Status Updates From Death-Devoted Heart: Sex an...

the artistic purpose of Wagner’s drama is to show that they are not fantastic at all, but rather the exaltation and vindication of a tendency that is already there in all of us, buried like a seed in the most mundane human love, unable to bud in the trampled world of daily life but flowering at last in art, which rescues from the marketplace of compromise this “most beautiful of my dreams,” as Wagner described it.

"Here we are not in the vicinity of an ordinary, repeatable, marketplace transaction of the kind that disgusted Gottfried. We are encountering the erotic in its highest form, as a bond that is completely independent of the external, public, and objective side of human life, and which binds soul to suffering soul in eternal union."

Tristan...has a public and a private side, and that what he really is—what he is for himself—is hidden behind the veil of courtly virtue. Tristan the hero is successful, glorious, universally admired. But the real Tristan is lonely, suffering, and vulnerable. And it is that real Tristan... who was touched and healed by the Princess Isolde, and who acknowledged this fact with a look

This is amazing. I can't follow 80% of the music theory being mentioned and I'm still enjoying this a great deal, and keep turning pages, and expect I will want to revisit this, and contemplating I might want to take some classes in musical theory just to get more out of this.

Wagner described his opera as a tale of “endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living— longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption — death, surcease, a sleep without awakening.”

"T and I are represented as elevated by their love to a metaphysical condition that removes them completely from the laws and customs of the surrounding order. They address each other in noble and courteous language, even while betraying the most solemn vows and sacred rules of conduct. Their crimes are thrust upon them by something more holy than the laws that they violate."