Richard Wagner: “Tristan und Isolde“, Prelude | Bayerisches Staatsorchester & Vladimir Jurowski

Richard Wagner: “Tristan und Isolde“, Prelude | Bayerisches Staatsorchester & Vladimir Jurowski | George Enescu Festival | | Bucharest Palace Hall Recorded from public broadcast. Enjoy! Please subscribe for more content like this! Cheers! _____________________________________________________ Tristan und Isolde digs deep back into the Middle Ages, which was an ongoing Wagnerian fascination. In this tale, much retold through the ages, Tristan is dispatched from Cornwall to Ireland to fetch Isolde, who is to become the bride of his uncle the king. Tristan and Isolde fall in love and get “carnally involved” during the journey, encouraged by a potion prepared by Isolde’s maid. They are discovered and Tristan is attacked by one of the king’s soldiers. He dies with Isolde at his side, after which she, too, expires in an ecstatic combination of love and grief. The first and last passages of the opera, fused into a single span, have become famous as the Prelude and Liebestod (Love-Death), sometimes with a soprano singing Isolde’s final scene, sometimes in a purely orchestral transcription. Notwithstanding Wagner’s conception of his operas as organic entities, he was not averse to extracting sections of them to present apart from their dramatic context. He conducted orchestral extracts from his operas as standalone concert works on numerous occasions, as did quite a few other conductors. He allowed Hans von Bülow to lead the Tristan Prelude in Prague in March 1859, more than six years before the opera was ever staged. Bülow devised a concert ending for that occasion, and Wagner so disliked it that he wrote one of his own that December, cobbling on bits from the opera’s second and third acts. In 1863, he created a combination of the Prelude and the end of the opera (stripped of Isolde’s vocal line), for a concert he led in Saint Petersburg. That arrangement is nearly always identified as the Prelude and Liebestod, but Wagner referred to this concert pairing as Liebestod und Verklärung (Love-Death and Transfiguration), the idea being that the Prelude (Wagner’s Liebestod) set the scene for the story of intertwined love and death, and that the Transfiguration was the spiritual resolution of that drama. ()