Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Tristan – Ben Heppner
King Marke – Matthew Best
Isolde – Ann Petersen
Kurwenal – Phillip Joll
Melot – Simon Thorpe
Brangäne – Susan Bickley
Shepherd – Simon Crosby Buttle
Yannis Kokkos (director, designs)
Peter Watson (revival director)
Chorus of Welsh National Opera
Orchestra of Welsh National Opera
Lothar Koenigs (conductor)
Wagner famously declared to Mathilde Wesendonk that only mediocre
performances of Tristan could save
him, the power of the work being such that it would otherwise be banned. ‘Perfectly
good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ Alas,
he – and we – must endure the opposite problem; when, at least in the theatre,
do we ever have the chance to find out. It is difficult enough to find an
orchestra with the requisite body of sound, let alone a conductor with the
skill to communicate the melos of
Wagner’s miraculous, treacherous score. Daniel Barenboim comes close, but the
only conductors I have heard live truly to fulfil that heroic task have been
Bernard Haitink and Semyon Bychkov. As ever, one longs for Furtwängler. I am
delighted to report that Lothar Koenigs did a more than reasonable job, a
distinct improvement upon his Proms Meistersinger.
Moreover, the orchestra sounded far better here than it had done in the vast
expanses of the Royal Albert Hall. I should be dishonest if I said there were
no occasions on which the lack of a greater body of strings did not register,
even on occasion painfully so, but far more often, I was taken aback at the
degree of success with which the strings punched above their weight. The WNO
woodwind section often excelled itself, clearly delighting in some interesting
highlighting of lines often overlooked. (Barenboim often does something similar,
in a nod to his experience with the orchestral sonorities of French music.)
To return to Koenigs, there was little here that seemed
arbitrary, and if Wagner’s vast architectonic forms did not always register as
they do in the finest hands, sections thereof possessed conviction, shape, and
direction. Particularly impressive were the more menacing sections, for
instance the violence one hears upon the arrival of Marke and Melot at Kareol,
and Kurwenal’s response. Sadly, much of the good work was undone by the
near-criminal cuts imposed upon the score. If I remember correctly, that in Act
Two was not the so-called ‘traditional’ excision, but it was no less
disorienting, the very heart of Wagner’s drama, verbal as well as musical,
treated with disdain. (And yes, I am well aware that, conductors I revere,
Haitink included, have acted similarly, though not always so.) The cut in
Tristan’s monologue was worse still; indeed, its shock was so disorienting that
I could not tell you precisely what was done; tonally, as well as verbally, it
made no sense whatsoever. Doubtless the cuts were made for vocal rather than
interpretative reasons, but they are no more excusable for that, which brings
me to my next point.
For, if conductors almost always fall short, their part
almost seems the easiest to fulfil. What of the cast, and especially what of
Tristan? I have never heard a singer up to its demands, at least not in the
theatre. We all know what happened to Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld – or rather,
we all tend to know the legend. At any rate, the days of a Windgassen, let
alone a Suthaus, let alone a Melchior, seem to be gone forever. That said, some
Tristans fare better than others. I had been heartened by reports from the first
night, suggesting that Ben Heppner’s voice had rallied. (His 2009 appearance at Covent Garden was not a happy experience.) For the first
act, the least challenging for the part, that just about seemed to be the case.
One might even have made a claim for ruggedness as part of the character. And,
to be fair, there were moments during the agonies of the third act monologue in
which Heppner’s struggles – not just in terms of his vocal difficulties –
proved moving, if perhaps more appropriate to Peter Grimes than to Tristan.
Heppner really does not do erotic. I defy anyone, however, not to have found
painful in the worst sense the swathes of the score in which there were not so
much intonational problems as an inability to sing, apparently even to hear,
the correct notes at all. There were certainly plenty of occasions when he was
more than a tone out of kilter with the score. Moreover, the bareness in many registers
of the voice, even when in tune, now sadly seems quite beyond repair.
That said, if one inevitably harks back to Nilsson,
Flagstad, et al., Ann Petersen’s
Isolde was more than creditable. There is neither the Lieder-singer’s detail that Nina Stemme brings to the role, nor the
searing intensity of the unforgettable Waltraud Meier, but this young pretender
is far from negligible. She sang intelligently, and for the most part with good
command of line, though her tuning, especially during the second act duet, was
not always so good as it might have been. Susan Bickley’s Brangäne was again an
intelligent portrayal, alert to musical and verbal requirements, though oddly,
the interjections from her second-act watch proved rather on the tremulous
side. Phillip Joll’s Kurwenal was at best gruff, more often, I am afraid to
say, merely crude. I almost always find myself saying that King Markes rarely
disappoint; yet, if it would be exaggerated to say that Matthew Best’s
assumption disappointed, his lament often lacked focus.
If, somehow, one had succeeded with respect to conductor,
orchestra, and soloists, whatever, then, would one need to do successfully to stage
the work? It needs staging; of that I have no doubt. And yet, it seems to need
so little. Abstraction has in my experience always worked best, though one should
not be prescriptive about it. Herbert Wernicke’s properly Schopenhauerian
understanding impressed at Covent Garden under Haitink,
only to be replaced by some typical reductionism from the dread Christof Loy.
(At best, one can simply express relief that Loy’s effort was not quite so
appalling as his Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten.) There are doubtless
some who will applaud Yannis Kokkos’s apparent lack of any idea concerning the
work, beyond presenting a diagonal onstage. It is only, however, if one
compares this production to the likes of Loy’s that one could feel anything
approaching relief. By all means do very little, but do not fetishise the stage
directions, the realm of the day in those most nocturnal, metaphysical of
dramas. I could not care less whether one sees a ship or not during the first
act, though there is no harm in doing so. However, when, at the end, one is
faced with sailors upon the masts, to no apparent purpose, one at best thinks
the stance more appropriate to townsfolk rioting in Nuremberg,
and in reality cannot help to be irritated by the naïveté of it all. Likewise
the appearance of soldiers with Marke and Melot; they might have contributed something dramatically, I suppose, but on
this occasion they certainly did not. There was no threat, merely distraction. The
production has doubtless served its purpose after a fashion, but should surely
now be replaced, though, given the potential horrors of a replacement, one can
well understand the trepidation that might be felt in going ahead.
