#liebestod — Public Fediverse posts

#NowPlaying #ChondriticSound has 3 new 3” CDs worth gripping.

#JTWhitfield finds himself trapped in a hell of his own making. Sisyphean industrial techno from a most adept practioner. https://chondriticsound.bandcamp.com/album/acceptance

Crude, rough-and-tumble noise from #Flysch, searing tones shove past overloaded distortion, while faint memories are choked out of existence. https://chondriticsound.bandcamp.com/album/teeth-like-chrome-skulls

#Liebestod is back with another EP of dread-inducing power electronic malaise. https://chondriticsound.bandcamp.com/album/the-long-con

In case anybody needs a #JessyeNorman break. #liebestod #wagner #beauty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9680zhMmIqM

Debates about terms aside, in Nike Wagner’s devastating reading of the drama, the love duet & the #Liebestod are a cloak for the terrible truth revealed when Tristan breaks the pact of simultaneous death:

“That even in love, every person is alone...that love is a projection of the self, a code-name for all sorts of other needs. Although we hold the romantic hope that we can submerge our ego in another person, this is ultimately a pious self-deception...one cannot escape from oneself...”

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A lovers tryst leads to a pact: Tristan proposes the Liebestod, or love-death (aka double or simultaneous suicide), to Isolde. "Thus might we die, together, ever one, without end." She consents. But then Tristan breaks the pact by dying alone, before her. Isolde dies after him, after singing an exquisite aria over his body.

The aria that ends the opera is commonly (mis)called the #Liebestod. In fact, Wagner called it Isolde's #Transfiguration.

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Karl Böhm's production of #Wagner's TRISTAN UND ISOLDE at the Roman Theatre of Orange in France in 1973 was my intro to #Opera. Not live, unfortunately, but on lo-res DVD in 2010.

Despite the lo-fi sound quality, the music & the performances of Jon Vickers & Birgit Nilsson blew me away. The emotionally charged prelude, the rapturous love duet in Act II, Isolde's #Transfiguration (the misnamed #Liebestod) at the climax...

The desire for self-obliteration has never sounded so exquisite.

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