Fully staged opera in partnership with CT Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra and Connecticut Lyric Opera.
Tristan und Isoldeis an opera by German composer Richard Wagner who wrote both the music and the libretto words for this “music drama” about sublime love.
First produced at Munich in 1886, it is based on the medieval tale of the same title by Gottfried von Strassburg and is a legend of forbidden love, a romantic tradition of the times. The story is not complicated. Isolde, a princess of Ireland, is on a ship, taking her against her will, to become the bride of King Marke of Cornwall, Britain. Isolde is being guarded by Tristan, King Marke’s nephew, who it turns out, killed her fiancée in a past battle incident. Angrily, she instructs her attendant Brangane to make a death potion for Tristan and herself, but Brangane makes a love potion instead that is unknowingly, but eventually, “lovingly” consumed by them both. Surges of passionate Wagnerian orchestral music accompany the singers’ divine outpouring of their love for each other. In Cornwall, Isolde rejects King Marke, and she eventually accepts Tristan’s pleas to be with him and follow to the “realm of death.”
Wagner did not use the traditional “opera” pattern of the times in Tristan und Isolde. Instead he made a music drama in which the orchestra plays a dominant role, commenting via an elaborate system of leitmotivs or “orchestral comments” and subject “branding.”
(Sung in German with English titles projected above the stage)
(A fully-staged live opera presented by Connecticut Lyric Opera and Connecticut Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra)