Great opera - shame about the view
Liz Anderson 10:25am
Glyndebourne on Saturday to see Tristan und Isolde. Michael Tanner has reviewed the opera (15 August) from the stalls, but if you were sitting in the circle on the left side (as I was) some of the singers were invisible for a lot of the time. So it was an enforced case of don’t worry what’s happening on stage just sit back and enjoy the music…which I certainly did: it was ravishing. But I do think that directors, designers etc should be aware that concentrating the action on one side of the stage — in this case on the extreme left — does mean that a good percentage of the audience in the cheaper seats can’t see the singers and has to guess what’s happening.
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Andy Carpark
August 24th, 2009 12:21pm Report this commentSorry you got stuck behind a pillar but into each life some rain, etc.
I am more of a Val Doonican man, m'self but I'll have a go. Up to and including Brangaene's warning from the tower, Tristan is in a class of its own but after that I struggle: I feel like I am being force-fed through a funnel like that theatre critic in Theatre of Blood.
Act III ⦠the shepherd's pipes get on my nerves and all that heat and gangrene stuff needs editing. The Liebestod? OK, the Fürtwängler/Flagstadt version (she aged 57) is something miraculous but anything less threatens to be dreary. And, as Michael Tanner has pointed out more than once, the idea doesn't quite cohere.
It's not the only time RW tried to align an ending to concord with Schopenhauer's philosophy (he re-wrote BrĂĽnnhilde's immolation to the same end when he should have left it alone) and as the harmony finally resolves one is left wondering whether this particular route to nocturnal oblivion is anything close to what Schopenhauer had in mind.
David Duff
August 24th, 2009 1:41pm Report this commentExactly the same sort of thing happened to me when I went to see "Arcadia" at the Duke of York's. Don't directors ever move about the theatre in order to check sight lines anymore?
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