Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90

Nobody mastered and shaped the great roles of high drama in the post-war period as effortlessly as Birgit Nilsson - this is her stupendous breakthrough as Isolde at Bayreuth with the musical colleagues she so highly respected. Birgit Nilsson, the young Swedish singer, had, together with Sigurd Bjorling, been recommended by Leo Blech to Winifred Wagner back in 1948 “because her sons felt eager and obliged to establish a new ensemble,” or so Wolfgang Wagner commented in 1994. Nilsson declined an offer to portray Sieglinde in Die Walkure in Bayreuth in 1951 due to an engagement at Glyndebourne. After much negotiation, she was first engaged at the festival in 1953 when she assumed the soprano part in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was this production from 1958, however, that cemented her place in Bayreuth history. Wolfgang Wagner observed in his memoirs: “The way that Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen, in collaboration with Karl Bohm and Wieland Wagner, became the perfect duo in the title of Tristan… had been part of my design several years previously, and so I was delighted to have conferred the ‘minor orders’ on these two great artists.”