This article analyzes Benjamin Britten's late works through the lenses of late style discourse and theories of aging, showing how these final compositions can be read as a reflection of the ways in which Britten's illness and physical disability in the last years of his life prematurely ushered the composer into 'old age' and its attendant physical and psychological difficulties. From Death in Venice on, Britten's compositions display an unmistakable preoccupation with mortality, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of an even further finessed concision of musical style. While the stylistic decisions in these last works cannot be divorced from Britten's very real sense and eventual acceptance of the nearness of his own death, neither can they be wholly accounted for by it, marking as they do an undiminished capacity for creative achievement in the midst of significantly diminished physical capabilities.

An ancient fable, the story of Tristan and Isolde's ill-fated love became one of the great themes in medieval European literature. Richard Wagner studied French and German medieval poetry during his Dresden years (1842–49), and his library contained copies of three different editions of the most famous version of the medieval Tristan, Gottfried von Straßburg's early thirteenth-century epic. In his opera Tristan und Isolde, Wagner draws on Gottfried's medieval epic and adapts it for his mid-nineteenth-century music drama.

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