'Mark Twain, on a visit to Germany, heard Tristan at Bayreuth and commented: "I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven."
Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his younger years was one of Wagner's staunchest allies, wrote that, for him, "Tristan and Isolde is the real opus metaphysicum of all art ... insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death ... it is overpowering in its simple grandeur". In a letter to his friend Erwin Rohde in October 1868, Nietzsche described his reaction to Tristan's prelude: "I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is atwitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture". Even after his break with Wagner, Nietzsche continued to consider Tristan a masterpiece: "Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan – I have sought in vain, in every art."[34]
Hermann ripped off T&S for his Vertigo soundtrack (this being one of those instances in which the rip-off was what i heard and fell in love with first, and which then helped me appreciate the original - see also jazz sampled in hiphop)
i like vertigo but this is why i mentioned the black and white films cos it does remind me of the utterly ennervating quality of early hollywood. just how dead and lifeless those films looked when they were on telly and youre a kid. how those strings seem to suck all the life out of the room