[lbo-talk] Birgit Nilsson, RIP

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, in Throne of Blood Kurosawa did MacBeth with
Shakespeare's words, and it's the best MacBeth ever
filmed by a long mile.  He also did King Lear (Ran),
probably the best Lear filmed. Maybe the music won't
be Wagner, for better or worse, but whoever wrote the
scripts for Throne of Blood and Ran had to face the
same problem as whoever is writing the music for
Tristan (the movie). Ridley Scott, who did this new
Tristan, is no Kurosawa, true he's done excellent
films (Alien, Blade Runner), and dreadful ones
(Gladiator), so you can't predict. Who says that Scott
won't incorporate Wagner's thanatic, if that is a word
insights into the movie as Kurosawa did Shakespeare's
exploration of human nature? I saw the trailers and
have my doubts, though.

Here's a link to the sources:

http://www.timelessmyths.com/arthurian/tristan.html#Early

Interesting that you're a Wagner fan, Doug, I would
not have predicted that. I love opera, but I like bel
canto -- Verdi, Puccini -- and Mozart, maybe some
French stuff. Over the last few years I've seen the
excellent Ring put on by the Chicago Civic opera,
walked out of Parsival, thinking that Nietzsche was
right about it, and still think with Mark Tawin that
"the music of Wagner is better than it sounds."

jks

--- John Lacny <jlacny at earthlink.net> wrote:


> > By the way, wonderful to see a Wagner fan here.
> 
> Thanks. So what's up with this "Tristan & Isolde"
> movie that comes out 
> today? I saw a poster for it in the mall a while
> back, and the tagline is, 
> "Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was
> Tristan and Isolde."
> 
> Which is technically true, but the Romeo and Juliet
> legend existed before 
> Shakespeare -- and no one today would be shameless
> enough to just do a movie 
> about the "original" Romeo and Juliet legend without
> using Shakespeare's 
> immortal words and dramatic construction. It would
> take a peculiar mix of 
> arrogance and bad taste to do that. Without
> Shakespeare, the story is dull 
> and lifeless -- two teenagers fall in love, but
> their families hate 
> eachother, so they kill themselves. Boo hoo. The
> story would be nothing 
> without Shakespeare's peculiar insights into
> humanity.
> 
> Similarly with Tristan and Isolde. It's one hell of
> a boring story without 
> Wagner's mix of Schopenhauerian philosophy and the
> deepest human angst and 
> longing for death, as expressed through the music.
> Apparently this movie 
> also has an original soundtrack. What
> self-respecting composer could go 
> around saying, "I wrote the music for Tristan and
> Isolde . . . the movie"?
> 
> On Nilsson, I think she was better as Bruennhilde
> and as Strauss's Elektra 
> than as Isolde, by the way.
> 
> 
> - - - - - - - - - -
> John Lacny
> http://www.johnlacny.com
> 
> Tell no lies, claim no easy victories 
> 
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

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