Musical Interpretations

Isolde’s final six minutes in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde have been recorded again and again for over a century — but no two performers have ever told it quite the same way. This week, Boneapart and Yulia compare three recordings of the “Liebestod,” Wagner’s famous “love-death,” made 23 years apart: an intimate 1903 reading sung in Italian by Budapest soprano Italia Vasquez, a mature 1914 performance from Amelia Pinto — who was singing the actual staged role at La Scala under Toscanini that same year — and a 1926 orchestral-only recording from the San Francisco Symphony under Alfred Hertz, a conductor once banned for life from Wagner’s own festival at Bayreuth. Same six minutes of music, three completely different ideas about what it needs to say — and one of them doesn’t use a single word.