Love death

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under love death (disambiguation) .

The death of love is a literary motif that is associated with Richard Wagner's musical drama Tristan und Isolde (1859). The opera's protagonists long for death as the completion of their socially impossible, adulterous love.

Richard Wagner

At the end of the opera, after Tristan died from a wound after a long illness, Isolde also collapses over his corpse. Her solo song at the end, which is generally known under the title "Isolde's love death", Wagner himself called "Isolde's transfiguration". Wagner described the orchestral prelude to the first act of the work as a love death. However, the libretto describes the bodies of the sunken Isolde and Tristan as "corpses", which indicates that Isolde actually achieved the longed-for union with Tristan in death.

prehistory

The literary model, Gottfried von Strasbourg's medieval verse tale Tristan und Isolde (around 1210), has remained a fragment. The couple's death together comes from Heinrich von Freiberg's pen (around 1290). However, he followed up with a warning about the dangers of worldly love.

With the (ostensibly) just death of Romeo and Juliet (1595), Shakespeare still adopts the motif of deceived fraudsters from medieval morality . The suicide was the Christian idea of a summit of self-importance - on the condition that the death was a mercy, and one can not draw up its own grace itself. Therefore, the motif of the love death played a role in the rebellion against vanitas since the end of the 18th century.

A liberation from religious beliefs began in the late 18th century. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which an unhappy lover kills himself, triggered a Werther effect . The suicide of the poet Heinrich von Kleist together with Henriette Vogel in 1811 is often associated with the motif of the death of love.

On the opera stage, the death of love developed its own tradition since the search for counter-models to aristocratic tragedy . A melodramatic version can already be found in Peter von Winters Lenardo and Blandine (1779). An essential role model for Wagner was Vincenzo Bellini's I Capuleti ei Montecchi (1830), an opera that he had already conducted in Riga. In Giuseppe Verdi's late work ( Otello , Aida ), too , the death of love was emphasized as a central motif.

reception

Throughout his film Patriotism (1966), Yukio Mishima played an old record of Wagner's love death in the background. The topic of discussion is the joint suicide of a military man and his wife after the attempted coup in Japan on February 26, 1936 .

The same music is used in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) as a symbol of common downfall without the foreground of an individual love relationship .

literature

• Jürgen Schläder : “The transfiguration of the hero in the death of love. The new hero concept in Verdi's Otello ”, in: “ Inventing reality is better ”. 19th century operas from Beethoven to Verdi , ed. v. Hanspeter Krellmann and Jürgen Schläder, Stuttgart and Weimar 2002, pp. 243-252
• Elisabeth Bronfen : Liebestod and femme fatale. The exchange of social energies between opera, literature and film , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2004. ISBN 3-518-12229-0