This new season opens with one of the grand monuments of Richard Wagner’s oeuvre and one of the greatest love stories of all time: Tristan & Isolde. The genesis of Tristan seems undeniably linked to the private life of its author. Wagner began composing it in Zurich in 1857, while he was staying at the property of his patron, the wealthy banker Otto Wesendonck, and succumbing to the charm of the beautiful Mathilde… who was none other than his host’s wife. Eight years later, he entrusted Tristan‘s premiere to conductor Hans von Bülow, whose wife Cosima had just given birth to a little… Isolde, Richard’s daughter. Wagner sublimates his forbidden loves through the Celtic legend of Tristan and Yseult, which medieval literature elevated to myth status. The score brings the passion between the melancholy knight and the indomitable princess to the point of incandescence, using unresolved chromaticism as a philtre of unfulfilled desire. The ‘infinite melody’ spreading from the voice to the orchestra leads the work almost hypnotically to its final climax: Isolde’s Liebestod, the ultimate sacrifice of love.