American painter Elizabeth Peyton published Da Scheinest Du, O Lieblichster der Sterne as part of a 2014 exhibition of the same name at Neugerrieschneider in Berlin. According to Peyton’s press release, this book is “a small, limited-run artist’s book of visual motifs used in the exhibition.”
The exhibit’s (and book’s) name is a quote from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and the book’s back cover is a picture of an interpretive panel at Runkelstein Castle in Italy that describes a fresco of Tristan and Isolde—whose story Wagner also adapted for an opera. The interpretive panel explains that in the Runkelstein fresco, the story of Tristan and Isolde doesn’t take place in “singular scenes,” but is “continuously represented and arranged by architectural elements and different landscapes.”
This book consists of landscape and still life photographs, details from the Runkelstein Castle Tristan room, and frozen frames from opera video recordings, which have been captured to emphasize their digital reproduction, with pixelization and, in one case, a video player’s control bar overlaying the image. In combining these sources, Da scheiinest du, o liebblichster der Sterne infuses each page with operatic drama and weight.
