Marc Danziger of Winds of Change writes about a concert performance of Tristan und Isolde:
It was amazing; I don’t think I’ve heard an orchestra play Wagner better; the singers were amazing, and the video backdrop was interesting, until the very end when it became transcendental.
Many years ago I attended a performance of Tristan at Chicago Lyric Opera. John Vickers, probably the greatest Tristan of my lifetime, was at the height of his powers. During the famous Liebes-Tod (Love-Death) scene I was transported. A Zen experience. A no-mind experience. A transcendent experience. I completely lost track of time and space and was surrounded and filled with the glorious sound.
It’s possible to have this sort of experience in many venues—through religion, or the martial arts, or even through one’s work but this has been the only time I’ve ever had such an experience through music.
Are these experiences mere fleeting instances of heaven or can one fill one’s life with them? Certainly psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihaly thinks that it is possible. In his fabulous book, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, he discusses this citing case studies, controlled experiments, literature, and historical examples.
In one of the most famous passages in all of literature Dante describes the poet’s experience of the source of that experience:
Within the deep and luminous subsistence
Of the High Light appeared to me three circles,
Of threefold colour and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As Iris is by Iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.
O how all speech is feeble and falls short
Of my conceit, and this to what I saw
Is such, ’tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest
,
Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived
Appeared in thee as a reflected light,
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.Paradiso, Canto XXXIII
