Tristan und Isolde
Musical Drama in three acts (1865)
Jon Vickers
Birgit Nilsson
Franz Crass
Norman Mittelmann
Grace Hoffmann
Ricardo Yost
Eugenio Valeri
Renato Sassola
Tulio Gagliardo
Coro y Orquesta Estables del Teatro ColónHorst Stein
Recorded live September 30, 1971
Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, Argentina
3 Cds Memoria Sonora del Teatro Colón no.3
flac, cue, logs and full scans
Vickers chose Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires, the site of his first Otello in 1963, as a less pressured setting than a Tristan under the demanding gaze of Karajan, the perfectionist he so admired. "So that I´d feel more confident with Karajan", he admitted. Birgit Nilsson had first sung isolde at Colon in 1955, in a run interrumped by the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón. The stage and hall are enormous, she recalled, and gestures had to be enlarged. But the acoustics are magnificent, and singing requires no more effort than in a much smaller theater because voices carry with such amazing ease.
The first Tristan finally came on September 25, 1971, with Horst Stein conducting, and with Nilsson, Grace Hoffmann as Brangane, Norman Mittermann as Kurwenal, Franz Crass as King Marke, and Ricardo Yost as Melot. Ernst Poetggen directed. I was repited September 30 and October 3, 6 , 10 and 14. Oscar Figueroa reported: "Those who watched him had the feeling that they were seeing the incarnation of Wagner´s hero, something which has not been felt since the golden days of Max Lorenz and Lauritz Melchior...After many years this opera finally had two stars".
Most who saw any Vickers Tristan performance recalled it as among their most remarkable experiences with opera. It is an other Vickers paradox that he could speak so ill of a character and composer and yet create a blazingly unforgettable portrait with all the resources of his voice and phyisicality. Eliah Moshinsky recalled that Vickers was a sensation in his first London Tristan, in May 1978. Moshinsky, who directed, concurred with the writer Peter Conrad when he say Vickers gave "a sense of a critique of the opera as his was performing it...He somehow delved in it so hard that he was able to extract something sort of subterranean out of it. Now, whenever I´ve done Tristan since with anyone, they can barely sing it, let alone extract anything from it. He was able to phrase it as sort of a dramatic poem of suffering....(that) through suffering you can achieve some kind of trascendance, which was this Wagnerian philosophy".
from Jon Vickers: A Hero's Life by Jeannie Williams