A vocally thrilling Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival

My most recent journey to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany was eventful, mostly because of some challenges getting there and because of the innovative use of Enhanced Reality glasses in the Parsifal production, which I will review in a later blog. I've done this pilgrimage three times now, with about 7 years between each visit. The experience remains atmospheric and oddly comforting, as I easily re-settled into traditions that have persisted since Richard Wagner founded the festival in 1876. Wagner, after initially trying to persuade Munich to build him a proper opera house for his spectacles (the Ring of the Niebelung was about to premiere), he gave up and instead built his new "shrine" in the sleepy town of Bayreuth, in the farmland north of Nürnberg in Bavaria. This was a good decision, as he could 1. have complete control over the construction, and 2. get festival goes away from the congested cities, so they could concentrate 100% on his music. Traveling there often required a laborious coach ride which, along with the hard wooden seats (to enhance acoustics), exemplified the German tendency to think that a little preliminary pain makes the ending payoff all the better. I had a bit of this experience this time; my planned 8 hour rail journey from Brig Switzerland took 4 hours longer than planned, including 2 hours in a hot, jammed, standing room-only local train from Stuttgart to Nürnberg. This was due to several cancelled express trains, a now-common phenomenon in the once-impeccable German Railways system. 

Once in Bayreuth my experience was largely unchanged from past visits.  I you haven't read it, see my initial impressions of the festival experience in 2011 here. The walk up the "green hill" to the hall remains serene and pleasant. 

A brass choir still announces the start of each act with a fanfare from a balcony, playing an excerpt from that day's opera. The operas still start at 4pm, with two 45 minute breaks for leisurely dining (I ate nice meals in the fancy restaurants, timed more efficiently than the railroads), meaning you exit the 4-5 hour operas about 10pm. They still check your ID on entry, ensuring that you match your printed name on the ticket--this is to discourage scalping. The audience is now less a bit more German and less international. They are also less disciplined after entry. They used to remain standing to allow other audience to enter, then sit down together, as if on cue. Now it just the usual random entry as at other houses. Ach, the death of Prussian tradition! Applause is robust after the opera, but blissfully there are no standing ovations as in NY theater or Portugal classical concerts. 

The theater continues to become a bit more comfortable. I sat in the balcony this time (the right back wall in the photo below), and noted that the seats there are much better padded, and more comfortable than downstairs. 

As before, the opera offers no convenient translation with projected supratitles, so it's now one of the few world opera houses to lack this amenity. You need to study up before you go, as Wagner intended. Within the town of Bayreuth, new restorations of the Wagner home and of the gorgeous18th century Baroque opera house make for attractive sightseeing in the daytime. It's also fun to take a short hike in the hills and cow pastures near the festival, providing a placid rural vibe.

There were a few detectable changes to the rampant hyper-traditionalism. There are now more dining options, eg a buffet restaurant and a food court with cold fish and bratwurst, along with a few more souvenir options. Most striking, you can now easily get tickets online as close as 1-2 weeks before the show. On my first visit in 2011 I had to pay black market resale rates, since an official ticket only came after years on the waiting list, or membership in a local Richard Wagner Society (yes, these are an actual thing). Opera attendance has plummeted worldwide since COVID (I am not sure why). The Metropolitan Opera now plays to 50% capacity at times, and even the venerated Bayreuth does not always sell out. So if you want to go to the Wagner Festival, you now can, even with planning a few months ahead. 

As to the first opera I saw this season, Tristan und Isolde, it maintained my Bayreuth experience of exceptional musical quality, but with variable staging success. I cannot imagine a better protagonist pair these days than Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund and Austrian tenor Andreas Schager. Both 50-ish singers act well, and seemed to be in love on stage despite some underpowered stage direction. Vocally, Nylund has a medium-volume, attractive voice (she began singing Mozart and Rossini) that worked here but would likely fall short in a bigger house like the Met. She emotionally occupied the role and gave a nuanced performance, with a moving Liebestod (love-death) to end the opera. Schager is more of a blunt instrument, a real heldentenor with a commanding, bright, somewhat monochromatic voice. However, it was thrilling for once to hear a tenor who seemed fully in command of the grueling role, and who actually could sing the long Act 3 monologues without my worrying about his vocal health. For once, the couple were equally matched vocally, as they used to be in classic 1950s-60s recordings. So I finally got to hear a live Tristan with the vocal balance Wagner intended. 

The fine orchestra, sort of an all-star band taken from orchestras throughout Germany, was conducted by Semyon Bychkov. It seemed a little muted to me, both in volume and in intensity. I wondered if the balcony seats contributed to this, but I read the same comment from some reviewers, so I think it was just an under-passionate conductor. As always it was cool to experience the orchestra playing in the unique Bayreuth pit, tiered below the conductor and with all members invisible to the audience because of a black cover over the pit area (see the left of the photo of the hall above). Wagner did not want the audience districted by seeing either conductor or orchestra, and instead to focus on the stage drama. Accomplished!

As to the production, it was certainly better than the horrible version by Kristina Wagner that I saw in 2018, but was still not great. The Icelandic designer/director Torleifur Örn Arnarsson set all three acts in a ship--first sailing from Ireland to Cornwall, then below in the hold cluttered with a bunch of knickknacks/junk presumably looted from Ireland (see photo above), then in a grim ruin of grounded ship skeletons. This was mostly ok, but the many piles of debris required the singers to constantly clamber over and around things, spoiling some big moments. For example, in Act 2 when Tristan rushes in to embrace his love potion-drunk Isolde, he had to climb over a pile of furniture, rather than rushing to his arms in a frenzy, as the music depicts. 

Ditto in Act 3, when Isolde arrives as Tristan dies--yet more clambering is required.  Equally poor was the lighting. Tristan kept walking into dark spots during his thrilling Act 3 singing--have the directors never heard of a tracking spotlight? Also, the concluding Liebestod of Isolde ended in sort of a faded orange blur that did not convey much atmosphere or transcendence. In short, this was a pretty conventional production unmarred by too many directorial flights of fancy, but one not very sympathetic to the drama.

I'll remember this Tristan for the great singing, but would hope that Bayreuth can finally stage a convincing production of this opera one of these years.