This volume uses the historic staging and legacy of the 1903 production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, directed and conducted by Gustav Mahler, to explore a wide range of interdisciplinary issues in the history of the opera, performance, and the reception and interpretation of Wagner's work.
The production marked a turning point in twentieth-century opera, as Mahler and the designer Alfred Roller broke with nineteenth-century naturalistic traditions and used new technologies to transform the aural and visual experience of opera. With chapters contributed by scholars from musicology, art history, theatre studies, and other disciplines, this book provides a uniquely multifaceted perspective on Wagner's opera in the historical setting of the early twentieth century. Chapters in the first part address specific aspects of the 1903 production, including staging, lighting, and performance practice, while the second part sets the production in wider political, artistic, and literary context. Together, they show how the visual and musical elements of the staging interacted to express new artistic philosophies. Enriching our understanding of Wagner, stage history, and the cultural ferment emerging from fin-de-siècle Vienna, this book will be of interest to researchers of music, theatre, and performance studies, and art and cultural history.
Foreword
Part I: The Mahler-Roller 1903 Tristan production
1 21 February 1903: Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller stage Tristan und Isolde
at the Vienna Court Opera, 2 'Wie, hör ich das Licht?': Music and Light in
Tristan und Isolde and the Mahler-Roller Production, 3 Electric designs: The
Working Relationship Between Adolphe Appia and Mariano Fortuny, 4 Tristan und
Isolde staged by Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller (1903) at the Vienna Court
Opera with a revival by Wilhelm Furtwängler (1943), 5 Lighting the Way from
Vienna to Bayreuth: Tristan und Isolde, 1903-1962, 6 Anna Bahr-Mildenburg,
The Dark Isolde, 7 Early Recordings as a Window onto Mahler's 1903 Tristan, 8
Mahler Conducting Tristan
Part II: Wagner in Vienna: Literary, Historical, Political, and Artistic
Contexts of Tristan 1903
9 The Way Out? Recalling Vienna's 1903 Tristan, 10 The Darker Side of Vienna
Hitler and the Nationalist Wagnerian Milieu, 11 Wagner and Wagnerism in
fin-de-siècle Vienna: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century (1899), 12 Alfred Roller's Secessionist Tristan and the
birth of 'Affect', 13 Koloman Moser, Wagner, and the Gesamtkunstwerk in the
Viennese Secession
Appendix
Anna Stoll Knecht is Assistant Professor at the University of Fribourg, leading a five-year Starting Grant project on music at the fairground (Swiss National Science Foundation). She is the author of Mahlers Seventh Symphony (OUP 2019) and of several articles and essays on Mahler, Wagner, and physical comedy.
Anastasia Belina is a musicologist, writer, and artist manager based in Sweden. Her publications (as author, editor, and co-editor) include Die tägliche Mühe ein Mensch zu sein (2013), Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (2013), The Business of Opera (Ashgate 2015), Cambridge Companion to Operetta (2019), and Music History and Cosmopolitanism (2019).
