SOME MONTHS AFTER Brian McMaster made his off er to Goodall, Lord Harewood at last decided that the ENO would also mount a production of Tristan, with Glen Byam Shaw and John Blatchley as joint-producers and a cast headed by Alberto Remedios and Rita Hunter. Goodall agreed to conduct, despite the fact that it was scheduled to open in January 1980, only a month after the last performance of the Welsh production. He now had to coach two casts, and rehearse two orchestras, for an opera he had never conducted before. To complicate matters, Cardiff 's production was to be sung in the original German, the Coliseum's in a new English translation by Andrew Porter. It was a formidable prospect for a man who had already passed his seventy-sixth birthday.

For the Isolde in Wales Goodall chose a soprano who had sung for him at the Coliseum in both The Mastersingers and The Ring, Margaret Curphey. The Tristan was to be John Mitchinson, a tenor with a fine heroic voice who was better known in the concert hall than the opera house; he had worked with Goodall once before, in 1969, when he had sung the part of Siegmund in a BBC broadcast of Act 1 of Die Walküre. Like their London counterparts, both Curphey and Mitchinson were new to their roles.

Goodall set about reading and re-reading all the literature about the opera he could lay his hands on. He analysed the harmonies and, in his own words, “took the score to pieces … I looked at every orchestral line … first clarinet, second clarinet, fourth horn, and played it on the piano quite a lot myself to get the sound of it into shape. Then I started with the singers.” Goodall was not afraid to admit that he found the opera's underlying philosophy hard to understand: