How Opera Taught Me to Have Six O'Fun

We all know the feeling of being torn between the responsibilities of dawn's rosy clutches and night's seductive grip. Sally Mapstone blows duty’s horn as the first slivers of light creep over crashing waves, beaches, and steeples. By the time they reach DRA, I am squirming in a regretful pool of last night’s triumph. I pay the price of Union-sanctioned passion with missed academic expectations, betraying responsibility for love. So, when I saw Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh a few days ago, I was moved. Wagner wrote not of some medieval fling, but the fated romance we find in 601. Considering the pair's story, I thought of the similarities between a love doomed by fate and the toil of us students: Can we throw caution to the wind and love ‘til the morning, or ought we Ever to Excel as dutiful Bejants in the light of day?

In a series of vivid dreams induced by the hum of the 787 bus back from my night of enlightenment in Edinburgh, the answer revealed itself. I was gently lifted from the bus’s sticky seat and moved to the storm-beaten hull of the vessel in which Tristan and Isolde fall in love. In an attempt to escape her looming life of domesticity with her betrothed, Isolde is tricked into drinking a love potion that awakens her festering love for Tristan instead. She fights against her responsibility within the social hierarchy and, through the potion, defies duty for passion in what Wagner calls a “Joy born of Deceit.” I jolted awake in a cold sweat: Could Wagner have known of the fabled properties of the Pablo in pulling defiant students together? Did Wagner realise he was prophesying the ill-fated love to which our fight against the toil of lectures leads? The answer lay in my dreams, so once again the 787’s hum carried me back to that resilient ship as I crossed into both Fife and my slumber. 

Perhaps the reason the story of Tristan and Isolde is so relatable is that the feeling of friction between duty and carnal lust transcends their story. Different branches of the tale grew in various places for 800 years before the opera was first performed. The rustic world in which they live serves only as a vessel for the heartache to emerge. We see our own reflections in the dark ocean the pair struggle through until at last the sun rises over the horizon and illuminates our responsibility. 

After a night of sailing, Tristan and Isolde are separated when they land on her groom’s shore. Tristan resumes his duty as a loyal knight to the man about to marry his love and Isolde is ushered away to prepare for the wedding. It is not until night falls that the two can meet again under the soft light of the moon. Wagner portrays night as a sanctuary for the two lovers, as their moment of reprieve gives them a window to love. As both music and love hang anxiously on the edge of resolution, the vague silhouettes of pursuing knights gallop behind the rising dawn. The darkness of shadow no longer shields the two, as the pair are plunged into a wash of light. In this moment, I felt like I had lived Tristan’s life 100 times before: I saw the blanket of darkness in the club being ripped away from the arms of a lover and me, left with the un-abstracted ugliness of searing white light.

As day and duty creep up on the passionate couple, Tristan is wounded in the ensuing fight and separated from Isolde. Much like the bouncers of the 601, Tristan’s enemies act on behalf of the day, fighting tooth and nail to put an end to the lust of the night. Tristan flees back to his kingdom and lies wounded on the shore, his feverish will persisting against an unresolved exit. Finally, Isolde arrives. In one last embrace, Tristan crosses into a sweet and fulfilled death. The music reaches its climax, and at last we hear its resolution in “höchstes Lust” (highest bliss). 

Stirring awake from my trance, I thought of Tristan and Isolde’s noble death. As the bitter morning penetrated the bus window, I finally grasped what Wagner truly wrote about. I rushed home and threw my curtains shut, banishing day’s furies until night would fall again. Only then could I relive the romance of Tristan.

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway