Prelude and Liebestod from ‘Tristan und Isolde’

Program notes

About the Work

Few works changed music as profoundly as Tristan und Isolde. Wagner’s opera of 1865, the story of two lovers bound by a magic potion to a passion that can only be consummated in death, pushed harmony to the very edge of tonality and, in doing so, helped open the door to the music of the next hundred years. Its very first bars announce the revolution: the famous ‘Tristan chord,’ a dissonance that aches to resolve but does not, setting up a state of yearning that the music sustains, almost unbearably, across the whole four-hour opera, and only fully releases at the very end.

The Prelude and Liebestod is Wagner’s own concert distillation of that vast arc, brilliantly pairing the opera’s beginning and ending into a single span of about eighteen minutes. The Prelude (which opens the opera) is all rising desire: surging, swelling phrases that climb and fall back, never quite arriving. The ‘Liebestod’ (‘Love-Death’) is Isolde’s final scene, sung over the body of the dead Tristan as she is transfigured by love and, in ecstasy, joins him in death. Wagner arranged the two together so that the longing of the Prelude finds, at last, its overwhelming consummation and release in the Liebestod’s final, radiant resolution. It is one of the supreme expressions of Romantic yearning ever composed.

What to Listen For

Listen, right at the start, for the Tristan chord, the very first sustained harmony, which seems to lean forward, asking to resolve, and then slips instead into another unresolved chord. This refusal to settle is the engine of the whole piece. The Prelude builds in great waves of rising, surging melody, each climbing higher and pulling back, generating an almost physical sense of longing and frustration that mounts to a shattering climax before subsiding.

Then, without the opera’s intervening hours, Wagner gives us the Liebestod. Listen for how Isolde’s transfiguration theme rises, gradually and inexorably, through the orchestra: the same kind of surging phrases as the Prelude, but now flooding toward fulfilment rather than frustration. The music swells to an overwhelming peak and then, finally, melts into a long, glowing resolution, the harmonic release withheld since the opera’s first bar. After so much yearning, the effect of that final, peaceful chord is profound: desire consummated, at last, in death and transcendence.