Insights on Tristan und Isolde

Anthony Negus is one of the leading Wagnerian conductors of our day, the Music Director of Longborough Festival Opera (LFO) where in 2024 he conducted three enthusiastically received cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen and Die Walküre (all directed by Amy Lane). The Ring was the culmination of a five-year project. With LFO, he has established himself as one of the most perceptive and original conductors of the Wagner repertoire, giving acclaimed performances of the 2013 full Ring Cycle (directed by Alan Privett), the culmination of a 5year project), Tannhäuser (also directed by Privett), Tristan und Isolde (directed by Carmen Jakobi) and Der fliegende Holländer; Die Zauberflöte, Ariadne auf Naxos. The 2017 revival of Tristan und Isolde met with especial critical and audience acclaim. The London Wagner Society awarded Anthony Negus the Goodall Award for ‘his devotion to the works of Richard Wagner’. Read more >

Carmen Jakobi is an opera and theatre director, previously for Longborough Festival Opera: Die tote Stadt 2022, Tristan und Isolde 2015 and 2017, conductor Anthony Negus. 

Productions include: Farinelli and the King by Claire van Kampen (SouthWest Shakespeare Arizona); Il Trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, Don Giovanni (Winslow Hall Opera); John Harbison’s Full Moon in March; the world premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s Dream Hunter in Wales and London, conductor Odaline de la Martinez; Tristan und Isolde semi-staged for Stavanger European City of Culture; Nicola LeFanu’s Dawnpath, Cardiff; for RWCMD: Dimitris Maramis’s The Women of Troy – a chamber opera, Baroque opera projects, Shakespeare projects; for Birmingham Conservatoire Orfeo. Read more >

Catharine Woodward is a British dramatic soprano resident in Germany. In early 2025 she completed her first two full Ring Cycles as Brünnhilde for Regents Opera in London to great acclaim. This Summer she returns to the Bayreuther Festspiele as Gerhilde Die Walküre. 

Since moving into the dramatic repertoire she has been twice in the live finals of the Lauritz Melchior (Wagner) Competition in Denmark, and has been selected as one of the top singers in NYIOPs ANON:DE audition project. Her first Wagner role was Eva Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2019. In February 2022 she made her debut as Leonora di Vargas La Forza Del Destino for Regent’s Opera in London. On the concert stage she has sung Isolde Tristan und Isolde Act 2 at the Tonhall Zürich and Kundry Parsifal Act 2 in London for New Palace Opera. Read more >

John Deathridge is a musician and writer living in Cambridge, where for some years he was a Fellow of King’s College and Lecturer and Reader in Music at the University. In 1996 he was appointed King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College London when he began to pursue his teaching of music in wider technical and cultural contexts. He is best known as a Wagner scholar and former broadcaster.

Among other outlets and programmes abroad, he contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library and three television series (The Great Composers, The Genius of Beethoven, Symphony). Among his many scholarly contributions and collaborations is a new Urtext edition of Wagner’s Lohengrin with Klaus Döge casting new light on that still underrated opera. In 2008 his book Wagner Beyond Good and Evil appeared with California Press arguing for a more open and critically informed engagement with Wagner. And in the same spirit he published a new edition and translation of the text of The Ring of the Nibelung with Penguin Classics in 2018. He is currently working on a revisionist appraisal of Beethoven and German music in terms of both historical documentation and contemporary cultural and performance practice.