Tristan und Isolde discography
This is an audio and video discography of Tristan und Isolde, an opera by Richard Wagner which was first performed on 10 June 1865 in Munich.
Tristan und Isolde
Although "Tristan und Isolde" is now widely performed in major opera houses around the world, critical opinion of the opera was initially unfavourable. The 5 July 1865 edition of the "Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung" reported:
Eduard Hanslick's reaction in 1868 to the prelude to "Tristan" was that it "reminds one of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel." The first performance in London's Drury Lane Theatre drew the following response from "The Era" in 1882:
Mark Twain, on a visit to Germany, heard "Tristan" at Bayreuth and commented: "I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven."