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Love and Death – on Stage and Page

Tristran and Isolde is the first of the tragic romances reviewed this week

It's all about love and death in any language: Richard Wagner's Tristran and Isolde in a new English National Opera production sung in English by Andrew Porter and Linda Esther Gray, and a new recording featuring the soprano singing the part in German with the Welsh National Opera. American novelist Helen Yglesias talks about the true story that inspired her new book, Sweetsir, about a domestic murder in New England. The Mayor of Zalamea, the 17th-century Spanish classic by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, directed by Michael Bogdanov at the National Theatre, London.

Presenter: Michael Billington.

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29 minutes

91Èȱ¬ World Service Archive

This programme was restored as part of the World Service archive project