Throughout my life I have been blessed with good health. In the Fleet Air Arm days I had never missed a flight, nor in the Decca days a sesion, through illness. I can function with surprisingly little sleep, althought getting out of bed has always seemed to be one of life's minor miseries. [...] But the strains of Tristan day after day began to take their toll. I became emotionally and physically exhausted, but managed for a while at any rate to keep up the pretence that all was well. One particular disadvantage was that I had never fainted, or even felt dizzy, so I had no idea what those experiences might be like; but on September 28th I did not think I would get through the penultimate session of Tristan. That nobody else seemed to notice was a help, for I think I would have folded up at the first sign of concern. When the session was through I asked Gordon to find me a doctor, but only on certain conditions. I did not need a doctor to tell me that I needed or should take a rest immediately; and I did not want a sermon about 'over-doing' things. What I wanted was a shot to give me a night's sleep, and another to get me through the next day; beyond that, I didn't give a damn. The doctor sent round some kind of sleeping pill for that evening, and appeared the next morning with the largest hypodermic syringe I have ever seen. He said that it contained his 'cocktail', which he would administer twice: once then, and again just before the final session. To this day I have no idea what was in it, but it worked. Tristan was finished, and the artists were in the mood for a party, which, after such intensive work, was more than understandable: it was essential. But I took to my bed at once, and stayed there for over two weeks. Yet even there I could not escape from Tristan, for the crew had to vacate the recording rooms downstairs because of some political convention in the hall itself, which meant that the editing equipment was moved into the flat. I lay in bed for hours on end while Erik went over the tapes in detail, time and time again. Yet at no time did I feel like crying out 'Enough!' Whatever kind of exhaustion had been brought on by so much exposure to Tristan was, in a strange way, also being healed by the same music.
John Culshaw on the recording of Tristan und Isolde in 1960 in Putting the Record Straight: The Autobiography of John Culshaw (1982)
