Tristan and Isolde (libretto)

About

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1865) is one of the supreme works of the Romantic period — an opera that pushed harmonic language to the verge of atonality and transformed the concept of operatic drama. The libretto follows the medieval legend of the love potion that binds Tristan and Isolde in a passion consummated only in death: the Liebestod ('love-death') that closes the work is one of Western music's most famous passages. As a reading text the libretto reveals Wagner's literary ambitions — his prose is dense, alliterative, and deliberately archaic — and his conception of drama as an art form that transcends the boundary between theater and music.