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/lit/ - Literature

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20321091 No.20321091 [Reply] [Original]

For many lovers of Tristan, the third act is the richest—the “greatest in every way,” “practically perfect,” according to Joseph Kerman—a perception extending back at least as far as Nietzsche’s panegyric in The Birth of Tragedy. It is not just because Wagner merges the exigencies of musical and dramatic structure to an unprecedented degree in this act but also because act 3 completes a palpable large-scale design for the work in toto. Wagner himself said that act 3 was the “point of departure for the mood as a whole,” a statement confirmed by his 1854 letter to Liszt, which already looks ahead to the oppositions that attain their point of greatest intensity in act 3. Act 3 pivots around those oppositions: Tristan’s curse of the love potion and his own existence, his relapse into unconsciousness, and his reawakening and clairvoyant vision of Isolde. These events are centralized within the act.

https://youtu.be/gGAKgoclJ6A?t=10358

>> No.20321108

>>20321091
Pretty solid ending. What do think is Isolda doing after the curtain falls?

>> No.20321126

>>20321108
She's dead.

>> No.20321693

>>20321126
Why would she be dead?

>> No.20321800

>>20321693
Wagner does everything within his ability to suggest her death, except for the literal explanation of how she died. But that doesn't matter because it makes sense when you watch it.

>In Music of the Future (1860), Wagner described his conception of opera in terms of the dominance of “inner psychic motives” over external events, the circumvention of ordinary dramatic causality, symbolized in the question “Why,” and the resultant transporting of the listener into a “dreamlike state which soon becomes a clairvoyant vision.” As he relates, in Tristan, having undergone a period of “questioning” in Opera and Drama and his other theoretical writings, he immersed himself in the “depths of the psyche and from this inmost center of the world boldly constructed an external form” in which the “detailed exposition” was of “inner motives” only: “the whole affecting story is the outcome of a soul’s inmost need, and it comes to light as reflected from within.”

On the contrary Wagner never completely vanquishes objectivity and leaves it open to interpretation that Isolde's fanatical self-conviction merely stopped her heart from beating. She follows in a long line of opera heroines dying without explanation, but at least the characters on stage acknowledge the inexplicability of her death.

>> No.20323073

>>20321091
Pretty neat find.

>> No.20323796
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20323796

>>20321693
She's from the middle ages

>> No.20323969

>>20323796
kek
>>20321800
many people falsely refer to her last soliloquy as Isolde's Liebestod (Love-death), whilst Wagner called it Isolde's Verklärung (Happiness, Deification, Glorification, Euphemisation...), which could mean an aweful fucking lot.
my personal take is that she died of orgasm.

>> No.20325401

>>20323969
>whilst Wagner called it Isolde's Verklärung (Happiness, Deification, Glorification, Euphemisation...),
Which is purposefully modelled off the assumption (since the Tristan ending is modelled off the Faust II ending). I mean in what context is a mortal transfigured except after death?

>my personal take is that she died of orgasm.
If the entire drama is a metaphor for sex then yes.

>> No.20326599

>>20321091
bump.