A love story of all time

The tale of Tristan and Iseult has cast a strange spell on audiences for more than a thousand years. Since the earliest written versions – those of Béroul, Thomas of Britain and Gottfried von Strassburg – the narrative has taken on countless forms, and echoes of the story’s essential features can be found throughout the canon of western literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, when fin-de-siècle gloom began to cast its shadow over the age of romanticism, the story of two lovers whose passion rendered them blind to the destruction it caused around them became a blueprint for love as a lofty, unattainable ideal. Frank Martin, when setting the legend to music in the late 1930s, opted to shed some of the nineteenth century baggage and return to something that resembled the original story more closely, in this case a…