Proust & Wagner

Tristan und Isolde will be the focus of our next session - we will watch, listen and talk about this opera as it was a Proust favorite, much cited, and discussed Wagner's work.

Leonard Bernstein considered Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde the "central work of all music history" and the "hub of the wheel".

The opera serves as a recurring, pivotal, and complex musical leitmotiv throughout Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Proust analyzes the opera's profound impact on perception, desire, and memory, using it to mirror the intense, agonizing, and unresolved longing experienced by his characters, particularly Swann.

Proust examines the famous, unresolved "Tristan chord" in writing characters with unfulfilled, intense desires. Just as Wagner’s music refuses to resolve, Proust mirrors this in the relentless, obsessive, and often torturous love that characters like Charles Swann, the Narrator, Robert de Saint Loup and the Baron de Charlus experience throughout In Search of Lost Time.