Tristan und Isolde
Royal Opera House
Tristan und Isolde is a masterpiece that can be given widely different interpretations, since even by Wagner’s standards it is permeated by ambiguities. He may have intended, as he wrote in that famous letter to Liszt, to write ‘a monument to that most beautiful of dreams’, that is, completely fulfilled love, but is that what he achieved? Whatever the answer, a performance that fails, in the first place, to leave you shattered, and in the second to make you think very hard about what you think passionate love is and whether you really want it, is a failure. Glyndebourne’s recent production left one in a kind of purple daze, mesmerised by its anodyne beauty. No one could accuse the new production at the Royal Opera of that.
However, before giving my tentative thoughts about this violently controversial staging, I’d like first to celebrate the musical triumph of the evening (I went to the second performance): for it was a triumph, and it’s decades since an account of Tristan at Covent Garden has been that. The glory of the evening was Nina Stemme’s Isolde, which has grown out of recognition since she first sang the part in Glyndebourne in 2003. She is tireless, riding the orchestral waves of the final minutes with a power that left me shaking. Her voice is absolutely steady, focused and, now, large. At long last the physical thrill of hearing her curse in Act I delivered so strongly that one feels pinned to one’s seat is granted. Almost as miraculous is her quiet singing in the most intimate passages of the Act II duet, while she tackles the incredibly difficult passage of lament over Tristan’s body as well as anyone I have ever heard. She is a beautiful presence, a noble actress, too.
What about the other half of the title? Ben Heppner is unfortunately in poor shape vocally, with many notes, especially quiet ones, emerging as off-pitch croaks — and then a passage of adequate singing follows. But you could feel the tension as everyone in the house wondered what would emerge next. His acting is confined to a limited amount of staggering. Even so, there is a sincerity to the performance, and a lack of loutishness, which raised it above Covent Garden’s misadventures with this role in the last two decades. The other singers are all admirable, with John Tomlinson a memorably angry Marke in Act II, and a heartbroken, heartbreaking one in Act III. Marke’s hopeless complaints that ‘Everything is dead’ have never been more affecting, as he surveys the pile of bodies.
The production: first, it does strike me as odd that an opera house dedicated to ‘outreach’, ‘accessibility’, catering for a ‘young, cool, buzzy’ crowd, as the Royal Opera incessantly proclaims itself to be, should be addicted to directors who seem only to be interested in catering to jaded, weary critical palates. The lady next to me, seeing Tristan for the first time, asked me why the surtitles were about Tristan offering Isolde his sword and her refusing to take it — and lots more things of that kind — when there was no sword and, given their clothes (contemporary, smart city-wear), it would have been strange if there had been. The superior reviewers who wonder why people want more ‘literalism’ on stage seem to overlook the fact that the characters come across as seriously dislocated from reality, since they can’t stop talking not only about absent objects as if they were present, but also about chivalry, honour, evoking a whole cultural and moral world which the staging ignores.
Christof Loy, the director, who in a long conversation with the conductor, Antonio Pappano, voices many views which any reasonably serious opera-goer should have for himself as if they were important fresh insights, tells us that he is eager to develop ‘a human, non-heroic approach to Wagner’. Nothing easier: have the curtain rise on the summer night of Act II, to discover Brangäne seated at a small table, combing her hair and putting on her lipstick in preparation for her date with Kurwenal — one’s servants have a love life too — and any hint of the heroic is decisively removed. But in the production it was never there. Wagner’s characters are heroic, in the immensity of their metaphysical ambitions and their readiness to die either to achieve them or if they fail to. Loy tells us that it is these ambitions that he is concerned with. But by putting them in a contemporary setting, and then handling them with considerable obscurity, he has sacrificed the ambience of the drama without penetrating to its core, and along the way throws up some wildly incongruous images and situations. And yet…in certain ways, which I wish I had space to elaborate on, he does penetrate closer to the essence of this always amazing work than most productions I have seen. It is hard to know whether all the strippings-away — they are, after all, a mannerism of his — are required in order to approach the heart of Tristan.
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