Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde, Germany 1865. Composed and written by Richard Wagner, directed by Þorleifur Örn Arnarsson (production) and Semyon Bychkov (music).
Live-broadcast from the opening day of the Bayreuther Festspiele 2024; Atelier movie theater, Row 3, Seat 10.
Yeah no—I wasn’t in Bayreuth and probably never will be. But I attended the live broadcast at the Atelier movie theater in Düsseldorf. It was a blast. Six+ hours, intermissions included, of exciting entertainment!
Now, to put this up-front and to put it bluntly: Tristan und Isolde is Wagner’s only opera I find musically interesting—with its tonal instabilities, remote modulations, general fluidity, and whatnot. It’s not quite atonal yet, but on its way—no wonder Schönberg was fascinated by it!
All other operas by Wagner are spectacles that I enjoy, some of them (like Meistersinger with its hilariously funny libretto and leitmotif playfulness) more than others (like Parsifal where rarely anything makes sense), but only ever live on stage. They are what they are—spectacles intermittently drowned in bombast and braggadocio, and Wagner’s personal conduct and his reception during the mid-twentieth century (you know what I mean) aren’t helping.
Against this background, Þorleifur Örn Arnarsson and Semyon Bychkov’s Tristan und Isolde is a thoroughly enjoyable production. And it is also a premiere, which means it doesn’t suffer from the notorious problems of Wagner repertoire productions where the cast has done their parts either a zillion times before or well in the past or both, so that many of the original musical expressions and stage directions have quietly left the building a long time ago. Here, everything is fresh and in the moment, with a palpable and exciting tension. How Bychkov approaches the score, right off the bat in the introduction and then throughout, is both unusual and interesting. I like it a lot! Particularly, I still marvel at—and fail at figuring out—how he manages to let the final Liebestod not come across as a “triumph of love” or some such, but as an exercise in futility with a whiff of Romantic nihilism. Which is also a good fit for my long-standing interpretation that the love potion and the death potion are essentially the same.
Now for a few parts I don’t care for very much.
Let’s start with some details of Arnarsson’s production. Every production of Tristan und Isolde has to deal with the fact that, basically, a handful of characters are up on the stage and two or more of them are singing at each other for more than four hours while nothing else happens. Thus, in game design parlance, you need a lot of idle mode animations for this particular opera! Which isn’t solved so well here, and it also isn’t altogether clear why Isolde keeps kneading her dress incessantly during the first act like a batch of sourdough.
Then, and these are really bad decisions, Arnarsson takes away the only two action scenes the entire opera has to offer, a brief swordplay between Tristan and Melot at the end of the second act during which Tristan is badly wounded, and a brief swordplay between Melot and Kurwenal in the third act during which they both die.
As for the first swordplay at the end of the second act that would have left Tristan mortally wounded, it is replaced by Tristan taking a sip from the death potion—which produces a terrible confusion in the third act. Because now, whenever the libretto mentions drinking from “the potion,” you never know whether it refers to the love potion (that Tristan and Isolde both took in act one) or the death potion (that, in the original libretto, no one took so far). Incredibly bad call.
As for the second swordplay, it is left out entirely without replacement, so that both Melot and Kurwenal survive and keep hanging around on the stage with nothing to do. Well, that tanks parts of the libretto too, only in a different way. Wagner vividly foreshadows Kurwenal’s death by devaluating his character in the third act’s first scene in exactly the same way how Shakespeare foreshadows Polonius’s death in Hamlet. Thus, this foreshadowing goes exactly nowhere in this production and renders a whole bunch of Tristan’s and Kurwenal’s lines without function. And that’s not even counting some of Marke’s final laments that make no sense whatsoever with Kurwenal and Melot still alive. Another incredibly bad call.
Next, the ensemble. Yes, they are really great, and they deserve all the curtains and cheers and bravos they received that night and more, as do the choir and musicians that constitute the Chor und Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele this year. Only Günther Groissböck as Marke caught some inexplicable boos at the end of the second act, and only then, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
One could say, certainly, that the cast is too often in full throttle mode. Which, importantly, isn’t the fault of the orchestra; Bychkov provides enough breathing room for more subtle expressions. But I’m reluctant to criticize that—just look at the score! Not only are there a lot of fortissimi, Tristan und Isolde has, when Tristan and Isolde meet each other during the second act, the only fff triple forte in all of Wagner’s oeuvre, to the best of my knowledge! (Just to make sure, I re-checked a few notorious suspects like Götterdämmerung 2.5 or 3.1, but nope—it’s all mere ff double forte over there, just as I remember it.)
Now, singing full throttle here is fine, except when it isn’t. It is prominently not fine in the final act’s first scene: Andreas Schager’s Tristan is great and powerful throughout when he is interacting with other characters, but on his own in that scene—Kurwenal’s interjections don’t count—it becomes uninteresting and even tedious fast. I’m not saying Schager should switch to a lyrical mode, like, say, Kollo did in his legendary Tristan 1981 in Bayreuth. (Kleiber’s recording from the same year would qualify too, only DG inflicted unspeakable digital shenanigans on it in post.) But more expressions besides sheer volume are desperately needed here, more interpretation, engrossment, absorption of and into what the character is going through at this moment in time. All that just isn’t there in this scene, only volume.
Finally, the stage settings. In the first act, the setting’s great. In the second and third, they are okay in principle, but both are clearly ship-like, which doesn’t rhyme with the libretto at all. And particularly the stage setting for the second act with its heaps of incongruent clutter kept reminding me of that hilarous asset hodgepodge from the game Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, no offense.
So yes, a lot to nitpick! But there is no “perfect” Tristan und Isolde and never will be, which is good and important in the greater scheme of things.
And all this certainly didn’t take away from the overall experience, with was awesome and inspiring.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!