Tristan und Isolde
Glyndebourne
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is a work of stark oppositions, which are overcome, or seem to be, in the final bars, as Isolde sinks lifeless over Tristan’s body, in a state of (her last words) ‘unconsciousness, highest bliss’. Well, which? you might ask. If you’re unconscious you can’t be in a state of highest bliss, and vice versa. But it is essential to this work that that central paradox is maintained throughout. Passion must lead to death. It undermines all civilisation and the concepts on which it is based and with which we work, and the lovers, a highly intelligent and speculative pair, think through, so far as they are able, the consequences of renouncing Honour, Duty, Fame, all the values of Day, and moving into ‘the wonder-realm of Night’, where only ecstatic Death holds sway. Is it nonsense? Yes, but listen to the music and see if you are not at least temporarily — or, through a whole lifetime, intermittently — tempted to assent to it as the only important truth. The ultimate test of an adequate performance of Tristan is that it renews your succumbing to that temptation.
Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s Glyndebourne production of Tristan, now revived for the second time, but with a wholly different cast and conductor, diminishes the tensions within the drama, by providing only one basic — very basic — set, a receding series of ellipses, and leaving all the work to Robin Carter, the lighting designer, and to Andrea Schmidt-Futterer, the costume designer. The work almost becomes an oratorio. At the end of Act I King Marke strides across the stage, but with no retinue, so anyone who didn’t know the opera might well wonder who this last-second interloper was. For the long final scene of Act II Marke addresses Tristan, Isolde lying nearby, but no one else is onstage. Melot runs Tristan through with no Kurwenal on hand to pull his master away. Isolde sings her Transfiguration alone on the stage — and at the back of it: very beautiful to look at, as the stage picture often is, but where is dramatic truth? Lehnhoff, a pupil of Wieland Wagner’s, seems to have lost interest in it. Worse, for such a seasoned director, he has failed to take into account audience reactions. When, at the hushed climactic moment of Act I, Tristan and Isolde at last abandon hostilities and verbal fencing, and murmur one another’s names, one of the most affecting moments in all drama, Lehnhoff has them literally sliding down the set, while a large gong-like object looms above them and recedes. The white-jacketed oaf sitting in front of me let out a loud guffaw — criminal, but these people shouldn’t be given the faintest chance to laugh, because at Glyndebourne they will take it.
Mainly the lovers keep their distance, singing much of the Act II duet — which still has the huge, disabling cut — on opposite slopes of the set. In general their movements bear little relation to their states of mind. And, as will already be clear, there is no differentiation between the settings of the three acts, and no props. So the lighting, which begins and ends as deep purple, with varying shades of pale grey and yellow, does what it can to establish the atmosphere. It isn’t enough. The singers are mainly only moderately gifted actors, so they can’t really make up the deficit.
Still, musically there are some rich rewards. The preludes to Acts I and III were played so wonderfully that nothing that followed could be so moving. Vladimir Jurowski adopted the dangerous tactic of pulling out all the stops from the word go, which meant that we were overwhelmed by the time the curtain rose. But then, since both Anja Kampe’s Isolde and Torsten Kerl’s Tristan are pocket-sized, the main part of the work had to be given something approaching a chamber-music reading. This is possible, since Wagner’s scoring is, among its many marvels, a wonder of delicacy. The whole heroic side was missing, only adumbrated by the magnificent Brangäne of Sarah Connolly and the mainly fine Kurwenal of Andrzej Dobber. Both of them have voices embarrassingly larger than their stage mistress’s and master’s, and more imposing presences too. The King Marke of Georg Zeppenfeld is grand, searing, passionate, a connoisseur’s item of sound and interpretation. Kampe is a singer one warms to, but a girlish Isolde, whereas Wagner’s music demands a woman of limitless emotional resources. She did some lovely things, above all her invocation to Frau Minne and her small-scale Transfiguration. Kerl’s Tristan is mainly yet another reminder of how badly we need an adequate heroic Wagner tenor, though he managed to turn his inadequacies to some advantage in the immense agonies of Act III. Needing to see and hear the work as much as I did, the whole was considerably more than the sum of its uneven parts, and I hope other people felt the same.
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