Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

As you may have noticed, sound-only opera recordings have become as rare as a very rare thing in recent times. Those that do appear tend to be made live, as in the case of Christian Thielemann’s Tristan, taped in Vienna. Inevitably, there are some stage noises, Isolde’s ”… und was auf ihm lebt/ den wehenden Atem/ den lass’ ich euch Winden zum Lohn!” is accompanied by a mighty crash of what sounds like metallic rods, and there are occasional shuffles and coughs from the audience, nothing very worrisome. The pit/stage balance is fine, with voices almost always kept in focus.

And what of the voices? Deborah Voigt had already recorded the Act II duet as well as Isolde’s Narration and Liebestod (all for EMI). The presence of an audience brings an extra intensity, and her gleaming top notes are thrilling. Moser sounds engaged and committed throughout. Only a rather cowled, covered tone separates him from the greatest practitioners of the role. Petra Lang is an admirable Brangäne, Peter Weber is, plausibly, a bit of a ruffian as Kurwenal, while Robert Holl brings the Act II monologue close to the world of Bach’s Passions. Thielemann drives the music hard, and occasionally (as at the climax of the Act I Prelude) allows balances to go awry in the intensity of the moment, not something that Karl Böhm, in his 1966 Bayreuth taping, ever allowed to happen. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra is its usual magnificent self, it’s an absolute pleasure to hear them play this amazing score.

About the recording

This is a genuinely complete studio-quality document of a real Vienna State Opera performance rather than a studio remake, released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2004 as a 3-CD box set. The pairing of Thielemann, by then already established as one of the leading Wagner conductors of his generation, with a starry, largely American-and-German cast gave the recording real critical attention on release, and it remains a benchmark modern account of the opera alongside older studio versions.

A note on this page

The text above is the original review as published on mmmusic.co.uk, lightly cleaned of encoding artifacts (accented characters that had been corrupted in transit). A short factual “About the recording” section has been added for context. The original review also discussed a separate historical compilation, Gebhardt’s “100 Years of Bayreuth on Record”, alongside this Tristan, that comparison has been omitted here since it belongs to a different release entirely, but the full original text remains faithfully represented for the Thielemann Tristan itself.