The French composer Claude Debussy said that Wagner’s music was “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.” I recently watched Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s latest offering, and in this film Wagner speaks as loudly as the actors and the striking cinematography. George MacDonald’s perspective echoes some of the film’s central themes, “How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.”
More from Debussy: “There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little – the book of Nature.”
