Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Met in HD encore, Phoenix Picturehouse, Oxford, 11 October 2016.
Tristan and Isolde I have listed among what are for me the fifteen greatest operas and is one I will never miss the chance of seeing. This is the eighth time I have seen it. It is also the fiftieth opera ‘Live from the Met in HD’ that I have reviewed. It is therefore an appropriate occasion on which to take a retrospective glance.
I first saw the opera in 1973 at the Royal Opera House conducted by Colin Davis with a cast which included Pekka Nuotio, playing Tristan who is escorting Isolde (Berit Lindholm) from Ireland to Cornwall to marry his uncle King Marke (David Ward). Isolde’s companion Brangäne (Josephine Veasey) substitutes a love potion for the poison sought by Isolde. Caught in flagrante, Melot (Thomas Allen) mortally wounds Tristan who is taken back to his birthplace by his servant Kurvenal (Norman Bailey), dying just as Isolde arrives with a pardon. Isolde sings a rapturous lament Liebestodt before expiring herself.
I have seen three Welsh National productions, in 1980, 1999 and 2012 conducted superbly respectively by Armstrong, Rizzi and Koenigs. The 1980 production was prepared by Reginald Goodall and issued as a recording. 1999 was the farewell performance of Geoffrey Lawton, by far the best Tristan, with Mary Lloyd Davis, Isolde. (Phillip JolI sang Kurvenal in both 1980 and 2012, thirty years apart.)! saw it at Glyndebourne in 2003 with Nina Stemme and in Toulouse in 2007 with Janice Baird and Alan Woodrow. This was the second time I had seen it live from the Met, the first being in 2008, the first such transmission of Wagner, with Deborah Voigt and Robert Dean Smith. On this occasion Voigt acted as TV host, interviewing cast members during the intermissions.
This latest production at The Met is a co-production with Festival Hall Baden -Baden, Polish National Opera and China National Centre for the Performing Arts Beijing. It has a Polish production team under Mariusz Trelinski and received its first performance in Warsaw in June 2016. In New York there is a star-studded cast led by Stuart Skelton as Tristan with Nina Stemme as Isolde and the conductor is Simon Rattle. Described by a reviewer as ‘dark and evocative’, it replaces Wagner’s grand concept of contrasting light and dark in human love and emotion with a pervading darkness relieved by the light of spot lights, fog lamps, electric torches, candles, even a cigarette lighter. The action is brought forward to modern times. Instead of the deck of a sailing ship, Act 1 takes place in the saloon of a modern warship the centre of action being a dilapidated sofa. The ladies are dressed informally in modern blue and grey dresses, Tristan and Melot in pseudo-naval blue uniform and Marke in white admiral’s costume. Kurvenal becomes a rough seaman with heavily tattooed arms and shoulders. Up to a point this interpretation works in Act 1 or at least does not distract from the overwhelming music. However, the interpretation gradually disintegrates and lapses into silliness in Act 3.
Musically and vocally the performance can hardly be faulted. Rattle conducts the opera as if a symphony, each scene being a separate movement, as he explains in an intermission interview with Voigt (supporting my view that this opera does not need singers). From the interview, it is apparent that he and Stemme had different views on the interpretation of Isolde but that she got her own way. This Isolde is a much more mature lady than her Glyndebourne interpretation of thirteen years ago, lacking some of its charm. Brangäne was played by mezzo Ekaterina Grubanova as a much younger companion with a voice more soprano than mezzo. There were equally fine performances by Evgeny Nikitin as Kurvenal, René Pape as Marke (as also in the Glyndebourne production) and Neal Cooper as Melot. Despite the strange setting, the drama came through with clarity and inevitability, from the interchanges of Act 1 to the subdued representation of the love-makiing of Act 2. Marke’s monologue was delivered superbly before things began to go wrong. Melot’s disgracing Tristan started with him stripping him of what appeared to be corporal’s stripes, before shooting him through the heart with a pistol, which from the appearance of blood-stain should have been immediately fatal.
According to Wagner, the last Act takes place in the castle garden with views of the sea, with a delirious Tristan reliving his youth. Here we had a hospital bed with a drip which was at no time connected. Tristan’s bandage is not where he was wounded in Act 2. The arrival of Marke and Melot is in almost complete darkness so it is impossible to follow the action. Isolde, finding Tristan dead, self-harms, cutting her arm with a knife before singing the Liebestodt with Tristan’s dead body propped up against her.
In retrospect, this sounds dreadful but such was the power of the performance that at the time it did not seem so. One was left with a grudging admiration for an interpretation which was at least self-consistent and provided a background to the enjoyment of the music, the singing and the acting.
I first saw the opera in 1973 at the Royal Opera House conducted by Colin Davis with a cast which included Pekka Nuotio, playing Tristan who is escorting Isolde (Berit Lindholm) from Ireland to Cornwall to marry his uncle King Marke (David Ward). Isolde’s companion Brangäne (Josephine Veasey) substitutes a love potion for the poison sought by Isolde. Caught in flagrante, Melot (Thomas Allen) mortally wounds Tristan who is taken back to his birthplace by his servant Kurvenal (Norman Bailey), dying just as Isolde arrives with a pardon. Isolde sings a rapturous lament Liebestodt before expiring herself.
I have seen three Welsh National productions, in 1980, 1999 and 2012 conducted superbly respectively by Armstrong, Rizzi and Koenigs. The 1980 production was prepared by Reginald Goodall and issued as a recording. 1999 was the farewell performance of Geoffrey Lawton, by far the best Tristan, with Mary Lloyd Davis, Isolde. (Phillip JolI sang Kurvenal in both 1980 and 2012, thirty years apart.)! saw it at Glyndebourne in 2003 with Nina Stemme and in Toulouse in 2007 with Janice Baird and Alan Woodrow. This was the second time I had seen it live from the Met, the first being in 2008, the first such transmission of Wagner, with Deborah Voigt and Robert Dean Smith. On this occasion Voigt acted as TV host, interviewing cast members during the intermissions.
This latest production at The Met is a co-production with Festival Hall Baden -Baden, Polish National Opera and China National Centre for the Performing Arts Beijing. It has a Polish production team under Mariusz Trelinski and received its first performance in Warsaw in June 2016. In New York there is a star-studded cast led by Stuart Skelton as Tristan with Nina Stemme as Isolde and the conductor is Simon Rattle. Described by a reviewer as ‘dark and evocative’, it replaces Wagner’s grand concept of contrasting light and dark in human love and emotion with a pervading darkness relieved by the light of spot lights, fog lamps, electric torches, candles, even a cigarette lighter. The action is brought forward to modern times. Instead of the deck of a sailing ship, Act 1 takes place in the saloon of a modern warship the centre of action being a dilapidated sofa. The ladies are dressed informally in modern blue and grey dresses, Tristan and Melot in pseudo-naval blue uniform and Marke in white admiral’s costume. Kurvenal becomes a rough seaman with heavily tattooed arms and shoulders. Up to a point this interpretation works in Act 1 or at least does not distract from the overwhelming music. However, the interpretation gradually disintegrates and lapses into silliness in Act 3.
Musically and vocally the performance can hardly be faulted. Rattle conducts the opera as if a symphony, each scene being a separate movement, as he explains in an intermission interview with Voigt (supporting my view that this opera does not need singers). From the interview, it is apparent that he and Stemme had different views on the interpretation of Isolde but that she got her own way. This Isolde is a much more mature lady than her Glyndebourne interpretation of thirteen years ago, lacking some of its charm. Brangäne was played by mezzo Ekaterina Grubanova as a much younger companion with a voice more soprano than mezzo. There were equally fine performances by Evgeny Nikitin as Kurvenal, René Pape as Marke (as also in the Glyndebourne production) and Neal Cooper as Melot. Despite the strange setting, the drama came through with clarity and inevitability, from the interchanges of Act 1 to the subdued representation of the love-makiing of Act 2. Marke’s monologue was delivered superbly before things began to go wrong. Melot’s disgracing Tristan started with him stripping him of what appeared to be corporal’s stripes, before shooting him through the heart with a pistol, which from the appearance of blood-stain should have been immediately fatal.
According to Wagner, the last Act takes place in the castle garden with views of the sea, with a delirious Tristan reliving his youth. Here we had a hospital bed with a drip which was at no time connected. Tristan’s bandage is not where he was wounded in Act 2. The arrival of Marke and Melot is in almost complete darkness so it is impossible to follow the action. Isolde, finding Tristan dead, self-harms, cutting her arm with a knife before singing the Liebestodt with Tristan’s dead body propped up against her.
In retrospect, this sounds dreadful but such was the power of the performance that at the time it did not seem so. One was left with a grudging admiration for an interpretation which was at least self-consistent and provided a background to the enjoyment of the music, the singing and the acting.