#xenowlsome i would never have had any idea that sans-peur-et-presque-sans-reproche was a reference without u pointing it out btw

[child-of-hurin]

I was thinking about two passages in LPM tome 1 that I love, that set the part comedic, part tragic tone of the novel's current civilization's complete loss of touch with the one that came before: first, the christian cathedral with stained glass and (classic? renaissance?) statues representing... the norse gods; second, an opera about Tristan and Isolde where the latter is in... a gondola, rowed by a gondolier with a huge hat.

But just to be sure I decided to look up Tristan and Isolde and Gondolas, and found this bit on information [in this website]:

With its distinctively dissonant “Tristan chord,” [Wagner's Tristan und Isolde] is music which, for many theorists, marked the beginning of the “dissolution of tonality” and opened the door to the tone rows of the twentieth century.

Franz Liszt’s haunting solo piano work, La lugubre gondola (“The Black Gondola”), is filled with intimations of “Tristan.” It opens with a solitary, searching line which suggests a dreamy remembrance of the rising sixth of Tristan und Isolde‘s “longing motif.” There are echoes of the tritone, one of the fundamental building blocks of Wagner’s “Tristan chord.” Drifting off into silence, this wandering, increasingly chromatic line is filled with harmonic ambiguity. As the music unfolds, it “finds itself” with a soaring and passionate statement. Yet, this evaporates into ominous parallel chords which sink five notes down the chromatic scale before rising again. The final bars seem to eviscerate tonality, gently outlining the whole tone scale before fading away.

While in Venice in December, 1882, Liszt saw a procession of black-draped funeral gondolas. He claimed to have felt an instant premonition of Wagner’s death. The experience was the inspiration for The Black Gondola, music in which the 6/8 swing of the gondolier’s barcarolle song becomes shrouded in ghostly shadows. Two months later, Wagner died in Venice.

Impossible to know, but obviously now I'm wondering if that jarring addition of a gondolier was, besides a funny way of portraying how disconnected these people are, a nod to this connection. We know the opera being performed can't be Wagner's original score, as there are only two male parts, but it clearly is a nod to it; might even be a modified version of it that survived, somehow...