BAYREUTH.- Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is not a love story. It’s a death story.
It’s an opera in which the central duet is an ecstatic, philosophical declaration of love through a pledge of mutual death. Tristan, his name itself rooted in sadness, welcomes his end as a release; the greatest act of devotion, for Isolde, would be to join him in a state of love transfigured.
OK, maybe “Tristan” is both a love story and a death story.
Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s new production, at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, emphasizes the death part more. (People in the country can stream it on BR Klassik.) He sets the opera in a purgatorial space and, instead of spiritual transformation, portrays a scarcely transcendent suicide, an act of self-destruction in service of love.
It’s a bleak but still Romantic outlook, conveyed with stubborn opacity and a loose grip of the dramaturgy. A director’s vision, though, is just one reason to visit Bayreuth, the pilgrimage-like festival that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago.
This “Tristan” belongs, above all, to conductor Semyon Bychkov. He previously led “Parsifal” at Bayreuth with shocking speed, but he did something like the opposite here: not necessarily stretching the score, but relishing key moments to guide the audience’s emotions as commandingly as Wagner intended. At times, the passion was tidal; at others, teeming with anticipation.
(Bychkov is in good company. The festival has had its share of conductor missteps in recent years, but the evening before I saw “Tristan,” Simone Young led a masterly “Götterdämmerung”; elsewhere at Bayreuth, Pablo Heras-Casado is returning for “Parsifal”; Nathalie Stutzmann is picking up a “Tannhäuser” once botched by Valery Gergiev; and Oksana Lyniv continues her fiery “Der Fliegende Holländer.” With three female conductors out of five total, Bayreuth’s gender distribution is applaudably better than many in classical music and opera.)
The musical quality onstage was more mixed, with seasoned but quite different leads. Andreas Schager was a blunt Tristan, his heldentenor sound undeniably mighty but often one-dimensional. He is best in Wagner roles like the bumbling Siegfried and the young Parsifal, but here, his voice wanted to erupt even as he tried to tame it, as incapable of finding perfect balance as a touchy shower knob.
Camilla Nylund’s Isolde was smaller by comparison, sometimes surprisingly so for the generous acoustics of Bayreuth’s theater, but her characterization was also more sensitive, and more alluring. Her climactic “Mild und leise,” better known as the “Liebestod,” was both elegant and euphoric. By then, the stage was entirely hers, and she didn’t have to force compatibility with Schager’s sound.
More on his level of power was mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer as Brangäne, a robust audience favorite, and deservedly so. An assertive presence, ideally blended with the orchestra, she also had an actor’s expressive clarity. You could say much of the same for Olafur Sigudarson’s Kurwenal, though not for starry Günther Groissböck’s King Marke, who had a creamily rich bottom range but a harder-edged top, in a way that was more indicative of poor technique than dramatic choice.
It wasn’t easy to make sense of Marke’s role in this production. Groissböck entered wearing an enormous black coat, appropriately regal but mysterious, perhaps a Charon or Hades to oversee the transitional space conjured by Arnarsson onstage.
At the beginning of the opera, Vytautas Narbutas’ scenic design has no edges. Ropes suggest the deck of a ship, but there is no mast. There is still a young sailor, delicately sung by Matthew Newlin, but as he describes the wind blowing toward home, he is looking out toward nothing in the distance.
Tristan paces at the rear of the stage, back and forth in a loop, while near the front, Isolde sits on the ground, wearing an enormous dress that sprawls about 10 feet in either direction. She holds a quill, and on the fabric writes text that appears to be phrases from the opera’s libretto. Both of them are trapped, perhaps surrounded by the “sacred night” to which their love belongs.
Eventually they do find each other, and when Isolde gives Tristan a poison to end it all, only to knock it out of his hands, they become in a sense liberated. No longer stuck in place, they walk over to a hole in the center of the stage and stare into its brightly lit depths. That’s where Act II picks up, with the cracked wood of the opening hanging above the set like a chandelier, and the lovers below in an old ruin of a ship’s hull. They are surrounded by artifacts from antiquity to the present. (Sibylle Wallum’s costumes, too, have a sense of simultaneous history.) There are reliefs from the Parthenon Sculptures; Isolde’s calligraphic dress; Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Port of Greifswald,” a painting that, fittingly, juxtaposes humanity and its towering creations against the greater immensity of the natural world.
By Act III, that set is splintered and scattered, as if obliterated. As Tristan lies dying, having taken poison, the shepherd appears like an angel, all in white with relaxed wings. Isolde will later take the poison too. They are out of sync, however, both achieving the death they sought together but arriving there separately, alone.
Yikes. Who knows, though? Maybe you would explain the production differently. But that’s not necessarily to Arnarsson’s credit.
It’s incredibly difficult to stage “Tristan.” Wagner called it a “Handlung,” a word often translated as “action,” which is funny considering how little of that there is in the opera; its energy is more potential than kinetic.
To keep his production moving, Arnarsson crowds the stage with symbols that gesture at ideas with neither a discernibly cohesive logic nor a sense of invitation to the audience. The best directors with a strong interpretive hand ask questions rather than make statements, to start a conversation that, if successful, elevates an opera in a testament to the art form’s vitality. It’s telling, and worrisome, that while I could venture a guess at the meaning of Arnarsson’s concept, I left with no new insights about “Tristan” itself.
—
‘Tristan und Isolde’
Through Aug. 26 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
