SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Isolde – Barbara Schneider-Hofstetter

Brangäne – Michelle Breedt

Tristan – Stig Andersen

King Marke – Matti Salminen

Kurwenal – Martin Gantner

Melot – Volker Vogel

Shepherd – Martin Zysset

Steersman – Joa Helgesson

Sailor – Peter Sonn

Claus Guth (director)

Aglaja Nicolet (revival director)

Christian Schmidt (designs)

Jürgen Hoffmann (lighting)

Volker Michl (choreography)

Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Michelle Breedt as Brangäne Picture Courtesy of Zurich Opera

It is not so often with a work such as Tristan und Isolde that I read the programme synopsis. I flatter myself that I know the plot inside out and, in any case, the stage action is hardly the thing with Tristan. Wagner acknowledged this when condensing the action of Tristan und Isolde into a few words for Mathilde Wesendonck. He did not even mention King Marke’s forgiveness: the action, he seems to be claiming, is not really of this phenomenal world at all, but metaphysical. Even Tristan’s agonies go unmentioned upon the way to ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’ (Erlösung: Tod, Sterben, Untergehen, Nichtmehrerwachen!) For whatever reason, however, I glanced at the synopsis following the performance. The production began to make more sense, at least upon its own terms, for the recounting, though nowhere did it explicitly acknowledge this, was of Claus Guth’s Tristan rather than Richard Wagner’s. Thus, we read:

Isolde is about to marry Marke, who is much older than she is. Powerless, she has to accept the match, which his nephew Tristan has arranged for social reasons. Brangäne, who is aware of Isolde’s desperation, argues with the voice of reason that, in her eyes, Isolde’s union with Marke, a high-ranking personage, can only be advantageous.

Wagner, it is true, points in the aforementioned summary, to the ‘custom of the time’ leading to the sin of marriage for politics’ sake. Yet that comes very much as background and remains in any case quite different from this banal, updated foregrounding. Isolde, we learn, ‘refuses to go to the altar with Marke before she and Tristan have spoken openly with each other’. Kareol is merely referred to as the ‘house’ of Tristan’s father. Metaphysics are banished, just as they were in Christof Loy’s production for the Royal Opera, which, in retrospect, now seems an echo, witting or otherwise, of Guth’s retelling, first staged in 2008 (and reviewed for Seen and Heard by José Maria Iruzun).

In short, what we have is an attempt to render Tristan as a bourgeois drama, somewhat in the manner of Ibsen, albeit without much of what makes Ibsen of interest. What one might consider the coup de théâtre is Christian Schmidt’s stage design for the first act, clearly the Villa Wesendonck, from which Isolde-Mathilde gazes out of her bedroom window. Local references seem to be a current preoccupation for Guth; apparently, his recent Ariadne auf Naxos, also for Zurich, was set in a local coffee-house. Yet the Wagner-Wesendonck soap opera is neither maintained nor discarded upon the way to something of more universal significance. For the first two acts, we remain within this ‘house’ and its garden – the Treibhaus plants are certainly evocative –but it is hardly enough merely to arrive at the Konzept and half-heartedly to pursue it, as here. Even had the idea been more clearly developed, I doubt it would have worked, for it appears – and this is not an absolute statement, merely an observation based upon experience – that a production trying to make this particular work ‘about’ something other than its inner drama simply will not work. Harry Kupfer recognises this apparent truth in his production for the Berlin Staatsoper. He incorporates nineteenth-century references, though they are never fetishised, remaining at the service of Wagner’s drama. Kupfer’s centrepiece for each act, a fallen angel, with a Victorian touch of ‘bad nineteenth-century’ such as Thomas Mann would surely have appreciated, is more importantly a revolving space for the true, inner action, and an ever-present reminder of the fallen human condition. Here, leaving aside the unfortunate failure of the revolving stage equipment on one occasion, the setting is both unduly prominent and lacking in further meaning. Directorial touches such as Tristan turning a light switch on and off at the end of the First Act – how technologically advanced was the Wesendonck household? – add nothing but irritated distraction. If a metaphor for Day and Night were intended, we could surely do better than that. I simply could not fathom why Isolde and Brangäne should be portrayed as near-identical, nor why they acted reciprocally as maid.

Regarding the general idea, one might claim that Hans Jürgen Syberberg does something similar in his Parsifal film, introducing imagery from the writing of the drama and more generally from Wagner’s life, for instance the window from the room of the Venetian Palazzo Vendramin, in which Wagner died. Yet Syberberg provides a multiplicity of settings and ideas – a problem for some, perhaps, but a different problem – and is anything but reductive. Moreover, Parsifal is not Tristan. Guth is a director I have admired, his Salzburg Festival Figaro far and away the best production I have seen of the work. More recently, though, not least in the remaining instalments of his Salzburg Da Ponte trilogy, his ideas have tended to confuse rather than to illuminate. Bizarrely, he reverted to the discredited notion of omitting the final scene of Don Giovanni, yet in a production that had little of the Romantic to it. That Figaro, almost an anti-Figaro, was certainly not faithful to the spirit, let alone to the letter, of the work, yet somehow its Ibsen-like rethinking worked. This conception of Tristan does not cohere.

There had been plenty of musical drama, in a resolutely non-Wagnerian sense, even during rehearsals. Waltraud Meier had departed the cast, on account of ‘artistic differences’ with Bernard Haitink. Meier’s replacement was Barbara Schneider-Hofstetter. Her voice did not sound especially appropriate for the role, possessing a distinctly mezzo-like tinta, vocally indistinct from that of Michelle Breedt’s Brangäne. One might, given the mysterious mirroring of the characters on stage, have thought that the point; yet, given the late substitution, that seems unlikely. Martin Gantner’s Kurwenal, at least initially, also sounded oddly cast; yet, despite a voice that often sounded more like a tenor than a baritone, he convinced on all counts, his fidelity to Tristan properly moving.

Peter Seiffert had fallen ill, to be replaced by Stig Andersen. Andersen’s Tristan would have been an impressive achievement, even if he had been slated for the role all along. Vocally and textually accurate throughout, he possessed not only the stamina to get through the third act, but vividly portrayed the agonies, physical and metaphysical, so lacking on stage. Matti Salminen’s King Marke wavered a little during the second act, but his forgiveness – perhaps Wagner was wrong after all – was truly moving, almost unbearably so. The voice of experience told and intensified. Bar an unnervingly out of tune Sailor, the smaller parts were well enough taken, Joa Helgesson bringing a winningly forthright quality to the tiny role of the Steersman.

What made this Tristan unforgettable, however, was Haitink’s conducting. The contrast between his and even the better renditions I have heard in between his final Covent Garden performance and now was stark. The unfolding of Wagner’s music drama was paced to perfection. Whereas, following Esa-Pekka Salonen’s recent performance with the Philharmonia, I was intrigued to find the score sounding less tonal, more proto-Schoenbergian, in conception than usual, here Wagner’s motivic web and vast tonal plan were invested with conviction and meaning at every turn. This was not, as Haitink’s detractors have sometimes claimed, a reading of ‘absolute music’. The terror instilled during the first act of the third act was clearly derived from words and music, or rather from their indissoluble union; especially telling was the rhythmic drive, not excitable but clearly grounded in harmonic rhythm. The Wagnerian melos, without which any performance will be in vain, emerged unchallenged as the guiding thread through the chromatic labyrinth. There were occasions when the Zurich Opera Orchestra sounded somewhat tired, likewise when the strings gained an edge to their tone. If Haitink were better served vocally in Zurich than in London (often catastrophic, in the worst sense), the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House’s contribution had been significantly superior. There was, moreover, something particularly odd about the off-stage horns in the second act; they sounded almost as if relayed electronically. Nevertheless, the orchestra was for the most part able to execute Haitink’s vision; the rest one could readily forget. Truly, one would have to go back to Furtwängler to hear Wagner conducting on so exalted a level. Let us hope that we might yet hear more Wagner from Haitink’s baton.

Mark Berry