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.

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.

“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.