Bernstein called it ‘the central work of all music history’. Wagner’s radical music-drama was deemed unperformable when first written, but time has proved the Vienna Court Opera very wrong. Tom Service selects a few of the highlights available to watch, or listen to, on YouTube.

The Royal Opera House’s 2009 production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – a controversial staging by Christof Loy - returns to Covent Garden tonight. Whether you can get to the Opera House to hear Nina Stemme and Stephen Gould or not, herewith a few opportunities to throw yourself into the supercharged erotic plasma of Wagner’s most radical music-drama, with some of the finest performances in the work’s nearly 150-year history. Although completed in 1859, Tristan und Isolde had to wait until 1865 for its first performance in Munich, having broken the resolve and abilities of Vienna’s Court Opera, who, after two years and 70 rehearsals, cancelled it, because it was “unperformable”.

This is the piece that Leonard Bernstein called “the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel”. And you can see his performance of Wagner’s hymn to love-death - arguably the most sheerly incandescent ever – in admittedly appalling visual quality here. But the power of Bernstein’s music-making, the way he screws every ounce of tension from Wagner’s infinite chromaticisms even in the opera’s prelude, without ever letting his grip on the music’s harmonic line loosen, and his sensational cast in these concert performances with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra cut through the technological crackles and smudges. It’s simply irresistible, and thanks to this recent upload, the highlight of my online Tristan-discoveries.

Bernstein said “I have spent my life trying to solve it. It is incredibly prophetic, full of pre-Freudian insights”. After the performances and recording – each of the three acts was performed separately; the composite CDs of the complete opera were the only complete Wagner music-drama Bernstein ever recorded – he said, “My life is complete, I don’t care what happens after this. It is the finest thing I’ve ever done”. As one composer-conductor’s blazing tribute to another, it’s hard to disagree with him.

And if you’ve the energy, and the psycho-spiritual-sensual stamina after watching all that (I would take a few days to recover, to be honest, if I was you), there are more complete stagings to watch, in better sound and visual quality: Daniel Barenboim has conducted two productions at Bayreuth, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Heiner Müller (the latter is the pick of the musical performances, the former a more conventional production), there’s Peter Konwitschny’s production in Munich, conducted by Zubin Mehta, and in black-and-white, Pierre Boulez’s performance in Japan, when the Bayreuth company went on tour in 1967: which means you can watch a complete production by Wieland Wagner, with a cast featuring arguably one of the greatest trios of singers in the roles of Tristan, Isolde, and King Mark of all time: Wolfgang Windgassen, Birgit Nilsson, and Hans Hotter. (Indeed, it’s Tim Ashley’s pick of the bunch, as he wrote earlier this week.)

There’s even Monserrat Caballé, somewhat less essentially I would humbly venture, in this remarkably be-wigged performance from Madrid.



And if you want to keep your Tristan und Isolde for your ears only, then you can hear some of the most electrifying music-making in operatic history in these performances by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Carlos Kleiber, all of which are frankly revelatory.

The question is what the experience of listening to Tristan und Isolde reveals to you. Roger Scruton has some startling insights in his book Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, but how the piece affects you will ultimately be completely personal. If you can go with the music in its relentless exploration of an interzone between love, death, desire, spiritual torment and metaphysical consolation, it offers a kind of existential confrontation that is among the most intense experiences that any art-work can inspire. (Among contemporary visions of the piece, Bill Viola’s version with Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen comes the closest, in my experience, of realising the work’s mysteries.) What you discover, though, will be something only you can know. But I’ll warn you: be prepared for what you might find there in the aching, unresolved tensions of Wagner’s music-drama, the work without which nothing in music and cultural history was the same again.



In pictures: Tristan und Isolde - 150 years of stagings



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