It’s Sunday morning and I’m reflecting on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
This afternoon I’m going to see the ENO production conducted by Edward Gardner, with Stuart Skelton as Tristan and Heidi Melton as Isolde. This sounds extremely promising but what may be problematic are the ideas of director Daniel Kramer and designer Anish Kapoor. Usually a young director can make a complete cock-up of what should be a sure-fire winner.
I think this will be the fifth production of Tristan that I have seen and two were especially good. An unlikely winner was at Grange Park in 2014. The night I went Isolde was not well enough to sing and GPO not rich enough to have a cover for such a demanding role. Disaster turned to triumph. Tristan’s real-life wife was in the audience and sang Isolde’s role standing at the edge of the stage while the indisposed Isolde acted out her part silently. We were extremely fortunate that Richard Berkeley-Steele is married to Susan Bullock, a world-class soprano with an extensive Wagner repertoire. The conductor, Stephen Barlow, also had his wife in the audience but fortunately did not ask her to sing. She is Joanna Lumley.
Many years earlier I went to Paris for a production that The New York Times described rather well.
Huge, dense, taxing, with almost all the action taking place in the heart, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is notoriously difficult to stage. Indeed, the composer himself abandoned his first attempt in Vienna in the early 1860’s after no fewer than 77 rehearsals. Now, in a daring experiment, the Paris National Opera has invited the American video artist Bill Viola to accompany the work with his own visual commentary.
On a 30-foot-wide screen above and behind the somberly lighted space peopled by the singers, images that recall some of Mr. Viola’s well-known video pieces variously offer literal, metaphorical and even spiritual complements to one of mythology’s most famous and tragic love stories. With only the preludes played to a closed curtain, Mr. Viola’s multi-toned video poem runs for some 3 hours 40 minutes, a full-length spectacle in its own right.
The production, first performed in a concert version at Disney Hall in Los Angeles in December, is directed by Peter Sellars, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Paris Opera Orchestra.
Its seven performances at the Bastille Opera through May 4 are to be followed by seven more in November, with Valery Gergiev at the podium. It is to return in concert version to Disney Hall in March 2007 and to be staged in New York in April 2007.
Central to this production are the German mezzo Waltraud Meier as Isolde and the Canadian tenor Ben Heppner as Tristan, both given a rousing reception after Tuesday’s opening night. In the view of French music critics, the Swiss mezzo Yvonne Naef as Brangäne, the Finnish baritone Jukka Rasilainen as Kurwenal and the German bass Franz-Josef Selig as King Marke also contributed to the high quality of singing.
But the true novelty lay in Mr. Viola’s videos, which the artist said in an interview were inspired more by the text than the music. “I listened to it, various versions, for a month and I was stunned, I couldn’t see anything,” he said. So, no less than Wagner, he started with the myth, the story, the text. “The images tell the inner story in a similar way the music tells the inner story of the emotional and, I would say, spiritual life of these people.”
As a result, Mr. Viola shot most of the images before turning back to the music. “I realized the music is not useful to me while I’m shooting,” he explained. “The music becomes absolutely necessary in the editing process. So music became for me the last stage. It was then that I tried to fit the images onto this pre-existing landscape that Mr. Wagner has beautifully provided us.”
As such, the images echo rather than illustrate the story, with many sequences slowed to harmonize with the protracted development of the plot. For instance, it takes most of Act I, as well as a magic potion, for Tristan and Isolde to recognize they love each other. They enjoy their love in Act II, but it ends with Tristan stabbed by a follower of Isolde’s new husband, King Marke. And Act III is devoted to Tristan’s extended death and Isolde’s decision to join him.
I found the video sometimes worked well with the music, heightening its emotional intensity, and at other times was either distracting or baffling. The great achievement of this unusual production was that the singers were freed of any need to act and in effect stood at the front of the stage giving a concert performance. Their performance was outstanding.
Here is a taste of what I will see this afternoon. I fear the worst.
I had the mixed pleasure of going to T&I last week so I am on tenterhooks to read the review of the great cognoscenti. My own take was that it was musically right up there. T&I were in perfect balance in sound and sight, unlike the matching I saw in the dim and distant of Rita Hunter and a weedy Norwegian. The set worked well with the cave in act 2 particularly effective. But oh my goodness the direction and the costumes were appalling. You will describe the horror better than I but it is in the genre of “the music is so boring we must entertain the crowd during the long bits”. You will recall Dario Fo’s attempt at Pessaro as being a superb example. The really worrying thing is that since being commissioned to do T&I, Daniel Kramer has been made artistic director of ENO so we can expect more of this barbarianism until they have to close the doors.
I agree with your assessment and it was good to see Ed G back in the pit. Act I was so amazingly awful that the rest of the opera came as a welcome surprise. How anybody can design a set that hides the singers from members of the audience who aren’t sitting centrally beats me. Dressing up T&I’s attendants in costumes straight out of panto was ludicrous. Then when I thought it couldn’t get any more absurd the King’s courtiers arrived dressed up like troopers from a Star Wars film.
I think that complaining about productions is for me part of the pleasure of going to the opera so I thoroughly enjoyed myself, not least because of Wanda’s good company – and wine.