It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May....

....and thus, time for a new masthead: "Tristan and Isolde", by Edmund Blair Leighton.

The tale of Tristan and Isolde is one of those "periphery" tales that surround the Arthurian legends, much like Lancelot and Elaine or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Originally the tale was not part of the "Matter of Britain", but it ended up closely wound up with the Arthurian mythos. A good amount of information about "Tristan and Isolde" can be found here (incidentally, this is part of a larger site that appears worthy of further examination, since I only discovered it about ten minutes ago as of this writing).

This legend is also the source of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, the Prelude of which is often cited as a "dividing line" when chromaticism in music became so prevalent that tonality had ceased to exist. The Tristan prelude paved the way for composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Weber in the twentieth century to dispense with tonality altogether, for good or ill. (A complete copy of the vocal score to Tristan und Isolde can be viewed here. I don't know why I've never thought of it before, but the Web seems to me perfectly suited for making music scores widely available for lovers of classical music. Score-reading is a pleasure denied to too many music lovers, I suspect.)

Finally, a film version of Tristan and Isolde is under development, but I couldn't turn up any news that it may be filming or done filming or whatever. Given that I haven't seen one word about this film on AICN (a site which, like it or not, airs nearly every rumor on nearly every genre film project in existence), I assume that this film is still in drydock.

(It also occurs to me that I should have archived the previous monthly mastheads, for newer readers. What I'm doing is using a different masthead image each month of 2004, drawing my selections from art devoted to the legends of King Arthur. I have already used the following paintings: January, February, March (not a painting, actually, but an engraving), and April.)