Tristan And Isolde Opera Quotes

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

The Prelude to Tristan und Isolde is a famous example of chromatic postponement in which the chord of the dominant seventh ‘suddenly appears, no longer as pointing toward the goal, but as the goal itself!’38 Indeed, the whole opera can be regarded in a rather similar light; the final resolution being postponed for over four hours of music. Since most compositions are considerably shorter than Tristan, it follows that the skills employed in raising and prolonging the listener’s expectations cannot be the only important ones pertaining to musical composition