Sô süeze waz der schellen klanc. Music, Dissonance and the Sweetness of Pain in Gottfried's ›Tristan‹

Abstract

By undertaking an acoustic ›reading‹ of Gottfried's text this essay shows that the power of minne bears strong similiarities to the way in which musica was understood to be a formidable aesthetic force in the early 13th century. Less concerned with musical performances in the work than with the theoretical – even inaudible – expression of sound, the argument is structured around two significant scenes that turn on metaphors of consonance: the drinking of the love potion brings Tristan and Isolde into harmony with one another, while the ringing of Petitcrîu's bell represents a painful ›dissonance‹ that causes the lovers to drift apart.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.