Tristan und Isolde

For those of you who may be uneducated, I'm talking about this, not this.

The Prelude is justly famous for throwing out the harmonic rulebook used by musicians for three hundred years - somewhere there is a quote referring to it as the bellwether of the decline of Western Civilization. (A free dinner to the person who finds me that quote, btw)

But it really is the Liebestod that... well...

Wow.

I hadn't listened to it in quite some time. I was at work, had brought the CD with me.

It is...

Let's just say that, about another piece of music, a conductor I knew, on an occasion at which I was not present, stated that religious ecstasy was close kin to sexual ecstasy... and that the climax of the Musikdrama is - intentionally, deliberately, and in the context of the story, literally - ecstatic.