Music Of the Day: Wagner's Gut-Wrenching Grief
In classical music, there may be no opening chord so famous as Richard Wagner's opening few moments to his opera Triston und Isolde. The opera is a behemoth--lasting nearly four hours, and is a beast of a performance for any opera company to put on. Luckily, the famous prelude, clocking in at no more than ten minutes, is much more digestible. That is what we will be enjoying together today. First, some context on the opera. Wagner took great influence from the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, though they never met. Schopenhauer's philosophy was nothing if not pessimistic---He saw life as driven by an insatiable, irrational force, the Will, which leads to perpetual suffering. As Schopenhauer saw it, this suffering will never be realeased---until death. Wagner's narrative takes us through every stage of this idea---despair, passion, and finally, release upon death. We start off with the prelude to the entire act, when we are ...