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What happens to Gabriele after she performs music in Thomas Mann’s Tristan?
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Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann.
In the novella Tristan by Thomas Mann, the character Gabriele is a tubercular woman staying at an Alpine sanatorium. Encouraged by the eccentric writer Detlev Spinell to reclaim her suppressed artistic spirit, she performs a selection from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde on the piano. As a direct consequence of the intense emotions reawakened by this performance, Gabriele suffers a relapse of her illness.1