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

In the wake of its rejection by scientists, the theory [of miasma] inspired at least one great work of art: the opera Debussy made from Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande, a sort of Tristan und Isolde relocated in the world of miasma. It is right that Pelleas et Melisande, in which everyone avows feelings of weakness and being lost, and some are already ailing; with its old, decaying castle that lets in no light; where the ground is full of subterranean terrors and dank or watery depths into which one can fall - all the correlatives of miasma, minus the stench - seems, to us, supremely a portrait of psychological sickness, of neurosis. For precisely as the category of generic sickliness was phased out of nineteenth-century medical thinking by the new understanding of the extreme specificity of what causes illness, it migrated to the expanding domain of psychology. The physically sickly person became the neurasthenic or neurotic person. And the idea of an organically contaminated, objectively pathogenic environment reappeared in the notion of a psychologically contaminated ambiance that produced a disposition to mental illness.