Tristan und Isolde
Glyndebourne
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is a work of stark oppositions, which are overcome, or seem to be, in the final bars, as Isolde sinks lifeless over Tristan’s body, in a state of (her last words) ‘unconsciousness, highest bliss’. Well, which? you might ask. If you’re unconscious you can’t be in a state of highest bliss, and vice versa. But it is essential to this work that that central paradox is maintained throughout. Passion must lead to death. It undermines all civilisation and the concepts on which it is based and with which we work, and the lovers, a highly intelligent and speculative pair, think through, so far as they are able, the consequences of renouncing Honour, Duty, Fame, all the values of Day, and moving into ‘the wonder-realm of Night’, where only ecstatic Death holds sway.
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