Dopamine, Richard Wagner, and the Love Death

On the interplay between art, emotions, and our brains that construct them

“‘Tristan und Isolde’ is the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel… I have spent my life since I first read it, trying to solve it. It is incredibly prophetic.”
- Leonard Bernstein

Richard Wagner in 1862, three years before the Tristan was first performed, and the chemical structure of Dopamine, Cäsar Willich+NEUROtiker, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde from 1865 was one of the most important events in the history of classical music. Taking up the medieval story of the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde that fall intensely in love after accidentally drinking a love potion, Wagner transformed the material into a spiritual reflection on love, death, and transcendence.

There is no country, no town, no village that I can call my own. Everything is alien to me and I often gaze around, yearning for a glimpse of the land of Nirvāṇa. But Nirvāṇa quickly turns back into ‘Tristan’; you know the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world. A breath clouds the clear expanse of heaven: it swells and grows denser, and finally the whole world stands before me again in all its impenetrable solidity.
- Richard Wagner

Wagner’s opera is not only great for its expressiveness and profundity, but for using dissonance in a novel way, opening the gates to the late romantic dissolution of harmonic boundaries. More specifically, the first notes from its prelude feature the famous Tristan chord:

In the words of Brian Magee:

The first chord of Tristan, known simply as “the Tristan chord”, remains the most famous single chord in the history of music. It contains within itself not one but two dissonances, thus creating within the listener a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution- but-not-resolution.
- Brian Magee

In the rest of this article, I want to connect this sense of agonizing desire that pervades the opera Tristan and Isolde with the role the neurotransmitter dopamine plays in shaping our daily desires, musing about some fascinating parallels between art, emotions, and our brains that construct them.