Some Seductive Evening: Michael Fuller is wowed afresh by the music of ‘Tristan’

Christian Thielemann has written that ‘Tristan remains the peak of operatic art, the opera of operas, the incunabulum, the key work. Tristan is the sum of everything and the exception to it. [...] music that seduces us, leads us astray and makes us deny our limitations’. Hyperbolic as such assertions may sound, Thielemann’s performance of Wagner’s opus metaphysicum in Dresden made a strong case for them.