[Wilhelm] Richard Wagner was born May 22, 1813 and died in Venice, February 13, 1883. His opera Tristan und Isolde received its first performance took place June 10, 1865 at the Imperial and Royal National Theater in Munich conducted by Hans von Bülow. Both Wagner and Bülow created concert endings for the opera’s Prelude. The idea of joining the Prelude with Isolde’s Transfiguration to form a concert piece was Wagner’s own idea. Franz Liszt’s transcription misnamed the work Prelude and Liebestod, the title by which the orchestral original version is still largely known.
Wagner’s epic opera, Tristan und Isolde, composed between the 1854 and 1859 and receiving its first performance in Munich in 1865, is one of the pivotal works in the history of music. Many of the reasons for its importance can only be explained using highly technical musical terms. The layman, however, would more profitably spend his or her time by examining the concept of Liebestod, a composite German word that literally means love-death. An understanding of this word can give one entry into the musical means used by Wagner to tell the opera’s powerfully moving story of love, a story based upon a medieval tale as told by Gottfried von Strassburg. In fact, as we shall see, it was one person’s misunderstanding of Liebestod that gave this work the incorrect title by which it is popularly known.
Tristan and Isolde’s love flies in the face of all accepted social conventions. Isolde, an Irish princess, is betrothed to Tristan’s uncle and sovereign, King Mark of Cornwall. As the curtain rises, she is being brought by Tristan to Cornwall against her will. We learn from Isolde’s narrative in Act I about the history of her relationship with Tristan, and of the deep-seated roots of her bitter hatred of him. As the ship nears Cornwall’s shore, Tristan and Isolde resolve to reconcile their conflict by drinking a cup of atonement. Expecting death, the pair instead are seized by overwhelming and involuntary passion (The purported agent is a love potion, substituted for poison by Isolde’s handmaid Brangäne, but this is merely a ruse rendered necessary by the literary sources for the legend). In Act II the lovers meet secretly at night, only to be discovered by Mark and his courtiers. Unable to defend his actions, Tristan is mortally wounded by his rival, Melot. (The love duet that is the centerpiece of the act includes a foreshadowing of Isolde’s Transfiguration from Act III.) Act III takes place in Tristan’s ancestral castle in Kareol. As Tristan lies in a coma, his faithful friend Kurwenal keeps watch for the arrival of Isolde. When she arrives, Tristan dies in her arms, and the opera ends with Isolde’s ecstatic Transfiguration, as she sings blissfully of their imminent union in death.
Liebestod is, as Robert Bailey points out, a “psychological reference point which exists before the action of the opera we witness.” The music associated first with the opera’s Prelude, therefore, is the true representation of Liebestod. Wagner’s name for the music linked to the end of Tristan and Isolde and which is linked in the concert hall with the Prelude is Transfiguration. We have this information from Wagner’s own hand, first evidenced by a letter dated October 5, 1862 that reads as follows:
I’d entitle the whole thing
a) “Liebestod.” Prelude.
b) “Transfiguration.” Conclusion of the opera.
Wagner, desperately in need of money, welcomed opportunities for the public to hear excerpts from his yet uncompleted new opera. Conductors, foremost among them being Hans von Bülow, led performances of the Prelude, but unfortunately they used poorly constructed concert endings (in the context of the opera, the Prelude goes directly into the first act). Wagner was extremely unhappy about these endings, and decided that he needed to rectify the situation himself by writing, in the first place, his own concert ending, and then, as related above, a coupling of the Prelude with the ending of the opera, music which he consistently referred to as Transfiguration. The popularly known title of Prelude and Liebestod, is, therefore, a misnomer. The origin of the mistake lies with none other than Franz Liszt, Wagner’s mentor and father-in-law, who, in his 1867 piano transcription of the Transfiguration, mistakenly called the music Isolde’s Liebes-Tod. Unfortunately, the error was repeated by publishers after Wagner’s death, thus continuing the transmission of the incorrect title up to the present day. Since the publication of Robert Bailey’s critical edition of the score (W.W. Norton, 1985) under Wagner’s intended title, however, it behooves us to restore the work’s proper name: Prelude and Transfiguration.
When Wagner conducted the Tristan excerpts himself in Munich in December of 1864, he provided the following program notes:
Prelude and Transfiguration
Prelude (Liebestod)
As suitor, Tristan transports Isolde to his king and uncle. The two are in love.
From the timidest lament in inappeasable longing, the tenderest shudder, to the
most terrible outpouring of an avowal of hopeless love, the sentiment traverses
all phases of the vain struggle against inner ardor, until this, sinking back
powerless upon itself, seems to be extinguished in death.
Final Section (Transfiguration)
Yet what Fate divided in life now springs into transfigured life in death: the
gates of union are thrown open. Over Tristan’s body the dying Isolde receives
the blessed fulfilment of ardent longing, eternal union in measureless space,
without barriers, without fetters, inseparable!
[from Ernest Newman, The Wagner Operas (New York, 1949)]
This performance by the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will present the Transfiguration as it occurs in the original opera, i.e., with Isolde singing Wagner’s text, rather than the version for orchestra alone one customarily hears in the concert hall.
Program Note by David B. Levy, © 2025