Love songs

I thought I had cracked it: why was Wagner's Leibestod from "Tristan and Isolde" on a higher plane than Puccini's "One Fine Day" from "Madam Butterfly"? Well, let's go one step further down the love song path, down to pop music and to Jennifer Rush singing "The Power of Love". Here we have lust posing as love: " 'Cos I'm your lady and you are my man, whenever you reach for me I'll do all that I can...." A bit on the lusty side I would have thought. Up to Puccini and here we have a woman singing about the return of her lover and husband (except that he isn't - well she thinks he is but he doesn't.... never mind); she doesn't sing of "bodies" in contact as Rush does but of lover's kisses and yearning for his return etc. But there is a good deal of sentimentality here, not just in the words but in the music too, underlining the passion. So now we reach the highest point of passionate human love with Isolde's aria in "Tristan and Isolde" - the wonderful Leibestod, surely an expression not so much of animal passion but of a higher form of spiritual love.....
Not from the accounts of how it was received when it was first performed. From a critic in 1965: "Not to mince words, it is the glorification of sensuous pleasure.... an act of indecency." Later from another critic: "the worship of animal passion"...." the passion is unholy in itself and its representation is impure." And from Clara Schumann no less: "the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in my life."
So there you have it: here's me thinking that Wagner was presenting human passion as a spiritual passion and really he was down there with Jennifer Rush and Madam Butterfly. My mistake was thinking that Wagner's music conveyed something of a grander passion - I was seduced by the music - and this probably was as a result of my not understanding the German language.