"Liebestod" from the opera "Tristan und Isolde"

LOVE DEATH (LIEBESTOD) in the third and final act of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is the culmination of the tragic events in the opera, which the composer created based on the ancient medieval knightly legend of the impossible tragic love between the Cornish prince Tristan and the Irish princess Isolde, wife of his father Mark, poetically rendered by Gottfried von Strassburg in the 12^th century. Inspired by the ideas of the philosopher Schopenhauer about transcendental love, about love after death, the opera also weaves in his own emotional experiences at that time – his unrealized love for the wife of his friend and patron Otto Wesendonck, the remarkable Mathilde, who shared his feelings but remained faithful to her husband. At the same time, Wagner wrote the famous five lyrical romances based on her poems (Wesendonck Lieder), and she herself took an active part in the creation of the opera's libretto, with some of the romances finding their way into the opera score. Wagner completed Tristan und Isolde in 1859, but opera houses refused to perform it for years, rejecting the composer's bold and modern ideas in terms of plot, dramaturgy, and musical language. In 1865, Wagner created the famous symphonic version of the introduction and finale, calling it Prelude und Liebestod (Prelude and Love Death), and with the support of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the opera was staged in Munich, premiering on June 10^th of the same year under the baton of Hans von Bülow. In Tristan und Isolde, Wagner realized his innovative ideas for musical drama as the music of the future, which he wrote about in his essay Opera and Drama in 1851. The action flows uninterrupted from the first bars to the passionate tragic finale of the story, which is filled with romantic suffering and death, through a complex system of leitmotifs – images and symbols. The harmonic language, saturated with chromaticism and unexpected sequences, was unusual for the time. The famous dissonant “Tristan accord”, which sounds in the first bars of the introduction and is repeated many times without tonal resolution, is directed towards Eternity in the tragic finale with Isolde's last aria. For the heroine, death is more of a deliverance, supreme bliss, liberation from worldly norms; in death, she can fulfill her love for Tristan. Embracing him, in her vision Tristan is alive again and she dies over his body. Regarding this scene, Wagner wrote: As the music rises higher and higher and floods on to its magnificent climax, Isolde is swept away on the crest of the song, past the sorrowing onlookers, to join Tristan in the vast wave of the breath of the world…Night and Death and Love are one.