Opera: The miracle that is Tristan und Isolde
On Monday night I saw Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the the Metropolitan Opera. It was perhaps the fourth time I have seen it live, and I have listened to it countless times. Once again the live performance exerted a very unique affect on me, one that I do not experience in other operas or in just listening to it at home on recordings. While this production had its ups and downs, there is something about a live performance of Tristan that suspends time for me in a most peculiar and intoxicating way. I first experienced this in the 1980's at the San Francisco Opera, when I went into my first live experience at 6 pm, emerged at 11:30, yet experienced it as if about one hour had passed. I wondered then: how does Wagner achieve this time warp?
The Met production Monday featured Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton as the ill fated pair. Both sang well, without the overwhelming vocal heft of the great past singers like Flagstad, Melchoir, and Nilsson, but with great sensitivity to the music and without producing the feeling that I had just witnessed a painful singing marathon. The modern way to produce the opera, in an era of less-than-superhuman tenors and sopranos, is to designate the great orchestra as the main character, and train the singers to sensitively fit into the texture, rather than try to dominate it. This approach works well in this opera, as it is perhaps the greatest orchestral score ever written and perhaps the best example of Wagner's idea of gesamtkunstwerk, in which sets, music, orchestra, singing, and words all merge into one united whole. In most modern productions, as long as the conductor and orchestra handle the demands competently (no mean feat), this opera seems to succeed regardless of the singers' or stage director's limitations or quirks. This makes it very different from, say, Tosca (see last week's blog), in which singing actors are critical to the success of the evening. The opera's score, beginning with the famous prelude and ending with Isolde's Liebestod (love-death) is an endless, never-resolving series of rich harmonic progressions that requires the conductor to perceive and communicate a 4-5 hour arc. The renowned current musical director of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, Christian Thielemann, admitted in an interview that he still approaches the score warily, because if not it can suck him into sort of a vortex and make things spin out of control. He says there is really nothing like this in the rest of orchestral music. So where did all this otherworldly music come from?
Wagner composed Tristan und Isolde from 1857-9, while he was also trying to finish his mammoth four opera Ring of the Nibelung cycle. The opera has a very simple plot. After killing her lover, Tristan abducts Isolde in Ireland to bring her to Cornwall to be the wife of King Mark, his foster father. She is distraught. He feels guilty because he killed her ex-boyfriend, and because when wounded, she nursed him back to health. They jointly take a love potion (thinking it is actually a death potion), fall in love, then are caught in the act by the King. Tristan is stabbed (in this updated modern production he shoots himself), is exiled, and slowly wastes away. Isolde finds him and dies as she embraces him. Death is the ultimate consummation of love (Liebestod).
Wagner describes the muscial themes of his new opera "bubbling up within him", even before he had written the libretto. In this case the words sprang from the music, rather than the other way around, which is more typical. Some biographers describe that he wrote Tristan as a sort of 19th century porn-equivalent, in response to a new love affair he was having with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a friend who was letting Wagner stay in their home while in bad financial straits. Actually, it worked the other way around. It seems that the (unconsummated) love affair sprung from the emotions he felt after composing Tristan...here human love was a secondary release from the higher thing that he had achieved in his concept of new music. Wagner would have described this as Kant's noumena or unseen forces trumping the phenomena or sensed, experienced events. Wagner had been reading Kant and Schopenhauer, and was very taken by the latter's philosophy of "Denial of the Will". Schopenhauer wrote that all human misery comes from unsatisfied Will (dissatisfaction, frustration), and that only by eliminating this frustration can true happiness result. Think of an addict. Morphine feels good, but in pursuing it relentlessly, the addict becomes miserable. Only in going cold turkey can this be resolved. This concept had been lingering in Wagner's mind for a while. Over a decade earlier, in 1842, Wagner wrote The Art Work of the Future, in which he dissects art into its components: Words, Rhythm, Harmony, Speech, Tone, Dance, Melody, etc. Here he sees his revolutionary romantic harmony as more than just music theory:
In the kingdom of Harmony there is therefore no beginning and no end; just as the objectless and self-devouring fervor of the soul, all ignorant of its source, is nothing but itself, nothing but longing, yearning, tossing, pining--and dying out, i.e. thus dying without death, and therefore everlasting falling back upon itself.
This pretty much describes both the music and the plot of Tristan und Isolde. Compare it to the couple's love duet in Act 2:
Free from delusion gentle yearning,
free from fearing, sweet longing.
Free from sighing, sublime expiring.
Free from languishing, enclosed in sweet darkness.
No evasion, no parting, just we alone, ever home,
in unmeasured realms of ecstatic dreams.
Or consider Isolde's final words as she dies:
Are they gentle aerial waves ringing out clearly, surging around me?
Are they billows of blissful fragrance?
As they seethe and roar about me, shall I breathe, shall I give ear?
Shall I drink of them, plunge beneath them?
Breathe my life away in sweet scents?
In the heaving swell, in the resounding echoes, in the universal stream of the world-breath -
to drown, to founder - unconscious - utmost rapture!
So Wagner wrote Isolde's climactic operatic death as harmony's, and love's, and life's consummation. It sounds like the old French term for orgasm le petit mort. Wagner wrote Tristan when, though married, he felt loveless and sexless. Tristan is a long exercise in musical foreplay, a five hour Denial of the Will. Tristan and Isolde, never consummating their love (like Wagner and Mathilde), become more and more overwhelmed by it, only resolving it by mutual death. But this is not the tragic death of Romeo and Juliet. This is a higher level death-merging of spirits that provides the only acceptable human catharsis (or Nirvana) for the dilemma. Somehow this pouring out of musical philosophy provided Wagner the release he needed, and results in an opera in which little happens, yet a relentless time warp drives us forward to the ultimate Liebestod. It's one thing to have this vision, and another to execute it. Somehow Wagner did it, creating one of the great works of art. It has influenced many others, including the brilliant movie director Lars von Trier, who used the music of Tristan as the score for Melancholia (2011) and ends the world with a stellar-terrestrial collision that would befit Wagner, and not be out of place in this production.
Well, enough metaphysics and back to this performance. This new Met production was booed on opening night, but not Monday. Director Mariusz Trelinski set the whole thing in twentieth century military naval settings, with a nasty modern group of sailors treating Isolde badly as they return her to Cornwall. The production was unremittingly dark and violent. For example, as Isolde sings her long Act 1 monologue describing how Tristan had killed her lover, we see this happen as a flashback onstage, as Tristan shoots the bound soldier in the head. Several critics objected, yet this legend is in fact a nasty one. For example, in the medieval version, Isolde is sent her lover's severed head! This staging featured some nice projected videos of solar eclipses (a great metaphor for the opera's constant reference to welcoming darkness vs. intrusive daylight). Many in the audience objected to the Act 2 love duet occurring in a harsh cargo hold, but this was fine for me. Given the metaphysical love being portrayed, we should not see conventional visual cues of Hollywood romance here; in a practical sense this is a good thing, since the singers who portray Tristan and Isolde are usually very beefy powerhouses who certainly do not look like Romeo and Juliet. There was a recurring flashback subplot portraying Tristan's childhood, when he saw both his mother and father die, events only briefly mentioned very briefly in the libretto. This was obviously important for the director, but were mostly distracting for me. But overall, the director did his job and created a dark, menacing, inward, subconscious set for this extraordinary drama, and mostly got out of the way of the wonderful Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted ably at this performance by Asher Fisch (the orchestra was originally prepared for the opera by Simon Rattle, exiting conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic).
I think I will continue seeing this opera about every 10 years, and only when guaranteed a good conductor and orchestra. My impression of it evolves each time. And, with maturity, I have increasingly become more awed and bewildered by its strange power.
The Met production Monday featured Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton as the ill fated pair. Both sang well, without the overwhelming vocal heft of the great past singers like Flagstad, Melchoir, and Nilsson, but with great sensitivity to the music and without producing the feeling that I had just witnessed a painful singing marathon. The modern way to produce the opera, in an era of less-than-superhuman tenors and sopranos, is to designate the great orchestra as the main character, and train the singers to sensitively fit into the texture, rather than try to dominate it. This approach works well in this opera, as it is perhaps the greatest orchestral score ever written and perhaps the best example of Wagner's idea of gesamtkunstwerk, in which sets, music, orchestra, singing, and words all merge into one united whole. In most modern productions, as long as the conductor and orchestra handle the demands competently (no mean feat), this opera seems to succeed regardless of the singers' or stage director's limitations or quirks. This makes it very different from, say, Tosca (see last week's blog), in which singing actors are critical to the success of the evening. The opera's score, beginning with the famous prelude and ending with Isolde's Liebestod (love-death) is an endless, never-resolving series of rich harmonic progressions that requires the conductor to perceive and communicate a 4-5 hour arc. The renowned current musical director of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, Christian Thielemann, admitted in an interview that he still approaches the score warily, because if not it can suck him into sort of a vortex and make things spin out of control. He says there is really nothing like this in the rest of orchestral music. So where did all this otherworldly music come from?
Wagner composed Tristan und Isolde from 1857-9, while he was also trying to finish his mammoth four opera Ring of the Nibelung cycle. The opera has a very simple plot. After killing her lover, Tristan abducts Isolde in Ireland to bring her to Cornwall to be the wife of King Mark, his foster father. She is distraught. He feels guilty because he killed her ex-boyfriend, and because when wounded, she nursed him back to health. They jointly take a love potion (thinking it is actually a death potion), fall in love, then are caught in the act by the King. Tristan is stabbed (in this updated modern production he shoots himself), is exiled, and slowly wastes away. Isolde finds him and dies as she embraces him. Death is the ultimate consummation of love (Liebestod).
Wagner describes the muscial themes of his new opera "bubbling up within him", even before he had written the libretto. In this case the words sprang from the music, rather than the other way around, which is more typical. Some biographers describe that he wrote Tristan as a sort of 19th century porn-equivalent, in response to a new love affair he was having with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a friend who was letting Wagner stay in their home while in bad financial straits. Actually, it worked the other way around. It seems that the (unconsummated) love affair sprung from the emotions he felt after composing Tristan...here human love was a secondary release from the higher thing that he had achieved in his concept of new music. Wagner would have described this as Kant's noumena or unseen forces trumping the phenomena or sensed, experienced events. Wagner had been reading Kant and Schopenhauer, and was very taken by the latter's philosophy of "Denial of the Will". Schopenhauer wrote that all human misery comes from unsatisfied Will (dissatisfaction, frustration), and that only by eliminating this frustration can true happiness result. Think of an addict. Morphine feels good, but in pursuing it relentlessly, the addict becomes miserable. Only in going cold turkey can this be resolved. This concept had been lingering in Wagner's mind for a while. Over a decade earlier, in 1842, Wagner wrote The Art Work of the Future, in which he dissects art into its components: Words, Rhythm, Harmony, Speech, Tone, Dance, Melody, etc. Here he sees his revolutionary romantic harmony as more than just music theory:
In the kingdom of Harmony there is therefore no beginning and no end; just as the objectless and self-devouring fervor of the soul, all ignorant of its source, is nothing but itself, nothing but longing, yearning, tossing, pining--and dying out, i.e. thus dying without death, and therefore everlasting falling back upon itself.
This pretty much describes both the music and the plot of Tristan und Isolde. Compare it to the couple's love duet in Act 2:
Free from delusion gentle yearning,
free from fearing, sweet longing.
Free from sighing, sublime expiring.
Free from languishing, enclosed in sweet darkness.
No evasion, no parting, just we alone, ever home,
in unmeasured realms of ecstatic dreams.
Or consider Isolde's final words as she dies:
Are they gentle aerial waves ringing out clearly, surging around me?
Are they billows of blissful fragrance?
As they seethe and roar about me, shall I breathe, shall I give ear?
Shall I drink of them, plunge beneath them?
Breathe my life away in sweet scents?
In the heaving swell, in the resounding echoes, in the universal stream of the world-breath -
to drown, to founder - unconscious - utmost rapture!
So Wagner wrote Isolde's climactic operatic death as harmony's, and love's, and life's consummation. It sounds like the old French term for orgasm le petit mort. Wagner wrote Tristan when, though married, he felt loveless and sexless. Tristan is a long exercise in musical foreplay, a five hour Denial of the Will. Tristan and Isolde, never consummating their love (like Wagner and Mathilde), become more and more overwhelmed by it, only resolving it by mutual death. But this is not the tragic death of Romeo and Juliet. This is a higher level death-merging of spirits that provides the only acceptable human catharsis (or Nirvana) for the dilemma. Somehow this pouring out of musical philosophy provided Wagner the release he needed, and results in an opera in which little happens, yet a relentless time warp drives us forward to the ultimate Liebestod. It's one thing to have this vision, and another to execute it. Somehow Wagner did it, creating one of the great works of art. It has influenced many others, including the brilliant movie director Lars von Trier, who used the music of Tristan as the score for Melancholia (2011) and ends the world with a stellar-terrestrial collision that would befit Wagner, and not be out of place in this production.
Well, enough metaphysics and back to this performance. This new Met production was booed on opening night, but not Monday. Director Mariusz Trelinski set the whole thing in twentieth century military naval settings, with a nasty modern group of sailors treating Isolde badly as they return her to Cornwall. The production was unremittingly dark and violent. For example, as Isolde sings her long Act 1 monologue describing how Tristan had killed her lover, we see this happen as a flashback onstage, as Tristan shoots the bound soldier in the head. Several critics objected, yet this legend is in fact a nasty one. For example, in the medieval version, Isolde is sent her lover's severed head! This staging featured some nice projected videos of solar eclipses (a great metaphor for the opera's constant reference to welcoming darkness vs. intrusive daylight). Many in the audience objected to the Act 2 love duet occurring in a harsh cargo hold, but this was fine for me. Given the metaphysical love being portrayed, we should not see conventional visual cues of Hollywood romance here; in a practical sense this is a good thing, since the singers who portray Tristan and Isolde are usually very beefy powerhouses who certainly do not look like Romeo and Juliet. There was a recurring flashback subplot portraying Tristan's childhood, when he saw both his mother and father die, events only briefly mentioned very briefly in the libretto. This was obviously important for the director, but were mostly distracting for me. But overall, the director did his job and created a dark, menacing, inward, subconscious set for this extraordinary drama, and mostly got out of the way of the wonderful Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted ably at this performance by Asher Fisch (the orchestra was originally prepared for the opera by Simon Rattle, exiting conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic).
I think I will continue seeing this opera about every 10 years, and only when guaranteed a good conductor and orchestra. My impression of it evolves each time. And, with maturity, I have increasingly become more awed and bewildered by its strange power.
This is actually one of my favorite movies, hopefully I will get to see it in opera soon.
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