1st Edition

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in 1903 Vienna Context, Impact, and Interpretation

Edited By Anna Stoll Knecht, Anastasia Belina Copyright 2026
304 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

304 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

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

Biography

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 Mahler’s 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).