One wonders what King Ludwig, who sponsored the first performance of
Tristan in this very theatre, really thought of the music that he
heard in 1868. His enthusiasm for Wagner really stemmed from the scores for
Tannhäuser and
Lohengrin. The opening chord of the new
work - branching out into realms of atonality - must presumably have
startled him as much as it mystified its first audience (including Berlioz)
when Wagner performed the Prelude in a Paris concert some five years
earlier. Zubin Mehta, who conducts here, certainly relishes the music. In
the days before he cast himself in the role of director for mega-media tenor
circuses, he was a conductor to be reckoned with. His interpretation here
brings decided memories of Solti’s hyper-heated traversal of the score
on disc some twenty years earlier. There are other things here which
underline that parallel: the recorded balance gives full weight to the
orchestra, often at the expense of the voices who are subsumed within the
waves of sound emanating from the pit. Some of the singers, as in
Solti’s recording, do not emerge from the contest unscathed.
Waltraud Meier was the
nonpareil among Kundrys for many
years, and her Isolde has some of the same attributes. She is a riveting
actress, clearly relishing every word of the text; but she is better in
anger than in romance. Her voice lacks the sense of femininity that one
finds with singers such as Helga Dernesch or (more recently) Nina Stemme,
and which she has subsequently demonstrated in her performances of
Sieglinde. She has no trouble with the top notes, although they clearly tax
her to the limit of her resources; but she has to take a breath in the
middle of her expansive line just before she extinguishes the torch. Her top
Cs at the beginning of the Love Duet are flicked at rather than delivered
with full voice. She remains fresh-toned throughout, and even though the
Liebestod in front of a drop curtain finds her in severe danger of
being overwhelmed by the orchestra she never quite succumbs. She is rightly
given the biggest ovation of all at the end.
A further parallel with Solti’s recording is to be found in
Jon Frederick West’s
Tristan, who has more than a passing
similarity to Solti’s Fritz Uhl: a voice working at the very limits of
its strength, and despite intelligent use sounding a size too small for the
role. He is also rather a dramatic cipher, keeping his eyes firmly glued on
the prompt box and the conductor even during the most romantic of his
entanglements with Isolde. In the final Act he generally manages to make
himself heard clearly over the orchestra, although sometimes he has to
resort to a species of
Sprechstimme in order to do so.
Marjana Lipovsek is a properly involved Brangäne, and she and
Meier make a good dramatic impact during Act One but she too is overwhelmed
in places by Mehta’s boiling delivery of the orchestral score. Most
unfortunately her delivery of her Warning during the Love Duet is unsteady
and plaintive in tone, which cannot have been helped by the producer’s
bringing her onto the stage to place nightlights around the lovers like some
over-eager gooseberry. During her second interruption she is properly kept
offstage, but then has to force her voice to be audible over the orchestra.
Bernd Weikl’s Kurwenal, on the other hand, simply seems out of
sorts, with a voice that sounds woolly and aged in the wrong sort of way. He
was singing much better than this in other recordings at the time, and one
suspects he may have been ill. As it is he doesn’t really wring our
heartstrings in Act Three in the way a Kurwenal in top form can. Kurt Moll
is a fine King Mark, but in the final scene he also sounds undesirably grey
of tone. The other members of the cast are fine, but nothing special; Claes
H Ahnsjö is a very lightweight Melot.
The production by Peter Konwitschny at first generally adheres
pretty closely to Wagner’s stage directions - no appearance of King
Mark at the end of Act One, for example - but when it departs from them it
does not do so effectively. The young sailor at the beginning is present on
stage; and at the end of Act One the lovers are entangled with each other
long before they drink what they imagine is the poison which will loosen
their constraints in the face of anticipated death. This leaves them with
very little to do during the long orchestral passage after they have drunk
the potion. At the end of Act One, by the way, the final offstage chord on
the trumpets is cut off very abruptly - presumably to avoid the audience
reaction, which is edited out; was there booing interspersed with the
applause? The wounding of Tristan by Melot at the end of Act Two is rather
botched, and it is far from clear what actually happens here. Before that
Tristan and Isolde have sat on each side of King Mark while they exchange
their vows to follow each other, which seems rather like unnecessarily
rubbing salt into the wound.
However in Act Three the departures from Wagner’s original
scenario are more obtrusive, and much less convincing. We appear to be
situated in a hospital room with a large functional central heating
radiator, and Tristan has been provided with a slide projector on which he
seems to be viewing his childhood holiday photographs. The shepherd is kept
offstage during the opening scene, which robs his short dialogue with
Kurwenal of any sense of pathos. Later
two cor anglais players in
ordinary concert dress wander onto the scene as Tristan describes the death
of his parents. Tristan comes forward, takes the cor anglais from one of
them to examine it, then hands it back and the two of them walk off again.
What this is meant to signify God only knows.
In his booklet note Konwitschny says that he wanted to avoid the
view of
Tristan as a tragedy - although surely nobody would regard
Isolde’s ecstatic
Verklärung (to employ Wagner’s own
description of the
Liebestod) as a tragic ending? His solution is
simply nonsensical. As Isolde sings her lament over the dead Tristan the
latter comes back to life, and the two of them wander off to the front of
the stage, remaining to watch callously as their friends slaughter each
other in a battle to occupy the hospital room. They then draw a curtain over
the scene and Isolde stands in front of this to sing her
Liebestod
directly to Tristan. After that they move off to the side of the stage
together, as the drop curtain parts to show King Mark and Brangäne
standing in contemplation of a pair of coffins. I’m not sure how this
is less tragic than Wagner’s original, but it fights every inch of the
way against his transfigured music at the close.
The set designs really do nothing for Konwitschny’s concept.
The primary colours throughout are simply horrible. Act One is set on the
deck of a cruise liner, with Isolde and Brangäne seated on sun-loungers
sipping cocktails - the young sailor brings them refills. Tristan is
discovered shaving in his cabin, and when he appears later on deck to visit
Isolde, he still has shaving foam on his chin - presumably to enable him to
offer her a razor with which to cut his throat. In Act Two Isolde’s
torch looks like a gaudy Christmas decoration; and Tristan drags on a
violently coloured yellow sofa for his encounter with Isolde, which looks
absolutely ridiculous. I have already discussed the travesty that is Act
Three in the preceding paragraphs.
The video production by Brian Large is a model of showing us what we
need to see, and manages on occasion to minimise what we would rather not
see. One only wishes that his successors in the production of operas for DVD
were similarly circumspect. The subtitles in English derive from William
Mann’s translation originally made for Covent Garden in 1968; I have
discussed their deficiencies in earlier reviews, and can only repeat what I
said then: “The translation itself is at once too literal and too free
in tone -
Der Welt-Atems wehendem All simply does not have the proper
transcendent atmosphere when it is rendered as
The cosmic breath’s
gusty totality.” To describe Isolde as a “spruce
colleen” is no more apt as a description of Waltraud Meier than it was
of Gwyneth Jones.
When it was originally released back in 1999, this was only the
second representation of
Tristan und Isolde on video; it had been
preceded by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s Bayreuth production. It also
appeared at some later date as a cover-mounted DVD on a periodical magazine,
and now re-emerges in a new release. It was not universally well received as
a production on its first appearance, and the musical performance was not
regarded as sufficiently good to redeem it. In the intervening years
versions of
Tristan on DVD and film have proliferated, so it would
need to be exceptionally good to justify its continuance in the catalogue.
The Glyndebourne production from 2004 is streets ahead of this, despite the
obnoxious and inexcusable cut in the Love Duet, and Nina Stemme has a much
more natural Isolde voice than does Meier here. Meier herself is heard to
better advantage in Barenboim’s CD set, as is Weikl in
Bernstein’s. Even Ponnelle’s Bayreuth staging, with its equally
wrong-headed treatment of the final scene, is better than this; and for
sheer beauty of set design there is no comparison.
No, unless you are a Wagner completist who wants copies of every
available production, it would be better to look almost anywhere else for a
Tristan DVD. Apart from a booklet note on the origins of the work, a
brief memorandum by the producer, and a synopsis, there are no extras.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Masterwork Index:
Tristan und Isolde
Previous review:
Frank Cadenhead
