Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Acts 1 & 2

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The problem with broadcasting the operas of Richard Wagner is that so many of them are too long in duration to fit my three-and-a-half hour timeslot. Although I hate to violate the integrity of a complete recorded performance, the only way I can accommodate Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1865) is to break up my presentation into two parts over two consecutive Sundays. So this Sunday you will hear the first two of the three acts of this monumental music drama.

The story of the illicit love of the warrior Tristan for the princess Isolde is one of the all-time great stories of tragic passion, the tale derived from medieval courtly romance and ultimately from ancient Celtic legend. As with all his other operas, Wagner wrote his own libretto for Tristan und Isolde; his take on the story is underlain with music that expresses uninhibited erotic desire so intense it borders on an ecstasy of pain. The opera climaxes with the mortally wounded Tristan's Liebestod or "love death," which amounts to coitus interruptus. Wagner's nuanced handling of the lovers' emotions makes this opera an enduring, iconic work of musical art.

This work requires singers of enormous stamina and skill to carry it off convincingly. In recorded operatic history there is a cadre of famous sopranos who successfully essayed the role of Isolde. One of them was the Norwegian Kirsten Flagstad. Her legendary voice was captured opposite Heldentenor Ludwig Suthaus as Tristan in a landmark 1952 monaural recording with Wilhelm Fürtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and the chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. I have broadcast the now historic EMI recording on two occasions, way back in 1986 and again in 2017, making use of the old 4 LP Angel/Seraphim boxed set preserved in our WWUH classical record library.

Our station has in recent years acquired the German Pentatone label's series of Wagner's operas recorded in state-of-the-art stereo sound live in radio broadcast from the Philharmonie concert hall in Berlin. In all these recorded interpretations it was Marek Janowski who conducted the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Radio Chorus. Tristan und Isolde was recorded in 2012 with tenor Stephen Gould as Tristan and soprano Nina Stemme as Isolde. The first two acts come on two of three Pentatone compact discs I draw upon for today's broadcast.