Word: tristan
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Prelude and Liebestod form Tristan and Isoide--Wagner...
...Franz Liszt, once the wife of Composer Hans von Bulow. It was while married to von Bulow that she met Richard Wagner, himself married to an exactress, Minna Planer. Minna had shared Wagner's poverty, put up with his adulteries, including the Mathilde Wesendonck affair which supposedly inspired Tristan und Isolde. But Wagner left Minna to live with Cosima, 25 years his junior. She bore him three children-before he married her, took her to live at the Villa Wahnfried provided at Bayreuth by Mad King Ludwig who also loved...
...life. That the Burrell documents provide a strong case none will deny. Minna was evidently a generous, badly abused soul and Wagner loved her. But Authors Hum and Root have weakened their argument by conducting it in a spirit of backtalk, by forgetting in their vindictiveness, that Tristan and Gotterdammerung will endure long after the names of Minna and Cosima have passed out of human remembrance...
...defensive apologist, Author Lawrence moves briskly to attack settled notions. Says he: "Boccaccio at his hottest seems to me less pornographic than Pamela or Clarissa Harlowe or even Jane Eyre, or a host of modern books or films which pass uncensored. At the same time Wagner's Tristan and Isolde seems to me very near to pornography, and so, even, do some quite popular Christian hymns." Author Lawrence thinks the present attitude to pornography is pornographical, blames much of it on "the last century, the eunuch century, the century of the mealy-mouthed lie, the century that has tried...
...plots are essentially nice; heroines are usually either unfortunate girls who have been seduced (Marguerite in Faust, Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana) or unfaithful ones (Nedda in Pagliacci, Fiora in L'Amore dei Tre Re, Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande, Isolde in Tristan und Isolde). In To sea the plot hinges on whether Tosca will give herself to Scarpia to save Cavaradossi. Double beds are the most important properties in Der Rosenkavalier. Don Giovanni is a series of rakings. Yet an opera company which eliminated these and similar operas would find itself with...