Reader Mail: “What is Seattle Opera’s Tristan Set All About?”

Just in over the transom, in response to my review of Seattle Opera’s Tristan and Isolde:

Help us out, please!  We’ve been to many Seattle Opera productions since the ’70s and have seen several Israel designs, especially his Ring, so we had some idea of what to expect. Wrong! The singing and orchestral work were of a caliber that made the production a stand-out, but we were totally confused with the set design. What was the red laser light all about? How about the large wrapped “parcels” stage left? We are both trained musicians but, as you stated, listening with eyes closed was a preferred method in this production.

Potential spoilers alert: my response after the jump.

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Anyone? I can only hazard some guesses; the red laser light baffled me, too.

If director Kazaras is serious about his reference to Ambrose Bierce (see the director’s talk, here), then the “concept” for the production is that Brangäne doesn’t switch the potions: It’s in drinking the poison that Tristan and Isolde have their dreamed-for union (the libretto’s multiple references to delusion takes on a more literal meaning here): Instead of their lives flashing before their eyes, they imagine their love affair played out. Thus we see them stumbling about in a foggy rapture, not quite connecting, as they sing of blissful union. It’s a delirium, with hallucinations (though this cheats the audience of a real lovestruck culmination). 

Now for the set, which felt to me designed to be more associative and evocative than defined. The sheet at various times suggests a sail, a veil, a bed sheet, a shroud. The red line it hangs on is echoed by the laser (at “Night” it shines out)–all I get really is the sense of a division (life/death, Day/Night). But maybe it’s a Scarlet Letter Laser. The wrapped packages suggest both the belongings Isolde sails with, and the sheeted furniture in a house where someone has died. The large chunk of stone is both a battering ram and a gravestone. (The tiny boats are pure Robert Israel–if he can miniaturize, he sleeps happy.)

You see Isolde all in red in the first act, then she and Tristan are half and half by act two, and in white by the end: the blood (life) drained out (and/or a cleansing redemption achieved). I would grant more meaning to the large box they’re in and its rectangle window if it weren’t recycled from Macbeth, but the pattern on the walls looked to me like a combination of Irish design and rock under stress.

UPDATE: Another reader writes:

I thought it pretty odd that only Tristan sipped the potion. I also thought the opera’s ending odd since Isolde seemed not to be death bound. Now upon reading your discussions: did only Tristan drink the Cool-Aid and thus we spent the following few hours sharing in his (not their) final few seconds, culminating with Isolde laying her head across his chest? I also thought there were interesting balance of power explorations going on.

This is an interesting point, sharp-eyed reader. I was working out how to decipher the post-potion goings-on from either a Tristan-only or a Tristan-and-Isolde perspective, because I wasn’t sure whose perspective we were seeing. Having Tristan drink the potion is perhaps an attempt to limit what follows to Tristan’s hallucination, but it’s still problematic that he’d be “envisioning” Isolde and Brangäne’s dialogue at the top of Act Two (or imagine himself teleporting inside of a large rock). It’s bound to become very confusing no matter what you do, because Wagner didn’t have that structure in mind. that said, I also felt the power dynamics were opened up more than usual. Tristan and Isolde had a great deal going on in addition to their attraction to each other, and Tristan’s betrayal of King Marke seemed (to me) very much a failed attempt to assert himself, if in the negative.