The film combines three short stories: Der Mond, "Tristan und Isolde" and "Aida". The themes of these short stories are sin, duty and love.

Belgian opera film of Wagner's opera.

RICHARD WAGNER - Tristan und Isolde - Bayreuther Festspiele Stephen Gould, Evelyn Herlitzius, Georg Zeppenfeld, Iain Paterson, Christa Mayer Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Christian Thielemann Staged by Katharina Wagner

Inspired by Wagner’s own tortured affair with the wife of his patron, this searing masterwork is based on Arthurian legend and tells of an illicit romance between a Breton nobleman and the Irish princess betrothed to his uncle and king. The composer’s larger-than-life sensibilities are on full display throughout the score: Along with intoxicating orchestral music that surges in tandem with the couple’s burgeoning passion and a chord left symbolically unresolved until the last moments of the opera, the opera also features one of the repertory’s most soaring and ecstatic final climaxes, as Isolde surrenders to a love so powerful that she transcends life itself.

Since the 1990s, Christoph Marthaler and his congenial stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock have caused a sensation with highly musical and atmospheric productions of plays and operas. It was only a matter of time, then, before this directing team was also invited to the Bayreuth Festival. Marthaler's style of radical deceleration proved ideally suited to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in this production – with Viebrock's sober yet poetic sets – unveiled in 2005. In the 2009 revival documented here, Robert Dean Smith and Iréne Theorin were joined in the title roles by Robert Holl, one of the great basses of his generation, who sang the role of King Marke.

The Bayreuth Festival Opera House mounted this production of Richard Wagner's 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde as part of the Bayreuther Festspiele. Staged by Heiner Müller, it stars Siegfried Jerusalem, Waltraud Meier, Poul Elming and Uta Priew, and features musical accompaniment by The Orchestra and Chorus of the Bayreuther Festspiele.

Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers star in this filmed record of the Theatre Antique d'Orange's acclaimed 1973 production of Wagner's epic tale of doomed love in the Middle Ages. Tristan und Isolde also features the Orchestre National de R.T.F., under the direction of Karl Bohm.

Through the power of a love potion, Tristan and Isolde have fatefully fallen for each other, but Princess Isolde is promised to Marke, the king and Tristan's liege lord. The lovers live their connection in secret, which inevitably has to be discovered and leads to catastrophe. The visually stunning production by Marco Arturo Marelli prepares the ground for the secret of this love in space and color, captured in Richard Wagner's opera, which premiered in 1865, in which the music becomes almost the sole carrier of the plot.

In the vision of Philippe Grandrieux, the director of Tristan und Isolde, the latter is the driving force behind the passionate drama of Tristan and herself. She is an erotomaniac who wants to possess and swallow him whole. Philippe Grandrieux's direction focuses on Isolde's desire and not the desire of both of them (as classical literature usually reads Wagner's opera).

Christian Thielemann conducts the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra in this production of Wagner's opera recorded in 2015. Starring Stephen Gould as Tristan and Evelyn Herlitzius as Isolde, the cast also includes Georg Zeppenfeld, Iain Paterson, Raimund Nolte and Christa Mayer.