Robert Knox Sneden, a private in the Union Army from 1861 to 1864, created watercolor scenes of dying and lonely prisoners at the infamous Andersonville prison camp in Georgia.
One of the reasons many of us are terrified of death is because we have witnessed frightening scenes of dying in the past through news reports, movies, books, or our own life experiences.
The Deepwater Horizon spill has generated heart-wrenching scenes of dying birds, oil-fouled marshes and barrier islands, and traumatized coastal residents.
The "un-consoled" patients were characterized by a lack of acceptance of death and a failure to actively pursue fulfillment of living in the final scenes of dying.
"After that, the scene kind of died," he said.
Here Schumann depicts the masked ball in the last scene of "Die Flegeljahre" by Jean Paul, the early-19th-century writer he adored.
His staging of the incestuous love scene of Die Walküre, for example, with Peter Hofmann and Jeannine Altmeyer as the stunningly attractive libidinous twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, was sexually charged to a degree not previously experienced on the opera stage.
In the final scene of "Die Walküre," when Brünnhilde pleads with Wotan to forgive her, the machine assumes a kind of craggy, Matterhorn shape and is projected with textures suggesting gray, icy rocks; as Wotan repeatedly rejects his daughter, recurring avalanches cascade silently downward, reiterating the way he steels himself against her.
Her last full performance was as Queen Marguerite de Valois in Les Huguenots at the Sydney Opera in October 1990, though the following New Year's Eve she appeared in a farewell performance at Covent Garden, feted by fellow guests and old friends Luciano Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne in the party scene of Die Fledermaus.
And my overriding memory is still of that horrific scene of people dying.
