Tristan und Isolde - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Tristan und Isolde

musical direction
Philippe Jordan
Staging
Calixto Bieito
stage
Rebecca Ringst
Costumes
Ingo Krügler
light
Michael Bauer

Tristan, the adopted son of King Mark of England, is at the helm of a ship. Tristan brings Isolde, the king's daughter of the conquered Irish, to England. There he will marry her off to the widowed brand in order to strengthen the alliance of the two peoples - and his own position of power. He stays away from Isolde on board. Instead of treating her with due respect, he has her mocked in a mocking song to which the entire team joins. Isolde reveals the background to her confidante Brangäne: During the war, Tristan Isolde's fiancé had killed Morold. But he had suffered a poisoned wound from the duel. The ailing Tristan let himself be released in a boat off the coast of Ireland to go to Isolde's care as a minstrel "Tantris", because he could only hope for recovery from her healing skills. Isolde recognized in him the murderer of her fiancé and was nevertheless unable to take revenge when the sick person looked into her eyes. The "Tantris", released cured, returned under his real name as the courtier of King Markes. The defeated Irish had no choice but to accept this proposal. When Brangäne refers to the magic potion that she has smuggled on board with the help of which everything might turn out fine, the deeply humiliated Isolde decides to poison Tristan and herself. But instead of the poison, Brangäne will hand the two mortal enemies a love potion that condemns them to the bliss and torment of insatiable longing.

With this opera Richard Wagner created the key work of musical romanticism, as conjured up by ETA Hoffmann: »Glowing rays shoot through this realm in the deep night, and we become aware of giant shadows that rise and fall, enclose us more closely and destroy us but not the pain of infinite longing «. At the same time, Wagner opened the door to musical modernity, because the independence of the chromatic and the emancipation of the dissonance denied the harmonic tension - symbolic of the erotic tension - the dissolution. This is only achieved in the death of love, in which the dying Isolde hallucinates the resurrection of the dead Tristan. Calixto Bieito, one of the formative music theater directors of the last decades, is dealing with this work for the first time. His works always thematize the creature, decayed corporeality of its actors. It should be exciting to experience this in battle with Wagner's Tristan theorem.

The new production of Tristan und Isolde is funded by: Gerstner, Catering & Events
Subject to changes.

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