Seattle Opera's Fractured Tristan Gets Standing Ovation, Lusty Boos

"This is a terrible thing for a designer to say," Robert Israel is quoted as saying in Seattle Opera Magazine, "but sometimes I just want to listen to the music and close my eyes." By that standard, his design concept for Seattle Opera's Tristan and Isolde (through August 21) succeeds. I did close my eyes at times to better enjoy the production; General Director Speight Jenkins has worked his uncanny casting magic once again.

Seattle Opera's singers and conductor make a feast of Wagner's score, so there's plenty to reward you even if you can't make the concept work. (At curtain, the audience rose for a standing ovation for the vocalists, then a large group turned boo-bird for Israel and director Peter Kazaras's walk-on.) Even the third act--of a long opera--rivets you. Vocally, Clifton Forbis's wounded Tristan suppurates with post-breakup bile, then sinks into a fevered vision of escape. Eaten alive by his need, shame, and self-doubt, he wavers on the edge of oblivion and self-forgiveness.

The remarkably dramatically astute Peter Kazaras can add little to this "disembodied" take on the opera (though his touches in other areas are evident and welcome). Wagner, on the other hand, does not go quietly--or even capitulate at all. Words and music still convey his brooding genius, even as the visual discontinuities accumulate.

Israel rolls the dice with his designs: Seattle Opera's post-modern Rochaix-Israel Ring (with flying carousel horses) is legend--as are the tiny gold soldiers who "marched" in Aida, sucking all the pomp and pageantry out of a triumphal display. At his best, Israel's juxtapositions form new emotional touchstones. When he errs, he professorially forecloses the audience's process, directing them to the correct result.

Tristan, he says, is "a very internal opera about people's deepest states of mind. I don't want to see people running around on stage."

We have no common ground there--what I respect about Wagner is precisely his ability to dramatize the interior state, to give it form and material heft. The heroic self-image we may keep under wraps strides into the spotlight in Wagner: a chest-pounding, heart-swelling love-warrior. The loyalty of a friend gets a voice, a body; so does craven spying.

The frame of legend gave Wagner latitude in his rebellion against the mores of his day; you can't tell the story of the forbidden love of Tristan and Isolde without putting adultery on stage. But it's Wagner's psychological "realism" that rocks you back, still--Tristan's second act recalls the night you were already planning to call in sick for work Friday, to make it a love-drunk three-day weekend in bed, who cares if they fire you.

In Tristan's third act, you recognize yourself alone on the couch with Ben & Jerry's or red wine, waiting for a call that won't come, but times ten, that time you still feel lucky to have survived. Really. Like if today you could go through all of that again, or donate a kidney, you'd launch yourself at the gurney.

The opera opens in medias res, with Tristan escorting Isolde (Annalena Persson, a gifted actor with the requisite vocal range but, at volume, pushing out a blurry vibrato-laden sound) to her marriage with King Marke (Stephen Milling, majestically human in his demand to know "Why?"). It's clear they have "a history," and have polarized around their attraction as if it's someone's fault. Tristan is stand-offish, Isolde vengeful.

Greer Grimsley's Kurwenal, Tristan's servant, piles on braggadocio to fill Tristan's silence; Brangäne (the superb Margaret Jane Wray) bulldogs for Isolde's due.

The opera in fact opens with a prelude containing the "Tristan Chord"--a fraying collection of notes, pulling apart even as a core sound emerges. It's an unstable isotope of a chord, mysteriously fraught, and conductor Asher Fisch hushes the house with its appearance, followed by silence, then repetition, as if a large ship is pushing off. (By the time Fisch took the podium for the second act, bravos were being shouted out amidst the applause.)

For Isolde's death-potion-that's-really-a-love-potion, director Peter Kazaras took inspiration from an Ambrose Bierce short story, wanting to expand on subjective time. (I think Last Temptation of Christ might even be more apropos, given Wagner's doubling play on "passion.") It's rare that you actually watch an opera wondering how it turns out, so I won't go into great detail, other than to say that I felt Kazaras overstepped his brief and perhaps sold his own gifts short. What could have been a fascinating additional perspective grew to take up a singular, distorting field of view.

(I want to insist on one thing--it's essential that Tristan and Isolde make love. Their tragedy is that--in eating every scrap of the apple--they learn their passion to consume each other is not resolved. They're still voracious. This is why death alone seems to provide an exit. If Tristan's audience isn't carnally engaged, this is an opera about bad choices, not fate reaching down and grabbing you by the scruff of the neck.)

The production features much more static stand-and-sing at the audience than I expected (or wanted), with the drama communicated outward in operatic gesture, rather than in physical relationship. The rest is collapsed--contained--in voice and music. Fisch nearly coaxes the score into taking material form, an illusion aided by the use of projections of waves, clouds, fire. Occasionally Israel strikes the right note: A huge chunk of stone obtrudes into the black-box set in the second act, lifeless, funereal, and foreboding. It is a material object providing atmosphere. Above the singers' heads, a laser-ish light provides only whispered confusion.