahnfried drawing-room hearkening to the Tristan overture, which they’d put on specially on my behalf.

I had named my son Tristan. The name didn’t seem at all sad to me or my late wife Sirje. It sounded tender, fragile, graceful. As if bowed on a string instrument, on a Stradivarius. Or rather on a cello, the viola d'amore that so nonchalantly moves Thomas Mann in his Doktor Faustus. Incidentally, at the age of 5 my little Tristan asked why we’d given him such a “circus name”. “Tristan,” I replied at the time, “first of all, no-one in the circus chooses such a dreamy name. And secondly, what would you rather have been named?” “Urmas,” he answered, because at the time a relative of ours with this ordinary name was expertly assembling furniture for us and seemed to the little fellow highly worthy of emulation. “There are enough Urmases,” I said, “but you’re the only Tristan.” I notice that there are now a whole bunch of Tristans. I like to flatter myself from time to time – and it may even be true – that I was the one who introduced the name to Estonia with my son.

Back then in Wahnfried, we didn’t spend the whole time in the drawing-room. The three of us went down to the cellar... where we walked over to the cast-iron safe... That was one of the greatest moments in human history for me! I got to take the original score of Tristan und Isolde into my trembling hands. Bound in cherry-red velvet, with the personally autographed title: “Richard Wagner. Tristan und Isolde.” That was once in a lifetime. Once in a lifetime...!

Once upon a time... “There are days in October that are like miracles….”