#waltraud meier

[beckmessering]

family. 𝖊𝖑𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖗𝖆

production: patrice chéreau, 2013, aix-en-provence. | klytämnestra: waltraud meier, elektra: evelyn herlitzius, chrysothemis: adrianne pieczonka, orest: mikhail petrenko.

quote: eileen by ottessa moshfegh

[soisaidfine]

Olivier PY: This state of night in which we live — we must learn to love it. That love of night in Tristan und Isolde is the love of our own night, the night of human beings.

(French)

Olivier PY: Tristan (Richard Wagner) reminds me of In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust): these are works that give us an extra life. Tristan is truly an inexhaustible work, self-sufficient, forming a totality. And that is extraordinary. Wagner doesn’t give us a philosophy lesson, but he allows us to enter a philosophical state in which one is “intelligent” in the fullest sense of the word. King Marke discovers that everything is theatre. It reminds me of this line from Schopenhauer: “When one is young, life is like a stage set seen from afar, and when one is old, it is the same set seen up close.” Marke understands that one can never reach ultimate purposes, that one can know nothing. King Marke asks, “Why?” And Tristan replies (in my favorite musical passage): “O king, what you ask, I cannot tell you.” That is the night Tristan and Isolde speak of: the impossibility of reaching the finality of ends and the causality of causes, the state of knowing nothing. This state of night in which we live — we must learn to love it. That love of night in Tristan und Isolde is the love of our own night, the night of human beings. That supreme joy which is the final word of the work: Höchste Lust — “highest bliss.”

Olivier PY, “Tristan and Isolde at the Dawn of the 21st Century”

Video: Waltraud Meier, Daniel Barenboim, 1995

Post by @soisaidfine · 1 video

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 5 · Patti Smith: ‘Put on Tristan and Isolde, real loud, and sit and listen to it.’ · Isolde: Jessye Norman THE RING: Jessye No

[parmandil]

[ofgreatart]

Gustav Mahler allegedly advised to spend less time studying counterpoint and to read more Dostoevsky. In Mahler as in novels, happiness comes best at the edge of catastrophe

‘how a musical idea, seemingly exhausted, rekindles itself through the unexpected emergence of one of its facets suddenly revealed, how a main phrase becomes secondary under the intrusion of a counterpoint that consciously takes precedence, how this perpetual change of hierarchy occurs…’

Video: Gustav Mahler, Ninth Symphony (adagio). Leonard Bernstein

Adorno: “During a walk with Schönberg and his students, Gustav Mahler allegedly advised the latter to spend less time studying counterpoint and to read more Dostoevsky. If Mahler’s music recalls great novels, it’s not just because it often seems to tell a story. The very curve it describes is novelistic: the way it rises to exceptional situations and collapses. It performs gestures comparable to that of Natasha, the heroine of 'The Idiot,’ burning banknotes, or to Jacques Collin, the convict disguised as a Spanish priest who, in Balzac, prevents young Lucien de Rubempré from suicide and elevates him to temporary splendor. In Mahler as in novels, happiness comes best at the edge of catastrophe. (…) The attitude of those who lament Mahler’s lengthiness is no better than that of promoters of abridged versions of Fielding, Balzac, or Dostoevsky. The generous temporal extension of Mahler’s music… makes no concessions to the comfort of easy listening, which spares the listener from any memory and expectation. His music embraces duration. Mahler makes those who have outlived him shudder like a boat journey makes frequent flyers shudder. Mahlerian duration reminds them that they themselves have lost duration. (…) The epic symphony savors time, surrenders to it; it seeks to materialize measurable time in living duration. It sees in duration itself the image of meaning, perhaps in reaction to the disgrace that duration begins to suffer in the mode of production of advanced industrialism and in corresponding forms of consciousness. Music must cease to deceive the listener about time through a true 'auditory illusion’; time must not pretend to be the moment it is not. Schubert’s celestial lengths were already the antithesis of such an attitude.” (Translated from French. Theodor W. Adorno: Mahler, A Musical Physiognomy)

Pierre Boulez: “Adorno is right about the novelistic structure in Mahler, but he doesn’t delve deep into the analysis. His reflection doesn’t rely on the description of the form, whereas there is so much to say about the form in Mahler, especially in all the finales, which are truly the pages of the highest complexity ever written in music. It would have been fascinating, for example, to show how a musical idea, seemingly exhausted, rekindles itself through the unexpected emergence of one of its facets suddenly revealed, how a main phrase becomes secondary under the intrusion of a counterpoint that consciously takes precedence, how this perpetual change of hierarchy occurs… For instance, consider the adagio of the Ninth, a kind of extraordinary extension of Tristan’s gruppetto: it is truly the Liebestod magnified, amplified by polyphony, and something Wagner would never have dared to dream.” (Translated from French. October 26, 1988, Questions to Pierre Boulez, by Henry-Louis de La Grange, MUSICAL, Châtelet Review - Paris Musical Theater: Mahler and France)

Video: Isolde’s Liebestod “Mild und leise” - Richard Wagner, Waltraud Meier, 1995

'consider the adagio of the Ninth (Gustav Mahler), a kind of extraordinary extension of Tristan’s gruppetto: it is truly the Liebestod magnified, amplified by polyphony, and something Wagner would never have dared to dream'

[that-stranger-in-paradise]

some Waltraud Meier gifs I saved

[monotonous-minutia]

Behold

Waltraud Meier as Nancy in Martha, answering all my gay prayers

[revedebeatrice]

RED

Don Carlos, Verdi, Théâtre du Châtelet, 1996

[vera-dauriac]

This is straight up fanfic, y’all.