Tristan - still

The myths that have grown up around the life and music of Richard Wagner are almost as fantastic as the reality. Especially intriguing to me is the so-called Starnberg Quartet – a string quartet Wagner was reputed to have composed as he embarked on his relationship with Cosima von Bülow just months before the first performances of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1865.

Eminent scholars have assured us that this piece was never written and never could have been. But if it is possible for something that never was to have a ghost then the spirit of Wagner’s non-existent string quartet haunts my orchestral work. A single slow movement lasting twenty minutes is built out of a few tiny splinters of ‘echt’ Wagner tweezered out of the love duet from the second act of Tristan und Isolde. There’s no intention of homage to the original. A faint echo of solo strings evokes the quartet which repeatedly melts into a meandering dreamscape of romantic half-memories before a climactic drowning as the still, cold waters of Lake Starnberg flood the life out of Wagner’s patron and obsessive fan, Bavaria’s King Ludwig.

Tristan – still was commissioned by the BBC and was first performed in 2003 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles at the Barbican Hall in London, at a concert that also included Act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I revised the piece in 2024.