Tristan und Isolde
Charles Zigmund
matinee and would like to review it briefly and then share some
further thoughts on the play and the music. First, as to the
production itself, the singing, conducting and playing seemed to me
magnificent. I am still a relative novice and so write about the
performances with some hesitation. Ben Heppner did a fine job as
Tristan and sang passionately, but his voice seems to me to be a
little thin, not full and melodious enough for the role or for
heldentenorship in general. I had no such reservations about Jane
Eaglen. Her voice was so full and beautiful throughout, and her acting
so good, that her bulk (she must weigh between 300 and 400 pounds) did
much less harm to the suspension of belief needed to imagine her as a
young lover than I'd expected. The conducting of James Levine, though
a little slow as usual for his Wagner, and the playing of the
orchestra, were superb. The gorgeous harmonies of this special music
resonated through the hall as beautifully as one could wish.
My prior experiences at the Met last year had been with more or less
traditional stagings. Tristan was my first in-person experience of a
modern abstract set, and this aspect of the production was simply
awful. Being a painter and loving much of modern art and architecture
(and disliking most of the rest), I have no predisposition against
such a concept, but the idea and execution here were execrable.
Imagine a large four-sided pyramid tipped over on its side. You are
looking into it through the bottom which has been removed. You thus
see four triangles whose sides form the floor, two walls and ceiling
of the set, coming together at the apex of the pyramid which is like a
vanishing point in the distance. If the two side panels are colored
gray, and the floor black, and the ceiling white, you have a schematic
representation of a landscape or seascape. This is what served for
the entire opera, with a few gimcrack properties thrown in to
differentiate land from sea and boat. For example, in the night scene
in Act II were added one lonely leafed branch each projecting in from
left and right to suggest a garden. Looking at the pointed apex of
the pyramid, where the eye naturally kept landing, for over four hours
was torturous and brought on a feeling of claustrophobia. Furthermore,
the designer evidently decided to express the negativity of daytime
which Wagner emphasizes by providing a very brightly lit sky triangle.
The white of this sky was so glaringly bright that the singers were
often silhouetted against it as black shadows and the titles on the
back of the seat in front of me were unreadable, because the eyes had
to keep dilating and undilating to make the transition. The
painfulness of continually dilating and undilating the eyes induced me
to give up on the titles after a while, not a great handicap because I
know the plot well. But the physical pain of looking at the set rarely
ceased, except during the night scene when the set turned mercifully
blue. (One inspired touch in this disaster was when the love potion
was drunk in Act I and the triangles turned pink and then red to
express the rush of realization of love, before turning back to white
and gray.) All in all, the set was obtrusive, pretentious,
claustrophobic and physically painful. A painting teacher of mine used
to say that one could paint a dull day but the painting should not be
dull. Here, the designer mistook the expression of pain which is
transmuted in Wagner's hands into sublime beauty, for the necessity to
wreak both physical and psychological pain on the audience.
Leaving aside the set, the performance provided what I had experienced
last year at the Met with Parsifal: an understanding of the opera on a
deeper level. Having thought the plot mawkish and the need for Tristan
to die simply a deux-from-the-machine kind of excuse for a tragic
ending, I now absorbed the story emotionally and even shed a few tears
during the final transfiguration scene (which was superbly sung and
acted by Eaglen). I understood what I had briefly glimpsed at times
in the past and then forgotten, that the art of opera is more than the
sum of its parts and cannot be truly grasped without being there in
person. The plots of many operas, not just Wagner's, may be improbable
but are redeemed by the totality of the art form. I look forward
especially to seeing the Ring at the Met next spring (if I can get
tickets) for the comparable deepened understanding of the cycle.
Lastly, I understand the Tristan chord and its genesis better now. I
have been asking myself continually for over a year now, and in one
instance have asked this forum: how could Wagner, who wrote and spoke
voluminously on everything that interested him, have not commented at
all (as far as I'm aware) on the revolutionary breaking down and
recasting of Western harmony which this opera accomplished – perhaps
his most important influence on the future of art? Having experienced
the heartbreak of the work more fully for the first time, I now know
why. I remember reading of the utter incomprehension of the people who
first heard it – even Berlioz could not understand the music and
listened in vain for a resolution into a meaningful tonic key. Yet to
Wagner this was a ‘practical' and concise opera which would earn him
a ready income – he had not the faintest inkling that people would be
mystified by the music, until he tried rehearsing it and found that
the musicians could not even make enough sense of it to play it. Why
was this?
Because the composer was simply casting in music the frustration of
his quest for love, not (in his mind) opening up new formal vistas.
The Tristan chord powerfully expresses beauty, sensual and romantic
love, and yearning and unfulfillment, all at once, in the haunting
arrangement of its notes. To Wagner this was giving necessary
expression to his feelings, not opening a new chapter in music
history. Likewise the refusal to come to rest in a tonic resolution
was not to him an opening up of polytonality or atonality, but again a
way to express his continuing inability to find love. He was thus
dumbfounded when his music could not be understood, at least at first.
His barely conscious creation of modern music reminds me strongly of
his contemporary Cezanne, who opened the way to cubism and modern
painting merely as a byproduct of his search for a better way of
expressing what he saw when he looked at nature. In one case, the
abandonment of traditional harmony; in the other, the abandonment of
Renaissance perspective; both accomplished almost unconsciously by
their creators.