the sublime and the ridiculous
by
Douglas Messerli
Richard
Wagner (writer and composer) Tristan und
Isolde / Live H.D. broadcast from the New York Metropolitan Opera on
October 8, 2016 / I attended with Howard Fox
The
first High Definition production of the new Metropolitan Opera season, Richard
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is sublime, with outstanding performances
by the great soprano Nina Stemme, Stuart Nelson (singing only his second
Tristan), Ekaterina Gubanova as the intruding servant Brangäne, René Pape as
King Marke, Evegeny Nikitin, singing the smaller role of Tristan’s loyal allay
Kurwenal, and, perhaps most importantly, Simon Rattle conducting of the Met’s
great orchestra.
Yet this version of Tristan und Isolde is often equally leaden and confusing through
production director Mariusz Trebliński’s decision to set the opera on a war ship
in Act One, and upon another ship and in that ship’s enormous lower-deck
storeroom filled with large containers of what appear to be weapons all stamped
with “Warning” in Act Two. The return to Tristan’s childhood home, where Kurwenal
has set up like a hospital room, where other portions of the home, having
undergone a fire years earlier, appear ready to collapse, is nearly inexplicable,
particularly when Tristan retrieves his father’s military jacket from the floor
of a nearly creosote leaden room.
On top of this, set designer Boris
Kudlička’s and projection designer Bartek Macias’ sets and projections
sometimes clumsily recreated the story of the young Tristan’s loss of his
mother (in child-birth) and father, along with the quite unexplained torching
of their home and the woods around, further making murky what is generally a
fairly simple tale of love, consuming desire, death, and transfiguration.
Yes, these various elements do keep our
eyes quite busy during the opera’s many long, static passages; and certainly
they help to make clear that part of Tristan’s determination to find love—first
in his obedience of and service to the King of Cornwall and, later, in his love
of Isolde—has a great deal to do with his being an orphan. The worlds of
Tristan’s Brittany, Isolde’s Ireland, and Marke’s Cornwall, moreover, obviously
are structures of military might achieved through violence—just the kind of
world in which Wagner generally locates his operas. Everyone here is a loyal
warrior or a traitor, with heroes being awarded and traitors (i.e, the other
side) being destroyed.
But these things are fairly obvious
within the long narrative passages Tristan and Isolde recount throughout the
opera, and hardly need be reasserted with such heavy handed imagery and
metaphorical projections.
At moments, particularly the long, long
love duet in Act II, the projections of clouds and spinning planets truly do
give rise to the kind of splendiferous visions being experienced by the loving
couple, particularly, as Brangäne interrupts their “maddened” lovemaking with
her 
beautiful off-stage song of
warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But,
for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed
in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and
night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, in itself, on
gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this
production.
beautiful off-stage song of
warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But,
for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed
in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and
night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, in itself, on
gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this
production.
And finally, the metaphorical ghosts of
both Tristan’s child-self and his dead father, particularly in Act
Three—although again much-needed visual elements while Tristan lies
dying—created more murkiness than clarity. It’s clear that Tristan is being
visited by the ghosts of the past, but a child flashing the light of a
cigarette-lighter into the dying man’s eyes seems nearly ludicrous—if not
dangerous.
As in all successful renditions of this
great opera, moreover, any singer who credibly endures it is a wonder. Here,
despite my cavils, this production, particularly given Rattle’s languid and
highly nuanced musical direction, along with Stemme’s beautifully balanced and
modulated singing and acting, will be recognized as one of the greatest of this
opera’s performances.
Finally, even if by slashing her wrists, Isolde
doesn’t quite go “gently into that good night,” it allows her to represent her
“Liebestod” as a gradual transformation of worlds through the gradual loss of
blood, making Marke’s and Brangäne’s reentries, once again, simple intrusions
on the inseparable lover’s lives. In
Tristan’s and Isolde’s love there is no room for others, not even room for living.
Los Angeles,
October 9, 2016
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