Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Tristan und Isolde
Wagner's 1857–59 music-drama of erotic-mystical Sehnsucht — Schopenhauerian World-as-Will set to chromatic harmony
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Tristan und Isolde (Middle (post-Schopenhauer)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Both |
| Time · Traversability | Cyclical |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Finite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Emergent |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Mediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Limited |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Impersonal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Tradition |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Tristan und Isolde
1857-59 composition; legend set in a mythic Cornish-Irish past. The opera's temporal experience is famously stretched (Act II's love-duet 'Nacht der Liebe' suspends action for an extended meditation outside narrative time).
Space
Tristan und Isolde
Zurich (Asyl, Wesendonck villa) composition; Cornish-Irish-sea legendary setting. Act II's garden-night and Act III's Kareol castle are non-realistic stage-spaces of metaphysical depth rather than geographical specificity.
Matter
Tristan und Isolde
Music-drama in which physical matter (the love-potion, the sword, the wound) functions emblematically — each material object as cipher of Schopenhauerian Will-events the lovers undergo.
Observer
Tristan und Isolde
Wagner post-Schopenhauer (1854); the lovers as ciphers of the noumenal Will; Marke as the witnessing-tragic observer whose 'monologue' frames the human-political cost of the metaphysical drama.
Energy
Tristan und Isolde
Erotic-metaphysical Sehnsucht (longing) as the work's organising energy — chromatic 'endless melody' that never resolves until death; the Tristan chord as harmonic emblem of un-fulfillable yearning.
Information
Tristan und Isolde
Chromatic 'endless melody' and the unresolved Tristan chord; informationally, the Tristan score is the threshold of European music's nineteenth-to-twentieth-century informational transformation — where tonal expectation begins to fail and post-tonal music becomes possible.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The threshold of musical modernity and the most concentrated Schopenhauerian artwork of the nineteenth century. Adorno: 'Tristan was the great breakthrough into modernity.' Nietzsche: 'The greatest passionate love of any opera... and what an apostasy from the Greek!' Its post-Wagnerian influence — from Mahler and Schoenberg through Strauss to contemporary film scoring — is structural rather than thematic.