William Christie, a conductor renowned for Baroque performances, thought back to a 2014 phone call from Nikolaus Lehnhoff, a year before the German director’s death.
"'I think a ‘Tristan’ with Christie would be really a great thing,'” Christie recalled Lehnhoff referencing Wagner’s opera. “I said: `That’s a bad joke.′ I said: `I’d be coming into an arena as a puny little boxer who doesn’t know sort of how to sort of box, someone who has no idea what all this is about. I’d be sliced to ribbons.′”
