Tristan and Isolde: A Meeting of Musician-Lovers

Yseult la blonde by Gaston Bussiere

Isolde

"...Half dreaming melt into the elements,
When they seem most alive and beautiful :
To fade into the purple of the west."

Brangaena

"...Bad dreams are said to augur opposites,
And bring us joys in weeds of sorrow draped."
Tristan and Isolde: A Tragedy. Louis K. Anspacher. Brentano. NY. (1904). Act II

I first became aware of the special importance of the Tristan and Isolde legend reading Joseph Campbell. The first known literary attribution to the tale is by Gottfried von Strassburg. The incredible mark that this story has made on Western civilization and truly world history is based on the central theme in the tale: Love. It is love, outside of Christian wedlock, which motivates the principal characters towards dissolution. For the first time in history, the cast of collectivism imposed over individuality was broken by a spell of love. Suddenly, the individual appeared at the fore of socio-cultural continuity for the first time and proclaimed an as yet unknown impact on the founding institution of social cohesion. Not only did love surmount the apex of all human relationship, the creative life, which sparks and endures love, became attainable, enabling the sacrificial character of a new individuality of self-knowledge and self-development in the art of life on Earth. 

See my previous post: From Genius Mind to Genius Heart: Wagner, Liszt and Dream's End

_________

a strong wind blows, and night falls, penetratingly raw, I pick up my face and screw it to the side of a cabin, changing my ways before the all-consuming blush of my red wife, gently winnowing my insides into the decadence of a youthful love story, she is my only one, and we decide to attend a party, by invitation to perform music, she is diligent in her work

Female Musician by Unknown

and in this response, a mystery hangs breathless with the unprofessional glint of our new friend’s weakened sigh, and stammering over the frozen concrete mold of a battering casino avenue, the wading head of sky simmers in an uncooked pit of flesh as we enter a home riddled with the divorce of youth from the useable head, dark rooms of sexual witnessing, of strange rumors, and fatherless groans, cruel mothers bedecked with the sorrow of an empty need

Monday Morning by Hans Baluschek

old children sit silently staring at a naked couple, motionless and bearing nothing but their side skin in two separate rooms of frightening disarray, and back in the foreground, the entrance hall, two young men sport a frantic jam session with homemade instrumentation, wood and stone chopped in a dizzying fray of wires and bone, strung together for a wish-fulfilled greed of rhythmic sounding, which stuns and climbs atop the phantom noose of age with momentous fleeting tones

The Savoyard by Alfred Jacob Miller

in that moment, the hostess of our strange inkling of a human party hands us a small envelope, and in it a card, reading the names of my wife and I, and best wishes in our move to new york city

_______ 

A space for listening, to cleanse the air with sacred voice,
An incensed feeling,
Touching on lost beauty within and under the strongly pressed clothing
Worn like skin that drops sadly over her neck of virulent sorrow
As a shapeless feature in the energy of her following
...
Passing through a foreign box
Crafted with a tongue for sensuous musical fruition,
To meld in the sorrow and aftermath of prehistoric eyes
Dreaming around the enshrined doorway
Through our billions in pain

Excerpt from "To Play the Chord of Humanity beyond Taoist Shamanic Heights" 

From Genius Mind to Genius Heart: Wagner, Liszt and Dream's End

Wagner at Bayreuth (shows Franz Liszt at piano) by Gemälde von Georg Papperitz

"If I think of the storm of my heart, the terrible tenacity with which, against my desire, it used to cling to the hope of life, and if even now I feel this hurricane within me, I have at least found a quietus which in wakeful nights helps me to sleep. This is the genuine, ardent longing for death, for absolute unconsciousness, total non-existence; freedom from all dreams is our only final salvation."

"As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head "Tristan and Isolde," the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; with the "black flag" which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die."

Wagner's Letter 168 to Liszt. The Project Gutenberg Etext of Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2, by Francis Hueffer (translator)

I suppose to find one's peer as an artist is an ideal that few artists truly find. In the artist's magic of self-distinction, and in their magnificent ability to penetrate the heart of all, there is a deep and rich yearning to struggle, co-exist and finally, bond with fellow colleagues in the field. The artist, however, is too often moved beyond the spheres of normalized human contact, and thus falls short in sharing the richness of their life with another, except in the case of a briefly interspersed encounter with love, endured while in the sweep and momentum of creation. The recording above bears such testimony, and the heartened dialogue which shifted the reigns from the genius mind to the genius heart in the Romantic age of music has no likely parallel than in the intercourse between Wagner and Liszt which produced such insurmountable passion. 

________

Separated friendships detached by the urban domestic strife of youth boggled into a labyrinth of direction often slides off course over more damaged rails and misbegotten paths, the hard-won industrial groove of 21^st century burning turns with a lifeless tour through the metal of pocket-worn need. 

White Buildings and Labours by Jayanta Bhattacharya

My friend, alone, and huddling over a home-cooked potluck gathering, strides in fully bedecked in Scottish kilt-wear. His face nearly contorted with the oncoming gripe of tears looks down and over his saran-wrapped goods. I comfort his back, emotionally elsewhere, long gone and hopeless for a friendship that’s as irrelevant as the contents of additional soup.

Scots boy in red kilt by Wilhelm Trubner

As I wander off, the air is opaque with a dark, runny stirring. The world commotion breathes heavily. A musical engagement is torn from my wife and I as our contact weans her ear from a phone of marital divorce, and the sky blackens with the frost of an easy death. 

Satire on Romantic Suicide by Leonardo Alenza Y Nieto

I tip toe up to my experimental end. I’ll have no burial, nor cremation, a sky birth in the way of my choice, a bungee jump without a bungee, and I dress for the occasion exactly as I would for my big day. My imagination jumps.  

_________

A great poverty aligns to the roof of the all-consuming jaw,
          That sweeps with the tornado dawn over the rushing plains
...
As American lore, talking through the human trees
          In a grave, over-worked rush to the gambled fortune
                 hidden in the proud dream
          To unite and be loyal to nothing,
          And yet return from the hollow
                 blank rough of our creative winter

excerpt from "Post-War Television Rites at the Dam of Time"