Richard Wagner
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Covent Garden
In The Perfect Wagnerite, Bernard Shaw said his preferred way to watch the
Ring would be sitting with his feet up in a box with his back to the stage,
to avoid the distraction from the music that the machinery and clutter of
productions tended to entail. So he would probably have been pleased to face
the stage in this very uncluttered, stark version of Tristan und Isolde
directed by Christof Loy and conducted by Antonio Pappano. At the end of the
Prelude, the light comes up to show Isolde (Nina Stemme) in a blindingly
white wedding dress, wandering through the candlelit tables of a huge and
opulent dining room. There is no ship, just as in Act Two there is no garden
in Cornwall, and in Act Three no lime-trees in Brittany. When the curtain
closes slowly on that scene, Isolde is left on the bare forestage with
Brangäne, listening to the voice of the young sailor. It makes the point
with beautiful economy: Isolde is on her way to be wed to King Mark, but we
have seen, too, the comforts and luxuries she has left behind in Ireland.
This division is upheld throughout the three acts: the social world, for
good or ill, behind the curtain, and the anguished mental world of the
lovers in front.
So the stage – or at least the staging – is set at the outset for an inspired
use of the acting space and curtain throughout this magnificent performance.
What is inspired is the way that this division perfectly represents the
central conflict, not only as it is perceived by this director, but as it
occurs in Wagner’s Tristan, in Wagner’s life, and in the whole medieval
world of courtly love. Wagner’s textual source was the great romance epic of
Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, one of the greatest (and in English
maybe the least known) of the archetypal poems of love written in the
Blütezeit around 1200. Wagner said he was paring back the romance elements
and episodes of Gottfried’s wide-ranging poem – its dragons and ordeals and
love caves – to an intense focus on the central story of love and death. One
might well claim that this production continues in the same direction,
developing even further the concentrated intensity of Wagner’s masterpiece.
There is of course a recent piece of Covent Garden prehistory here. Loy’s
similarly narrowed and chastened Lulu was ill-received by some of his
audience this June when his production was accused of lacking vitality and
being more like a concert performance than a fully realized theatrical
event. Loy and Pappano defended their version by saying that the removal of
any extreme production histrionics allowed the music to dominate (and nobody
questioned the beauty of Pappano’s orchestral performance, then or now).
Whatever one’s views about Lulu, the charge of untheatricality certainly
does not stick to Tristan – although a very small section of the audience
seemed to feel the need to grumble again and left during the applause at the
end. They didn’t seem to see the irony of their haut bourgeois protest
against a production that highlighted precisely the conflict between tired
social values and grand passion. Probably they didn’t think that hard about
it; but that minority reaction at the end of such an inventive and radical
directorial treatment was disappointing. As Pappano says, “Tristan und
Isolde begs to be experimental”; the experiments here were thought through
in great detail.
Everything about this production intensifies the meaning of the opera as well
as its atmosphere. A famous French discussion of courtly love, written in
the 1930s, was translated into English with the felicitous title Passion and
Society. This central meaning was perfectly expressed here. Behind the
curtain is society, with its obligations, duties and customs; in front of it
is the enactment of passion, which has disastrous consequences not just for
the lovers but for society, too. King Mark has to back down, conceding (too
late) Tristan’s power over Isolde; but his gracious concession can’t
disguise the destructive implications of this defeat for the political
sphere. John Tomlinson’s decent Mark makes this point admirably; niceness is
not the main requisite for a king in an epic. The ageless power of the
courtly model of the battle between individual will and social order has
survived to be restated for the modern era by Freud in Civilization and its
Discontents; the fated transgressive love of Tristan and Isolde is the
archetypal instance. This is confirmed again by the interest in Tristan of
modern social theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Slavoj Zizek.
The symbolic centre is wonderfully sustained throughout this Tristan. The
medieval lovers’ opting for night rather than day, and the familiar cursing
of the day in the aubade, the Tagelied, is developed by Wagner to an
all-consuming extent in the opera’s last act. In opting for endless night,
the parting lovers do not merely reject the dawn, as in Romeo and Juliet or
Donne’s “Sunne Rising”; rather, they choose a realm in which night and death
become the new reality. Behind the curtain is the old life; in front of it
lies the passionate attempt to create the new reality of the Liebestod. One
of the most brilliant uses of the curtain comes when Brangäne draws it shut,
closing off the sleeping decadents behind it, and then pulls it open again
to show the room empty. Dying reality has been supplanted by a terrible,
dark, new void.
The function of the middle-world characters, Brangäne and Kurwenal – who
belong neither to decadent bourgeois society nor to the ending’s disastrous
new reality of love-death – is pivotal to Loy’s understanding of the meaning
of the opera. Their despairing sanity, mediating between social order and
the fatal fulfilment of the lovers’ night world, is shown to gain authority
at the same time as the Liebestod builds to its climax in Act Three. It’s a
wholly successful parallelism, in part because the sparkling Brangäne
(Sophie Koch) and the powerful Kurwenal (Michael Volle) are such good
singers and actors: they dominate the stage. And they have two particularly
memorable moments. The first comes when Brangäne takes off her brightly
coloured dress to emerge in black, echoing Isolde’s replacement of her
glittering wedding dress with black in Act One, and economically expressing
the defeat of her own liveliness (“coquettish” is not a likely word in the
world of Wagner, but Koch approaches it) by the world of Night. Kurwenal’s
corresponding defeat in the first half of Act Three has him sitting at the
front of the stage with his back to Tristan (Ben Heppner) through most of
the great love delirium: and he is emphatically more defeated than
horrified. Volle provides the perfect foil for Heppner’s moving and eloquent
loss of grip and power that develops throughout the scene. Again, the acting
is as impressive as the singing, as Heppner deliberates on his
responsibility or fatedness, and the function of the various influences on
the action: desire; the lovepotion; the fateful meeting of eyes (in the
great traditions of courtly love) that stopped Isolde killing him.
The great conclusion, like so much that has gone before, is driven by the
magnificent performance of Nina Stemme. She sang Isolde at Glyndebourne in
2003, and has also sung the role at Bayreuth and in her native Sweden. She
recorded it with Pappano in 2005, in a version that one commentator
suggested might be the last studio recording on such a scale (Böhm’s classic
recording was done in three takes before three different thousand-strong
audiences at Bayreuth). At the Royal Opera, Stemme is sensational, although
that is perhaps too histrionic a word for a delivery that so miraculously
combines vocal power with ease of presence. Her controlled interpretation is
helped by Loy’s staging: it is hard not to be reminded, by the quality of
grace in her standing and appearance, of one of Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated
actresses. The central beauty of Isolde and the stark black-and-white scenic
presentation together lift Tristan out of the Middle Ages and into a
decidedly modern, existentialist world. In Bergmanesque terms, we might say
that we were in the musing world of Wild Strawberries rather than the
eschatology of The Seventh Seal.
This is a production of stunning beauty in several ways – not least in the
orchestral set pieces, such as the Shepherd’s cor anglais and tárogató at
the start of Act Three. In the same way that Stemme combines ease and power,
Pappano combines onward drive with radiance of sound. Whether or not
Pappano’s EMI version turns out to be the last large-scale studio
performance, this live version will certainly live in the memory. It will be
a challenge to decide where the next experimental Tristan should turn if it
is to compete with this haunting triumph.
Bernard O'Donoghue's verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight was published in 2006. His Selected Poems and his Cambridge Companion
to Seamus Heaney were published last year.
Your Comments
Order By: