Liebestod (Tristan und Isolde)

Wagner broke off the composition of the Ring in 1857 to write Tristan und Isolde, completing the score in Lucerne in 1859. The Vienna Court Opera accepted it, rehearsed it more than seventy times over two years and finally abandoned it as unperformable. It was staged in Munich on 10 June 1865 under Hans von Bülow, whose wife Cosima was by then Wagner's partner; the first Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died a few weeks later. The opening chord, and a harmony that refuses to settle until the last page, altered what nineteenth-century music was thought capable of.