★★★☆☆
Early 20th-century composers fled from Wagner’s monstrous shadow in many different ways, but no reaction was more symbolic than Frank Martin’s when he composed his 1940 piece, Le Vin herbé. Martin, a French-speaking Swiss composer, must have been making a considerable political statement simply by writing a new, French-language setting of the Tristan and Isolde story at a time when Wagner’s operas were being appropriated and warped by the Nazis, and the Nazis themselves were invading France.
And in every way Martin’s version is chalk to Wagner’s cheese. Whereas Wagner focused on the fatal eroticism at the heart of the story, Martin based his work on a French novel that weaved together several medieval Tristan legends. Wagner stretched the love-triangle tragedy out to