Heartbroken by the death of his beloved wife, Eurydice, Orpheus descends into the underworld to retrieve her. In Western culture, the theme of love death is present in ancient mythology, starting with the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Although Liebestod is one of the most enduring motives in the Western world, it is also a universal myth, found, for example, in the Japanese concept of Shinjū, the lovers’ “double suicide,” and the Hindu custom of “Sati,” a woman’s obligatory immolation at her husband’s funeral pyre. In his book Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont notes that “a myth is needed to express the dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with death, and involves the destruction of any one yielding himself up to it with all its strength” (21).
The theme of Liebestod often involves the double suicide of lovers who cannot live without each other and who die of despair over the death of the other.
Connecting la petite and la grande mort, the Liebestod represents love as an eternal force that conquers death and survives lovers’ corporeal bodies.
Liebestod (from the German Liebe, meaning “love,” and Tod, meaning “death”) defines the lovers’ consummation of their love in death or after death. “Liebestod” is the title of the final dramatic musical piece from Richard Wagner’s 1859 opera, Tristan und Isolde, but the word itself also means the theme of “love death” prevalent in art, drama, and literature.
0 kommentar(er)
