Born on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig; Died on February 13, 1883, in Venice
“Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde
Composed: 1857-59
Estimated length: 8 minutes
First performance: Wagner led a concert version linking the Prelude and Liebestod for the first time in 1862 in Paris. This was three years before the opera’s world premiere in Munich.
First Nashville Symphony performance: November 23, 1948, with William Strickland conducting at War Memorial Auditorium.
Like the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that Missy Mazzoli explores anew, the medieval Celtic story of Tristan and Isolde and their forbidden love is one of the archetypal narratives of Western culture. Richard Wagner similarly probes the connections between sex, love, and death in his treatment of the source material. His opera centers around the doomed love between knight Tristan and Isolde, an Irish princess who had been made a captive bride to his uncle, King Marke.
For Tristan und Isolde, Wagner evolved a radically new musical language to express the torment of their impossible desire. In the process, he changed the course of music history, profoundly influencing countless composers since.
Though he completed the score in 1859 (taking a very long “break” from his work on the still-to-be-completed Ring cycle), Wagner had to wait until 1865 before an actual performance of the complete opera was possible. He meanwhile prepared a concert excerpt in which the Prelude segues directly into the music that Isolde sings in the opera’s final minutes (played without the vocal part).
For this program Lidiya Yankovskaya has opted to present the music from the concluding scene on its own, shorn of the Prelude with which it is usually paired in concert performances. This music is known as Isolde’s Liebestod (“Love-Death”), although Wagner actually applied that term to the Prelude, calling Isolde’s farewell a “transfiguration.” It occurs after Isolde has arrived too late to heal her mortally wounded lover. She retreats from those around her, entering a state of ecstasy as she imagines her transcendent reunion with Tristan in a “vast wave of the world’s breath.”
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Wagner reprises the music from Tristan and Isolde’s expansive love duet in the opera’s second act, which had been interrupted at its climax by the sudden appearance of King Marke’s retinue. Retuned to Isolde’s final vision, the love duet’s frenetic waves of sound become oceanic strains of incandescent serenity. As this subsides, the anguished harmony of the motif of desire from the very opening of the opera at last resolves into what Richard Strauss once described as “the most beautifully orchestrated B major chord in the whole history of music.”
Scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Featured on Wagner & Dvořák — September 28 & 29, 2024
Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Simone Porter, violin
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