David Hockney – Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner

Description

David Hockney, Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner is an original signed poster made by the Los Angeles Music Center Opera in 1987.  It is signed and dedicated “for Dan.”

Tristan und Isolde marked a new beginning for Wagner – and indeed for opera. Written in the 1850s, at the same time as he was beginning the Ring, he was moving away from plot-driven romantic operas to meditations on the nature of existence itself. Under the influence of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (who taught him that man’s life on Earth was dominated by unfulfilled longing) and sexual yearning for the married Mathilde Wesendonck (which taught him much the same thing), he had gone all metaphysical, and his work would never be the same again.

“Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul,” wrote Wagner.