Zürich Opera House

This guide to the Zurich Opera House asks what it costs a composer to write an opera he can never watch, and answers with Richard Wagner's flight into Swiss exile in eighteen forty-nine after joining an uprising in Dresden. It follows Wagner conducting his own music on this ground, then meeting Mathilde Wesendonck at one of those concerts in eighteen fifty-two, a married woman whose husband quietly paid off his debts and gave him a cottage he called his Asyl. You'll hear how that affection fed into the opera that became Tristan and Isolde, and how a letter meant for Mathilde changed everything in 1858. Stand where the old Aktientheater once stood and listen for the name Wagner gave his refuge.