(Zaragoza, 1941).
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Murcia. He has studied History, Art History and Philosophy at the Universities of Valencia, Rome, Münster, Berlin and Paris. A visiting professor at European and American universities, his work focuses on the history of ideas, the philosophy of culture, aesthetics and art theory. Among his numerous publications are Philosophy and its Other (1977), Fragment and Totality: the Limits of Classicism (1988), The Crisis of Reason (1985). Editor of Pontormo, L.B. Alberti, J. Ruskin, S. Mallarmé, Paul Celan, among others. Director of the Arquilectura collection. He has been vice-president of the Board of Trustees of the Reina Sofía National Art Museum (MNCARS) and is currently a member of the advisory committee of the Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art and the Botín Foundation. He has curated exhibitions such as Radical architecture (2002), Microutopias: Art and Architecture (2003), Matisse and the Alhambra (2010), Ariadne’s thread (2012), etc. He participates in the Geo-philosophie de l’Europe group and is coordinator of the Tangiers Group.
“Tristan and Iseult: Drama and transfiguration”
In his Theory of Modern Drama Peter Szondi insists on the centrality of the drama form in the genesis of modernity. Attentive to the German tradition from Lessing to Schiller, without forgetting the relevance of the Trauerspiel that so fascinated Walter Benjamin, Szondi sets out a new scenario, that of the revival of medieval traditions by German Romanticism, which would permeate German culture until Wagner’s death in Venice in 1883. It was undoubtedly Wagner who, from new aesthetic and musical assumptions, already in Tannhäuser, addressed the search for “the total work of art” (Gesamskunstwerk), as a synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and performing arts, which he had already proposed in essays in 1849 and 1850, speaking of “the music of the future”. From 1854 to 1859 Wagner worked on the poem and music for Tristan and Iseult. The discovery of Schopenhauer’s work gives his work a more comprehensive direction, as he confesses to Liszt in the correspondence from those months: “… Every day I move towards an indescribable chaos…” which will influence all forms of composition with a new chromaticism and will make Tristan and Iseult the work in which he accomplishes the slow destruction of the tonal system, through his increasingly complex sounds. Unresolved chord sequences, already present in previous works, but which here become dominant, giving rise to a flow of sounds of yearning violence, which transform the dramatic action into an ecstasy that is consummated in the final chord that concludes the work.