Mezzo-soprano Hermine May and pianist Manuel Lange invite you into Wagner’s world of Tristan und Isolde where insatiable yearnings are awakened, passions heightened and where the fervent desire to transcend reality finds supreme love beyond death in Liebestod.

The Wesendonck Lieder build a musical bridge to the opera, with Im Treibhaus and Träume described by Wagner himself as "studies for Tristan". Isoldes Liebestod is an emotionally charged, virtuosic piano version, arranged by Wagner’s friend and father-in-law Franz Liszt, which is combined here with Wagner’s original vocal part for Isolde.

Henri Duparc’s chansons in L’amour et la mort narrate the stages of Tristan’s love from dreamy longing, through forbidden lustful fulfilment, to Isolde’s fatal ecstasy in an impressionistic tonal language that repeatedly revolves around Tristan motifs and variations of its famous chord.

Hardly any other French composer was as greatly influenced by the Bayreuth master as Duparc. The rampant wagnérisme in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century had enraptured him, especially the love-death mysticism of Tristan and Isolde. His famous mélodies, even though only 17 of his songs have survived, are such jewels of musical prosody that Duparc became known as one of the most important French song composers.