Word: tristan
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...This Tristan is becoming something terrible!" wrote Richard Wagner while working on the third act of what was to become his most famous opera. "I fear the opera will be forbidden unless the whole thing becomes a mere parody by bad performance. Completely good ones will drive people insane...
...time Wagner's fears seemed justified: at a turn-of-the-century Tristan performance the orchestra poured out music of such passionate urgency that one panting English critic found that he was "no longer artistically and morally a responsible being." The surging erotic melodies of the second act's Liebesnacht moved strong men to tears, and young girls swooned in the aisles...
Today, the tale of Tristan's illicit love affair with Isolde, bride of his uncle, King Marke, and of the lovers deaths-Tristan from a dueling wound and Isolde from grief-no longer packs the emotional wallop it had for Wagner's generation. Indifferently played, the familiar music sometimes has an almost soporific effect. But at the Bayreuth Festival last week, audiences responded to a stunning new Tristan und Isolde that gave Wagner's paean to love some of the shock value it must have had when its composer trembled for his hearers' sanity...
...tides with endless variations on the inevitable flagrant delit, or with revues and vaudevilles based on evanescent issues of the moment: the Franco-Russian Alliance, X-rays, the Parisian Metro, and the like. Others however, were constructed by comic dramatists of genuine wit and ability, humorists like Georges Feydeau, Tristan Bernard and Georges Courteline. If such authors may never be credited with bringing about any major revolutions in the French (or World) theatre, they were, all the same, uncontested experts in the no less noble endeavor of showing their contemporaries the laughable side of a life too often taken...
...Tristan islanders, who have only seven family names, are descended from a handful of British, U.S., Dutch and Italian adventurers, mostly shipwrecked sailors. In 1827, wives were found for the island's bachelors by importing five colored women from equally tiny St. Helena, 1,600 miles away...