Is life a boon? Like Colonel Fairfax in The Yeoman of the Guard, Wagner could never make up his mind. He was drawn to Schopenhauer’s vision of life as carnage, best dealt with by withdrawal and self-extinction, but he was equally sure that the bliss of sexual union and of artistic creation revealed something essential and ultimately real. The richness of Wagner’s music dramas comes, in part, from the ways they show us both views at once, and he never did this more directly than in the third act of Tristan. The lovers’ passion is mutual, and it drives them both to the very limits of consciousness and of life itself, but how they come to terms with their fate is strikingly different. Michael Steinberg will try to illuminate those differences by relating them to Wagner’s own philosophical development—and (spoiler alert) will suggest that it is not Schopenhauer who has the last word.