Summer Season: Sarah Estill & David Cowan

Sarah Estill (soprano) David Cowan (piano)

Wagner - Love and Infatuation

Richard Wagner - Wesendonck Lieder
Richard Wagner - Liebestode (Tristan und Isolde)

Wagner believed he had "not written anything better" than this beautiful cycle of five songs for female voice, born out of the mutual infatuation between Wagner and his poet and muse, Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his patrons. Written at the time he was working on his operatic masterpiece Tristan und Isolde, the songs give a revealing insight into the composer at his most vulnerable and human and they also inspired the powerful intensity of that great romantic opera, which culminates in Isolde's final, dramatic Liebestod or "love-death" scene.