"Refuge on the green hill", Richard Wagner called his temporary home in Switzerland after his flight from Germany, persecuted for his involvement in the Dresden uprising of 1848. In this refuge, a passionate love burned between the romantic Wagner and the poetess Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of his benefactor Otto Wesendonck, who gave him the villa. The state of amorous longing gave birth to Mathilde's poems and to the song cycle of Wagner in love, "Wesendonck Songs". He later said that he had written nothing more wonderful than these songs and that few of his works could compare with them.

This is perhaps the sincerest and most moving revelation, word and music in perfect union as the hearts of lovers have been joined. Mathilde's amorous longing and reverie come alive in her poems: "The Angel", "Be quiet", "In the Greenhouse", "Anguish", "Dreams". Each song is a breath-taking revelation. The Angel's prayer for supreme Dreams in heaven is followed by "Be quiet", the whistling wheel of time, a measure of eternity. "In the Greenhouse" is a romantic metaphor for the dyes of suffering, "Anguish" the grief and pain of realizing that life is only born in death, and at the end "Dreams" is a question without an answer.

This spontaneous outburst of the two lovers, the impossible love and suffering, comes to life in the love poem "Tristan und Isolde", the grandest monument to love.

 "Never in my life have I been truly blessed by love. I must erect a monument to this most beautiful of all my dreams, imbued from beginning to end with love. I heard within me the theme of Tristan und Isolde, a most simple but most full-blooded musical idea," Wagner wrote.

To be blessed by love, is this not a longing, a dream for every man. Isn't that a great challenge for the modern man, bewitched by the technocratic mind.

If the philosopher Descartes once believed that "I think, therefore I am", today "I feel, therefore I exist" is the great challenge. The challenge of feeling, life. For what is love but a state, a feeling of being alive, a feeling of eternity and death as the natural state of the human spirit.

If you want to experience the greatest feeling, the state of being in love, a state in which you lose yourself and forget about the white day and plunge into the magic of the night, of infinity, of that feeling in which I feel I mean I am, listen, experience Wagner's music in the greatest evocation of love in his "Tristan und Isolde". The work of searing love and longing that captured the soul of Wagner in love. The state of love that conquers the soul, the soul that suffers but also triumphs and gives birth to eternity.

"Oh, wait a moment, you are so wonderful!", all this you can experience with the spectacle of the Sofia Opera in "Tristan und Isolde", brought to life for the first time on home stage.

"All is in vain! The heart fades powerlessly to melt in longing," is how Wagner verbally defines the opera's "introduction".

To melt into a state of longing, to awaken in yourself the feeling of love, to experience the magic of love, this can happen if you become empathetic to the experience of "Tristan und Isolde", a spectacle created by the ensemble of the Sofia Opera for the first time on home stage.

Be with us, perhaps you will hear the voice of love awakened in you, experience the magic of love with the most magnificent musical monument to love "Tristan und Isolde" in the month of love and spring.

MAGDALENA MANOLOVA