Throughout Tristan, from beginning to end, acoustic effects replace the symbolic (i.e., written) structure of drama and music. This happens first of all to the voices and second to the instruments, because once again breathing becomes their common root. In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, his own Isolde, Wagner explained how the Tristan Prelude’s dynamics were simply laid out in the composition and thus materialized “the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world.” In the very beginning, before the first sound, there was endless silence or “nirvana” or “heavenly clarity.” Then, “the heavenly clarity darkens” with the cello solo, which is explicitly labeled “a breath.” Finally, the Tristan chord appears and the whole orchestra sound “begins to swell, becomes denser, and ultimately, the whole world in its impenetrable massiveness once again stands before me.” This is plain and simple; furthermore, as regards this massiveness, it is also a pure dynamic in the media-technical sense. From nirvana via an aboriginal breath up to the composed world, the orchestral Prelude to Tristan represents the first circuit of an acoustic feedback.
The second circuit, this time a vocal one, opens with the curtain. A “young seaman” sings, first of all, without the actor being visible, and second, a cappella, that is, without orchestra. He sings of the “wind that blows freshly homeward,” thus sending the ship and seaman farther and farther away from his “Irish child.” Which is why the seaman, in his next breath, inquires of his distant love: “Are those the breezes of your sighs that fill the sails for me?” Distantly reverberating sighs […] should thus themselves create the distance they then bemoan: the paradox of a respitory erotics. Thus wind and breathing, natural sounds and the human voice become indistinguishable, even in the seaman’s puns. For everything he says and sings simply exploits the nearly perfect homonym in the German words weh (meaning woe) and wehen (meaning to blow). His song ends with the dreamily sad verses: “Wehe, wehe du Wind! Weh, ach wehe, mein Kind!” (Blow, blow, you wind; woe, oh woe, my child” [Tristan, libretto, 3; trans. modified]).
Human voices as winds, winds as human voices––only the linguistics of a Wagner or Siegfried in his disdain for meaning allow such equations that are, moreover, acoustic puns. Yet for music-drama they are essential: they alone can hook up voices and instruments, text and score.
Friedrich Kittler, "World-Breath: On Wagner's Media-Technology," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (1994)
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