Tristan's Lament (excerpt)
b'Tristan\\u2019s Lament seems to allude Tristan\\u2019s complaint in the third act, when he is sick to death awaiting his beloved and \\u201cbest doctor\\u201d, Isolde. However, Essl has chosen a sequence from the prelude, and by a program written in MaxMSP he moves through the sound in slow motion, back and forth, quicker and slower, until the time flow stops. In every performance, the live improvised reconstruction creates new variations \\u2013 endless configurations of an endless melody.\\n\\nIn Wagner\\u2019s prelude, the \\u201cawful yearning\\u201d implies the longing for love in every person of the play, and it is musicalized in chromatic shifts and the famous Tristan chord, that has broken the traditional tension patterns of tonality. Sighs and suspensions claim for solutions, which Essl denies, again and again turning back, as if the loops of increasing tension could prolong the bittersweet pain of expecting love in missing it. A sudden \\u201cforte\\u201d dies away, there is no increasing progression towards a climax, no breakthrough into bliss \\u2013 not even the bliss of death \\u2013, just a startling outbreak, isolated like Tristan\\u2019s screams in his dismal solitude. In unexpected breaks the music is torn to tatters \\u2013 like Tristan tatters his bandage to open his wound for Isolde\\u2019s healing \\u2013 but the abrupt pieces remain splintered and deny any hope for an embedding, comforting continuity. Every fade away of the rough sounds turns into deprivation, a small death beyond love. Layers of adapted sequences form dissonant cluster areas, which fade into courses of rootless slides like sirens of futility. (Susanne Vill)'