Leipzig Opera House
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Tristan (Daniel Kirch) and Isolde (Meagan Miller)
Images: Tom Schulze |
Tristan – Daniel Kirch
Isolde – Meagan Miller
King Marke – Sebastian Pilgrim
Kurwenal – Jukka Rasilainen
Melot – Matthias Stier
Brangäne – Barbara Kozelj
Shepherd – Martin Petzold
Steersman – Franz Xaver
Schlecht
Young Sailor – Alvaro Zambrano
Enrico Lübbe (director)
Torsten Buß (co-director)
Étienne Pluss (set designs)
Linda Redlin (costumes)
fettFilm (video)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Nele Winter (dramaturgy)
Leipzig Opera Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)
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| Sailors and Kurwenal (Jukka Rasilainen) |
Leipzig’s relationship with its
greatest son has never been easy, nor should it have been. Wagner, in all his
glorious and inglorious contradictions, is too complicated, problematical, and
interesting to be reduced to mere hero-worship; or, as Theodor Adorno put it, ‘progress
and reaction in Wagner’s music cannot be separated as sheep from goats’. There
has been – arguably, still is – enough of that in Bayreuth, anyway. Many Wagner
productions of what we may broadly think of as the Regietheater era have acknowledged that: Rings from Joachim Herz to Frank Castorf and beyond, Parsifal and Meistersinger stagings too. Of the music dramas, however, Tristan has seemed more resistant to
problematisation, deconstructive or otherwise. Rare examples with some degree
of success have included Peter
Konwitschny’s old Munich production and, more fully, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2018 staging for Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the latter
loudly denounced by most, yet for me fruitful in its alienation. Ultimately, Tristan’s problems seem different: more
a matter of balance between drama as conventionally understood and that metaphysical
drama of the Schopenhauerian Will and representation which Wagner, for one, certainly
came to see as the work’s true core. Or is it, perhaps, that one needs to look
and indeed to listen more closely, more subtly, for the fissures of a modernity
that no one has ever seriously been able to deny this most singular of works?
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| Isolde and Tristan |
The question remains open, I
think. In the meantime – we shall likely ever remain in that meantime – Oper
Leipzig has steadily been renewing its Wagner roster. This new Tristan production arises from a welcome Leipzig collaboration with the Intendant at the
city’s Schauspiel, Enrico Lübbe, and his deputy, Torsten Buss. Fundamental to
the staging is a ship(wreck): the location, in a relatively straightforward
realistic sense, of the first act, yet also a focus for memories, dreams, psychological
states and philosophical ideas brought into being. Each act has the same basic
setting, yet is seen from a different standpoint, in a different state of
repair, on a different scale, so as to enable the quasi-symphonic emergence of
unity in diversity, ultimately cyclical, as perhaps befits a nineteenth-century
work, in a final, post-Liebestod
return by Tristan and Isolde to a pristine ship, never previously seen – and perhaps
never having existed – in that state. In its second-act ruins, we appreciate not
only our construction of connections, but crucially, our capacity for imagination.
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| Brangäne (Barbara Kozelj) and Isolde |
So too does Tristan, who,
during Isolde’s initial confrontation with him, soon regresses to the role of a
child, even an unborn one, lying in foetal fashion, as if to recapture the
essence of a relationship he never consciously experienced first time around, his
mother having died during childbirth. Is it his imagination, then, that creates
the multiplying Isolde figures during the love duet? What do they signify?
There is an aimlessness, an unsatisfactory nature to them, which may hint at dashing
of romantic hopes long since foretold, psychoanalytically. There is something,
moreover, of the delirium we encounter more fully in the third act, to the way
people, settings, thoughts, and even narratives drift in and out of
consciousness. Can one, should one, begin to piece them together? Temptation is
unavoidable; the production seems to encourage it. A nagging doubt nonetheless
remains, like the contemporary, or at least Adornian, nagging doubt concerning Wagnerian
totality. It is Tristan und Isolde,
of course, not Tristan oder Isolde;
the celebrated second-act discussion of ‘diese süße Wörtlein: “und”’ is often
understood to offer a conceptual key to the work. And yet, Tristan will tear
off his bandages, will he not? In what sense are the two ever truly united? Is
the union we witness at the close of this production noumenal, phenomenal, or a
sham?
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| Tristan and Isolde |
Oppositions will always play a
crucial part in Tristan, above all
that between night and day; it would be strange if that did not in some sense
feature in a staging. It certainly does here, for instance when the stage turns
almost, yet not quite, black – part of the ship may still just be perceived – after
drinking of the potion and, again, during the love duet. Night, even then, is a
creation: of Tristan and Isolde; of the ship, as foundation and locus of the
drama; of Wagner; of the performer; of the audience; and so forth. That we wish
the dimly perceptible set to disappear entirely is symptomatic: Romantic
illusion and delusion are ours, as well as the characters', as well as Wagner’s.
Perhaps, then, we did need to watch and listen more subtly. One might think of
this as a collaboration between different forms of light: lighting and video,
as well as those entrusted with it (Olaf Freese and Torge Møller of fettFilm); Freese
in the programme booklet refers to a ‘Zusammenspiel [interplay] von Licht und
Video’. Film, just as much as set design, creates and disintegrates the ship - at least until the close. Likewise, we might say, there are collaboration and, more dramatically, interplay between realism and abstraction; between the individual
psychological of chamber theatre – often chamber music, too – and metaphysical symbolism;
and, of particular importance to this production, between sea-voyage and its fateful,
fatal culmination, symbolised by the image of a ship, perhaps as shipwreck, as
its own graveyard, somewhere between stagnant and dead. It should move, yet it
does not; rather our gaze moves, or is moved for us by the design team, and
more broadly, the production. Our souls, similarly, are moved, or should be, by
Wagner’s great Greek Chorus of the orchestra.
Visual and, more specifically, design values are strongly to the fore, yet not for
their own sake, as mere backdrop, but as a portal to the dramatic and
conceptual. One may think this a Seelenlandschaft
(‘landscape of the soul’), as Lübbe describes it, not least when the excellent
English horn player, Gundel Jannemann-Fischer, wanders across the stage, a
different figure from the Shepherd: a relationship that may perhaps be
understood in terms of Schopenhauerian aesthetics and implicit critique or at
least (typically Wagnerian) extension thereof. The alte Weise is far more than something the Shepherd plays, yet
Wagner would have considered that all the more justification for concealment of
the player. Granting the instrument personification, albeit in gentle,
non-provocative fashion, both heightens the importance of music and also
lightly nods to a twentieth-century world of music theatre, even of post-Holocaust
antagonism to idealist totality. Whatever the truth of that – one soon finds one
is tied in knots – it is surely the case that even such a quasi-Schopenhauerian
relationship may only be accomplished by parallel or, ideally, Hegelian-dialectical
communication and understanding of, if not its negation, then at least its
inversion; that is, by nurturing also a sense of soul in landscape, in Nature.
It was a Romantic reading, ultimately, that I gleaned, as befits an ultimately
Romantic work.
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| Isolde and Brangäne |
Much to ponder, then, which is
far from always the case in a Tristan staging.
Unfortunately, musical fortunes proved patchier, above all from Wagner’s aforementioned
tragic Chorus, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and its conductor, Ulf
Schirmer. The orchestra has a wealth of Wagnerian experience to call upon; this
was no vintage night, however, with some strikingly careless and non-committal playing
and only intermittent presence of its distinctive, ‘old German’ tone. Schirmer’s
direction certainly did not help, especially in the first act, whose form had
yet to be mastered. The opening Prelude seemed to go on forever: not on account
of tempo as such, but of a lack of unifying ‘unendliche Melodie’, vertically
and horizontally. A striking lack of chemistry between orchestra and conductor
may have betokened an off-night; it was nevertheless concerning, given that Schirmer
is no visiting conductor, but the opera’s General Music Director and Intendant.
As is often the case, ‘traditional’ cuts did their distorting work; neither sole
nor even principal responsibility, however, lay with them. Ingolf Barchmann’s
bass clarinet deserves a mention for its roving, malevolent, harmonically
destabilising contributions.
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King Marke (Sebastian Pilgrim) and
Melot (Matthias Stier) |
There was more to enjoy
vocally, though here the picture was also mixed. Most singers improved as the
evening went on, Daniel Kirch’s Tristan fully coming into its own in a highly
impressive third act. Too much in the way of first-act barking gave way,
ironically, to a more lyrical style. Given that many tenors struggle to make
their way through the work in one piece, perhaps this was a matter of
first-night nerves and issues of pacing; dramatic instinct and technical ability
were certainly present. Meagan Miller’s lyrical, touchingly human Isolde occasionally
sounded overwhelmed, yet for the most part offered – and contributed - much. Barbara
Koselj’s Brangäne offered the most consistently impressive vocal performance, as
unfailingly intelligent as her subtly expressive gesture. Jukka Rasilainen
struggled as Kurwenal in the first act, bluff and dry of tone, but recovered
markedly in the third. Sebastian Pilgrim made a fine impression as King Marke, sonorous
of tone and, again, unquestionably human. Smaller parts were all well sung and
acted, Alvaro Zambrano’s Young Sailor in particular catching the ear. (He also,
unusually, appeared briefly on stage.) Had there been more consistent collaboration
with this chamber-drama sphere from ‘metaphysical’ orchestra and conductor –
the opposition is, of course, not precise – the wholeness of the evening’s experience
would undoubtedly have been furthered. Yet even in that (relative) lack, one
was led to think about the desirability or otherwise of totalising
intoxication. Nietzsche’s opus
metaphysicum, its score only to be read when wearing gloves, may not always
have been fully realised; in a deeper, yes metaphysical, sense, it remained untamed
as ever.
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