“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.
I will be blunt. In order to understand Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde you need to be familiar with the Philosopher who inspired Wagner’s Tristan. The Philosopher I am talking about is Arthur Schopenhauer. Without being familiar and understanding the Schopenhauer Philosophy you will reduce Wagner’s Tristan work to a refined form of pornography with orgasmic music etc.
May I recommend a very readable shortcut by suggesting a book By Bryan Magee named “The Tristan Chord”. Magee also wrote a book called “The Philosophy o Schopenhauer”. The latter book is a way to avoid the preferred way to Schopenhauer by reading through his six volume set of all of Schopenhauer works.
I am surprised the the previews to Seattle Opera’s Wagner works Schopenhauer harly ever gets any notice!
This production of Tristan & Isolde is inexcusable and unwatchable. There was no intelligible dramatic concept. The set was ugly, confusing and ultimately pointless. The most interesting thing to look at was a ubiquitous white bed sheet hanging on a red clothes line. Projections, to the extent there were any, were a colossal let down. The two leads had zero chemistry. Persson spent the first act either angrily stalking about or wandering around in a fog–Forbis simply wandered around in a fog. I don’t think the two ever touched each other. Imagine a production of Tristan & Isolde where the first hint of passion came with the act II entrance of King Marke, at which point the audience woke up and took notice. Stephen Milling kicked the production up several notches with a heart rending and emotional performance, both vocal and physical. Great, except that it is a sad day when the most exciting point in a production of Tristan is King Marke’s narrative! All this is a great shame, since on balance musically and vocally, the performances were mostly all very good. Even Melot stood out with a surprisingly attractive voice, but that is not really where the audience’s attention should be focused. I felt sorry for the whole cast, since the director and designer had basically hung them out to dry. Forbis sings like a true heldentenor with great support. I would like to have heard his narrative in the 3rd act, but just couldn’t bear to watch any more. As my companion and I headed out early for the parking garage, audience members were leaving in droves.
“The Tristan Chord” is the best book on Wagner I have ever read. I recommend it highly. Yes, to fully appreciate Wagner, one has to understand the Schopenhauer connection.
I will disagree, Mr. Rom, to the extent that while I think you can deepen your understanding of Wagner’s work by tracing influences, when you talk about the work, you talk primarily about what’s on stage. That’s the artist’s task, and I think Wagner did it well, evidenced by the fact that many more people have seen and enjoyed “Tristan” than have read Schopenhauer.
However, I take your point that Wagner’s aim isn’t prurient as such. The passion between the two lovers is a launching point, not an end. Still, without passion, there’s no launch. I’m not asking for two sweaty people on the floor (nor am I against that, depending on who’s singing)–but however their relationship is portrayed, the audience needs to feel the electricity in it.
Having seen the last production of Tristan und Isolde by Seattle Opera, I was so very disappointed with the current one. The last production had several major strengths:
– without mauling each other the leads conveyed the passion of their relationship
– the set incorporated action which enhanced and added interest and depth to the story. In the second scene the room was merely a metallic frame standing out in odd contrast to the forest behind it. As the scene evolved, while Tristan and Isolde spend their last night together, the forest fractured into small wedges and pulled out of view revealing a pitch black background upon which stars slowly came out. The frame of the room hung precipitously in space conveying the frailty of human experience and how the thinnest of margins separate us from the universe and the lovers of the night from their duties of the day.
– finally at the end the transformation of Isolde was palpable and believable. I am not actually quite sure how she managed to convey that moment, but the 2010 Anna was simply laying down with a sheet over her. It just didn’t do the trick.
Overall it was an effective, remarkable production which may be very hard to match in the years to come.
I have seen seven Tristans now, including the last Seattle Opera presentation, and the current one is by far the best ever. Besides having one of the most powerful casts ever assembled, the director’s concept of suspending time and allowing the potion to distort the meaning of reality is exactly what this opera needs to replace the silly on-stage depictions that have made audiences wince and laugh for decades. It was a psychological jolt that enhanced and did not detract from the glorious music like many other stagings do. In this depiction, the audience gets to decide if Tristan “accidentally” falls into his wounding sword or if he actually fights his accuser. The audience gets to decide if Isolde is conjured up to fulfill Tristan’s longings or if she is a physical reality. The audience gets to decide if the potion was a love potion or a death potion. For some on this blog, it seems like that is too much work, but I think it is exactly what Wagner would have wanted this creation to become – a vehicle for deep psychological meditation. It was also ingenious to have characters conjured up instead of sneaking around on stage trying to hide from one another. Wagner’s presentation of the longing for unceasing orgasmic ecstasy only obtainable by death is enhanced, not diminished by allowing the audience to go deep into their own psyche. The director wisely chose to eliminate the distractions of silly sword fights and groping in the dark. Especially helpful to this concept of unfulfilled longing while in the realm of day/life and yearning for the fulfillment of night/death was the director’s elimination of the oh-so-boring placement of half-naked actors on stage lying still side-by-side in bed for an entire act.
The sets and the staging were horrible. They failed to convey any psychological effects. It is certainly a viable concept to escape from realism to imagination in a production of Tristan und Isolde. But, this production failed miserably. Kazaras and Israel should be forced to drink the death potion!
I did not walk out after the 2nd Act, but I wish that Kazaras and Israel had walked onto the stage so that I could have booed them. The orchestra was, however, wonderful and the singing was very good; so, Wagner’s music and the singing saved the day. I, too, felt sorry for Asher Fisch, the orchestra, and the singers for having to be forced to perform in such a substandard overall production.
My wife and I flew all the way from Houston, Texas to see this production. Our experience could have been better.
You are correct.
For me the set was an immeadiate distraction. Visually I was constantly re-doing it.What was Napoleon’s Josephine’s
couch, complete with red upholstery, doing on stage during the first act? Only one of many thoughts about set.
However, during the second act, partly due to lighting and the boulder I was amazed that set “worked”. Having the projection turn to a negative as Tristan was injured was a powerful image, I thought.