Ned Rorem - 29 July, 1973

from The Nantucket Diary of Ned Rorem 1973-1985, page 34:

"Book Music" (Notes for an essay on non-musicians who write about Music): In is powerful and now-famous story "Patriotism", Yukio Mishima (like René Crevel in France forty years earlier) preview his own suicide. In the film version made by the author, he considerably weakened (and inadvertently insulted) this detailed act by overlaying it with a soundtrack of the Love-Death from Tristan und Isolde. It can't be proved, but probably Mishima's choice of this sumptuous score to illustrate his stark subject was because of Wagner's title rather than his music.

cite as

Ned Rorem, The Nantucket Diary of Ned Rorem 1973-1985, volume 2 (San Francisco, 1987), p. 34. https://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/entity/lexp/1433364711434 accessed: 25 December, 2024

Listeners

Ned Rorem
Critic, essayist, Composer, Diarist […]
1923-

Listening to

hide composers
Tristan und Isolde
written by Richard Wagner

Experience Information

Date/Time 29 July, 1973
Medium playback
Listening Environment in the company of others, in private, indoors, in public, solitary

Notes

Soundtrack to a film.


Originally submitted by pashworth on Wed, 03 Jun 2015 21:51:51 +0100
Approved on Wed, 13 Jan 2016 09:48:54 +0000