Visual tricks

Any seasoned opera-goer is likely to have had the experience of attending a performance where most things are right, but the overall impression is dismal; and also where, even more puzzlingly, most things are wrong but somehow the total effect is good or even overwhelming. To some extent it is relative to the work being performed, but not entirely; and to a much greater extent it depends on what your expectations are — I always try to have low ones, but expectations aren’t voluntary, alas.

Last Sunday’s performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Festival Hall was, emphatically, the second kind of occasion. It’s not hard to list what was wrong with it, and that will sound damning. But it was nonetheless a shattering experience for me and I think for many of the audience who found as much to be annoyed by as I did. Tristan is likely to be shattering, of course, the power of Wagner’s genius triumphing over the inadequacy or perversity of interpreters; yet the last two productions at the Royal Opera have shown how decisively it can be undermined by presumption from the director and inadequacies in casting and/or conducting.

This semi-staged affair at the Festival Hall has been doing the European rounds for the past five years, and concluded here. The main novelty was a continuous visual commentary, sometimes mobile, sometimes static, projected on a large screen behind the orchestra. The visual artist was Bill Viola, the ‘artistic collaborator’ Peter Sellars. That sounds like trouble, and it was. The images ranged from the fatuous to the gross. The first was of waves, obvious enough if hardly required: Wagner’s music is powerfully suggestive.

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