Tristan und Isolde (complete opera, concert performance)

Program notes

About the Work

Tristan und Isolde is one of the most influential and overwhelming works in all of music: the opera with which Wagner pushed harmony to the brink of dissolution and changed the course of Western music. He composed it between 1857 and 1859, interrupting work on his great Ring cycle, while immersed in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and consumed by his passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a patron. Out of that crucible came a work that is less a conventional opera than a vast, four-hour meditation on love, longing and death, on the idea that the union the lovers crave is impossible in the daylight world and can only be consummated in night, oblivion and death.

Musically, it begins with the most famous chord in history. The very first bars sound the ‘Tristan chord’, a dissonance that yearns to resolve but refuses to, launching a flood of chromatic harmony that hangs suspended, unresolved, across the entire opera until the final moments. This ‘unending melody,’ this deferral of resolution, is the sound of desire itself, and its influence on later composers (Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg and the whole of modern music) was incalculable. The opera was so demanding that it was at first declared unperformable; it finally reached the stage in Munich in 1865 under Hans von Bülow (whose own wife, Cosima, was by then Wagner’s lover: life imitating art).

The story is simple: the knight Tristan escorts the Irish princess Isolde to marry his uncle, King Marke; the two unwittingly drink a love potion and are consumed by an irresistible passion; their secret love is betrayed and discovered; Tristan is mortally wounded and dies in delirium as Isolde rushes to him; and Isolde, in the closing ‘Liebestod’ (Love-Death), sings herself into a final transfiguration, dying to join him. Tonight Sir Antonio Pappano, one of the great opera conductors of our time, leads the London Symphony Orchestra and a stellar cast in a complete concert performance.

What to Listen For

Listen, at the very start, for the Prelude and its famous unresolved chord, the seed of everything that follows, establishing the mood of aching, unfulfilled longing that the whole opera sustains. Throughout, notice how Wagner’s orchestra is not mere accompaniment but the true voice of the drama, carrying the surging, endlessly modulating harmony that mirrors the lovers’ desire.

Act I (aboard the ship to Cornwall) builds from Isolde’s furious humiliation to the shattering moment when she and Tristan drink the potion. Listen for the orchestra erupting as the music of death turns suddenly into the music of overwhelming love. Act II is the great central love scene: a long nocturnal duet (‘O sink hernieder,’ the hymn to night), interrupted by the hunting horns of the returning king and the lovers’ discovery. Listen for King Marke’s long, grief-stricken monologue, music of profound human sorrow. Act III finds the wounded Tristan in delirium, his feverish visions among the opera’s most extraordinary music, before Isolde arrives too late. Then comes the Liebestod: listen for the way the great surging theme from the Act II duet returns and finally, after four hours of yearning, achieves its resolution, the lovers united in death as the music at last comes home to rest. It is one of the supreme moments in all of opera.

In a concert performance like this, with surtitles, the orchestra is fully visible and central, a chance to hear, in the playing of a great symphony orchestra under a master conductor, the full glory of Wagner’s revolutionary score.