the soon-to-be new teenager hit

Well, Hollywood ran out of things to market to teens so apparently they've done a movie version of Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Iseult, whatever suits your fancy). Yipes. They've already destroyed Le Morte d'Arthur and the Chretien de Troyes romances enough. Plus it sounds like they've added some rock-ballad horrors to the soundtrack. Think "Everything I do (I do it for you)." Man, that Robin Hood was beyond atrocious.

Well, maybe a new generation will finally be interested in Wagner. They should be--there are orgasms written into the music in that opera.

An aside--I actually liked Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet (even though I hated Moulin Rouge so much I walked out of the theater after thirty minutes). But my big problem with Romeo and Juliet was that the sound editor or soundtrack editor or whatever used the last three minutes of Tristan und Isolde for the final death scene--but left out the Tristan chord! Using the allusion to the opera was a great idea (only in death can Tristan and Isolde be together, just like only in death can Romeo and Juliet be together), but they completely ruined it. The whole musical point of the opera is that this impossibility is reflected in the tonality of the music. The music doesn't resolve to the tonic until the last note--after three-and-a-half hours. That was a monumentally big deal and quite revolutionary in the 1850s. So in my opinion, they shouldn't have made the musical reference at all--they just glossed over the final Tristan chord and went straight for the finale. barf.