Sensational Swede Nina Stemme will open the Met 2016-17 as Isolde.

She died of love but is alive and kicking, all of 150 years old. No, she’s not the delicate Guatemalan maiden of José Martí’s poem (“The girl from Guatemala, The girl that died of love”) but a northern, and generally speaking more robust relative. She is Tristan’s better half and if there’s chemistry and, above all, powerful voices united by the “sweet little word und,” they could go mad and – worse – drive an audience mad. Tristan is no longer Tristan and Isolde is no longer Isolde. They are each other. They melt in an embrace and conjure up a monster of which Wagner himself was afraid (“Only mediocre performances are safe; a perfect one could lead to madness”). For Bruno Walter the score “had stopped being music” it was much more, a transcendental experience. Ultimately, fans and critics alike saw the lovers’ passion as an addiction to a drug more powerful than opium or alcohol: music. That lethal drug, embodied in a love potion that her nurse Brangäne has poured into the glass with which Isolde tries to poison Tristan, her fiancé’s killer and the nephew of the elderly king to whom she is to be married. Both she and Tristan drink out of the goblet, hate becomes love, and the rest is history.

A century and a half ago – after six years of unsuccessfully rehearsals of “that unplayable music” – the famous Tristan chord was heard on a stage to revolutionized music forever. That apparently harmless initial chord would cause controversy, scandals, hate, shudders and fainting spells. For Leonard Bernstein, it was “the central work of all music history.” It was a G-spot of sorts in a drama often associated with coitus interruptus, one that resolves itself in a final orgasm, a transfiguration called Liebestod (love death). That world of longed-for eternal night, an ambivalent, vague world, was then and forever after called “Tristanesque,” a world of waters of life and death, of poisons and balms that Susan Sontag described so well in Wagner’s Fluids. Water is the essential fluid that changes everything and here reaches its peak in a one-way journey in which the sea is a vehicle and a tacit protagonist. The ebb and flow of the ocean, so ominously described in the prelude, envelops the musical drama to the very last note.

The three acts all begin with each protagonist tormented by desperate anxiety until the other one arrives, at which point they both leave consciousness and enter into another dimension, far from all social conventions and worldly obstacles, in a literal mutual annihilation, soothed by an “uninterrupted melody” (which in 1955 Hollywood transformed into Interrupted Melody, a biopic of Australian diva Marjorie Lawrence, stricken by polio who “arose” at the end while singing the Liebestod). The particular Wagnerian timing – including the unusual length, the fever-pitch emotions, the intimate confession in the midst of an epic tale, the voice emerging viscerally over a 100-piece orchestra – unsettled an audience confronted with something totally new. And the singers, poor things, would embark on an adventure of extreme vocal resistance, so extreme that it is said to have caused the dead of 29-year-old Ludwig Schnorr von Caroslfeld, the first Tristan, a true guinea pig for the brand new Heldentenor Fach. Malvina, his wife, was the first Isolde at the world premiere in Munich on June 10, 1865, with Mad King Ludwig II suffering simultaneously in the royal box. The great Hans von Bulow conducted. Later, his wife, Cosima Liszt, would leave him for Wagner, who at the time combined all versions of the Celtic legend of Tristan et Yseult to present himself as Tristan in his sublimated love for Mathilde (Isolde), the wife of his benefactor, Otto Wesendonck (King Marke), while Minna, his first wife, exited stage left. Wagnerian reality surpassed Wagnerian fiction, epitomized in the five Songs of Mathilde Wesendonck; still the best appetizer for the Tristanesque world.

Eleven years went by before another Tristan climbed the stage, and then the voice- (and life-) crushing machine started up again. Maestros Felix Motti and Joseph Keilberth died after conducting the opera in 1911 and 1968 respectively, both at Munich’s National Theater. Even when they lived, few overcame the challenge of playing the hero, from Jean de Reszke to the “great Dane” Lauritz Melchior, Germans Max Lorenz, Günther Treptow and Wolfgang Windgassen, Chilean Ramón Vinay and Canadian Vickers, a stage animal, wounded and fierce. With varied degrees of success, Siegfried Jerusalem, Rene Kollo, Peter Hofmann and Ben Heppner navigated the role through the late 20th century, while Plácido Domingo, found in the studio recording the courage to fulfill his dream of “rustproof tenor”.

Neither did Isolde escape the grinder. Even if she holds the reins, hates, incites, seduces, surrenders, in the first act alone she sings more than her Italian cousin Aïda in her entire opera. And, of course, exhausted by the end of the third, she dies, though of love. It is a multi-faceted role, vocally impossible for soprano-ish mezzos and vice versa, fraught with daring high notes that prevented a singer like Jessye Norman from taking it on complete (She resorted to singing only the irresistible Liebestod). The same tack was taken by the illustrious Leonie Rysanek, Leontyne Price, Christa Ludwig – who wisely refused Karajan’s request that she sing the complete role – and even the lyric Felicity Lott, who performed a sublime chamber arrangement. They wanted to indulge themselves (and why not?), as did Horowitz with the piano transcription by Liszt, Wagner’s father-in-law. Other mezzos and near-mezzos tackled it, even if they had to screech some notes. The result was extraordinary performances by Martha Mödl and Astrid Varnay at Wieland Wagner’s New Bayreuth in the 1950s, Helga Dernesch with Karajan conducting, and, until recently, the volcanic Waltraud Meier.

Among the more mystical Isoldes of the early 20th century – from Lillian Nordica, Olive Fremstad, Johanna Gadski to Berliner Frida Leider and French Germaine Lubin, who had the misfortune to be Hitler’s favorite Isolde – the best was Kirsten Flagstad. The Norwegian sang at Buenos Aires’ Colón Theater when she was over 50, but she amazed the orchestra, which stopped dead on its tracks as conductor Erich Kleiber said, “Gentlemen, on our feet for the greatest.” Years later, she was asked by Furtwängler to leave testimony of a voice immense like no other, a reverberation in bronze, on a historic complete recording that, in an effort to be perfect, erred by having Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (wife of the producer Walter Legge) sing two high notes of the tremendous first-act narration, as they proved difficult for the veteran goddess.

English and American Isoldes did not lag behind. We had Helen Traubel, Eileen Farrell and Margaret Harshaw. Later came Christine Brewer, Joanna Meier (the first American Isolde in Bayreuth), Jane Eaglen, Deborah Voigt, Gwyneth Jones, Anne Evans, Christine Goerke and many others powerful sopranos. But none surpassed Birgit Nilsson, a very different singer from Flagstad but in the end, her successor. The indescribable Swede, possessor of high notes like laser, sailed through the whole opera cool as a cucumber. Asked the magic recipe for performing so many Isoldes over so many decades, she replied, “A comfortable pair of shoes.”

Isolde inspired the pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley, Egusquiza, Kiefer, Dalí and David Hockney, who designed a multi-colored set, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and later Heiner Müller in Bayreuth, architects Herzog & de Meuron at the Berlin opera, and Bill Viola, in a memorable production. The prelude shaped Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the Liebestod, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’ s Berlin Alexanderplatz and enkindled Margaret Price’s pure Mozartian voice in Carlos Kleiber’s inimitable recording.

The new century’s sensation is again Swedish, and her name is Nina Stemme. She co-starred with Plácido Domingo in the complete opera under Pappano, was a a success at Glyndebourne, London, Houston and Berlin and will open the Met’s 2016-17 season with a new staging by Trelinski. “Mortgage your grandmother and fly to Stockholm to see her,” said one critic in 2006. The fact is Stemme is the real thing. Her voice is immense, dark, velvety and even, and she is an attractive and accomplished actress. She described the role as “a marathon that requires a certain state of being.”

To conclude, more has been written about the moment in which Isolde dies (a true “petite mort”), resolving the musical tension of the entire opera, than about the famous opening chord. The intangible union of the lovers is the triumph of music and also of its silences. It is a musical drama worth experiencing over and over again. It is as addictive as plunging into the sea, as Isolde herself describes as she takes her last breath: “In the surging swell, in the ringing sound, in the vast wave of the world’s breath – to drown, to sink unconscious: supreme bliss!.”  And don’t forget “much better with a comfortable pair of shoes”…

 ESSENTIAL COMPLETE RECORDINGS

* FURTWÄNGLER – FLAGSTAD, SUTHAUS, THEBOM, FISCHER DIESKAU, EMI 1952

* BÖHM – NILSSON, WINDGASSEN, LUDWIG, WÄCHTER, DG BAYREUTH 1966

* C.KLEIBER – M.PRICE, KOLLO, FASSBÄNDER, FISCHER DIESKAU, DG 1982

* BARENBOIM – W.MEIER, JERUSALEM, BAYREUTH DVD MULLER 1990