Tristan und Isolde (Complete opera)

"With several superb recordings of Wagner's epoch-making masterpiece in the catalogue, it seems presumptuous for Naxos to enter the fray with a second rank company such as the Royal Swedish Opera. Surprisingly, though, this recording can hold its head high in exalted company, and of course, it's at a bargain price.

If you were judging this recording only on the soloists (the excellent German soprano Hedwig Fassbender and the lackluster Wolfgang Millgram) it wouldn't be in the running but what lifts it above average is the wonderful playing of the Swedish Opera Orchestra."
-- Ivan Hewett, The Times, June 4, 2005

In the drama Tristan und Isolde, Wagner transforms an early legend recounted in the work of the medieval poet Gottfried von Strassburg, derived from Le roman de la rose. Wagner's work reflects something of his own life. In Switzerland, where he had settled in 1849, now exiled from Germany, he had met, in 1852, the merchant Otto Wesendonck and the latter's wife, Mathilde. Wesendonck was of material assistance to Wagner, who had often to call on others for financial support, and in 1857 made available to him a house in the grounds of the new Wesendonck villa on the outskirts of Zurich. A relationship had developed between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck, a liaison that Wagner found himself increasingly obliged to explain and justify, particularly when his wife Minna intercepted a letter that her husband was sending to Mathilde, couched in the warmest terms, together with a pencil draft of the Prelude to the new drama. Wagner had already given Mathilde his newly completed poem Tristan und Isolde, received ecstatically. Minna reacted to the letter with anger and confronted Mathilde Wesendonck, whose husband Otto was already aware and patiently tolerant of the liaison between his young wife and a composer whom he greatly admired and continued to support. Minna's action made it impossible, Wagner thought, to remain at the garden house that he had called the Asyl. Minna was despatched to Brestenberg to take a cure, while Wagner left what he had called the Green Hill, moving first, in August 1858, to Venice, continuing work on the music of his new drama, but finding the necessary conditions for the completion of the score in Lucerne the following year. Tristan und Isolde was not performed until 1865 in Munich, where King Ludwig II, the nineteen-year-old King of Bavaria, had tried to install Wagner. In April of the same year, two months before the première, Cosima, the younger daughter of Liszt, and wife of the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who had spent part of their 1857 honeymoon with the Wagners, gave birth to the first of her children by Wagner, Isolde.