Staatsoper Unter den Linden
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| Images: Monika Rittershaus |
Tristan – Andreas Schager
King Marke – Stephen Milling
Isolde – Anja Kampe
Kurwenal – Boaz Daniel
Melot – Stephan Rügamer
Brangäne – Ekaterina Gubanova
Steersman – Adam Kutny
Young Sailor, Shepherd – Linard
Vrielink
Tristan’s Mother – Kristin Becker
Tristan’s Father – Mike Hoffmann
English horn (onstage) –
Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen
Dmitri Tcherniakov (director,
set designs)
Elena Zaytseva (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Tieni Burkhalter (video)
Tatina Vereshchagina, Detlef
Giese (dramaturgy)
Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Raymond Hughes)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
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| Tristan (Andreas Schager) and ensemble |
No one doubts the supreme challenge
presented in performing Tristan und
Isolde. After seventy-seven rehearsals, the intended 1861 Vienna premiere
had to be abandoned. A work that had taken less than three years to write took
more than double that, as John Deathridge has observed, to ‘overcome prejudice
about its viability. … Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden,
Hanover, Stuttgart, Prague, and Vienna: in the end none of these opera houses
would touch it.’ When Munich finally did, in 1865, Wagner’s Tristan, Ludwig
Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died after just four performances. Wagner’s foes,
political, aesthetic, and ‘moral’, seized on the opportunity to claim, ludicrously,
that Tristan, rather than typhus was
the agent of death. If audiences today avoid quite such high (melo)drama, more
often than not they meet the curse on the other side of Wagner’s melodramatic coin:
‘only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, - I cannot imagine it otherwise.
This is how far I have gone!! Oh dear! – I was just in full career! Adieu!’
The twin dangers of unviability
and necessary mediocrity were avoided in this outstanding performance from the
Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, and a cast headed by Andreas Schager
and Anja Kampe. When I last heard Barenboim conduct Tristan, in 2010, I
observed that this, ‘of the three Tristans in the theatre’ I had heard him
conduct, had ‘surely [been] the best, above all in as searing a first act as I
have ever heard, reminiscent of Karl Böhm at Bayreuth.’ This proved a
more powerful musical experience still, and quite different. Yes, the first act
was ‘searing’, but it had little in common with Böhm, save perhaps for the
visceral, overwhelming quality to the close, which left me in quite a state of
shock: not so far from Wagner’s ‘perfectly good
ones … bound to drive people mad’. Barenboim now appears to be hearing Tristan more overtly through ears
transformed by his recent Parsifal performances – or at
least leading us to do so. (Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that they
too have been collaborations with Dmitri Tcherniakov – and Schager, and, oneyear, Kampe too.)
Some people have, apparently,
been complaining that his tempi were ‘slow’: do they really want a ‘fast’ Tristan? I fear that, unconsciously or
even consciously fearful of Wagner’s ‘perfectly good,’ they actually might. Perhaps sometimes they were. I have no
idea, not being a clock-watcher. More importantly, there were ample space and tension, for the ebb and flow of
Wagner’s Schopenhauerian Will to find orchestral representation. For, still
more than Parsifal, the music of Beethoven
– and Barenboim’s recent Beethoven, as heard in a life-changing symphonic Proms
cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – made its harmonic mark. The ‘growth’
of harmony from the bass line, even when, indeed particularly when, Wagner’s
extreme chromaticism tugs away from it, ensured both musicodramatic
comprehensibility and a placing between Beethoven and Schoenberg, yet reducible
to neither. The Staatskapelle Berlin might almost be taken for granted in this,
so inveterate is its Wagnerian excellence; it should not be. Without its dark, ‘German’
tone, ‘traditional’ and yet probing so many of those new musical worlds
seemingly born in this score, we should come nowhere near The World as Will and
Representation at all, still less to a ‘perfectly good’ Tristan.
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| Isolde (Anja Kampe), Brangäne (Ekaterina Gubanova) |
Likewise Barenboim’s excellent
cast, crucial to far more than the ‘surface’ role Schopenhauer’s aesthetics
might suggest. Schager again might readily be taken for granted. (Remember when
we had no such Heldentenor? It was
not so long ago.) His was certainly the finest account of the role I have heard
in the theatre, fully worthy of comparison with the great, doubtless
mythologised performances of the recorded past, although again certainly not to
be reduced to them, nor indeed to comparisons therewith. If the seemingly
infinite vocal resources Schager can call upon to make his way through the
third act monologue – it was to that in particular that Wagner referred in his
letter – suggest Lauritz Melchior, there was none of the laziness or, at least,
somewhat cavalier attitude that could afflict the latter’s work. Schager can
sing the part and he does, but dramatically it needs to be hard work; we need
to feel, to share in, Tristan’s struggle, even as it frightens, repels us. We
did, in this, a performance for the ages. Kampe’s Isolde was perhaps not on
quite so grand a scale; nor did it need to be. She offered her own detailed
portrayal, again matching ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ imperatives – as if they
might ever formally be separated! – to a degree it would be difficult to match,
let alone to surpass. Boaz Daniel and Ekaterina Gubanova offered far more than
support as Kurwenal and Brangäne, the latter’s ‘operatic Lied’ approach, unfailingly sensitive to words and their implications,
without permitting them to override the imperatives of the musical line. King
Markes rarely disappoint: what a gift of a role it is in a more traditional
sense. Nevertheless, Stephen Milling’s depth of tone and grace of character
impressed greatly. Amongst a strong ‘supporting’ cast, Linard Vrielink’s
beautifully sung Young Sailor and Shepherd stood out.
There remains, however, another
common danger, increasingly common, to contemporary Tristan performances – more strictly, to productions. That is of
missing the point of the work entirely. I hope it will not be taken that I am
referring in some generic reactionary fashion to the ‘creator’s intentions’.
However, Tristan seems in practice to
prove unusually resistant to attempts even to question what it might be ‘about’.
The idea of the work being shoehorned, for instance, into a justified protest
against anti-immigration policies hardly bears thinking about. Tristan is certainly not in any emphatic
sense ‘about’ its ‘characters’, insofar as they be characters at all; it seems
to come closer than any other of Wagner’s dramas to that all-too-celebrated
description of ‘deeds of music made visible’. Prior to Tcherniakov’s staging, I
had yet to see what might broadly be termed an ‘interventionist’ staging that
worked.
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| King Marke (Stephen Milling), Tristan, Melot (Stephan Rügamer), Kurwenal (Boaz Daniel) |
Does Tcherniakov change that? I
hope it is not unduly pretentious – it may already prove a little late to sound
that alert – to say I think it too soon to tell. What I can say is that his
production has made me think about the issues involved like no other: an
achievement I think worth lauding in itself. By contrast with his perhaps
atypical, unquestionably brilliant Parsifal
– the best I have seen since Stefan Herheim – we return to Tcherniakov’s homeground
of the unpleasant rich. Fair enough: with kings, queens, and princes, that is
what we are dealing with. Elena Zaytseva’s costumes and Tcherniakov’s own set
designs – in the first act, a true luxury vessel, replete with ‘bespoke’
anything you might care to mention; in the second, a ‘tasteful’ Jugendstil indoor forest ‘theme’ we want
to hate, yet secretly want – instantly evoke the excesses of a corporate, materialistic
world we know only too well. The third act by contrast retreats to a homely
comfort zone for Tristan, an old moneyed boy who never grew up (haunted, as his
monologue tells us, by the circumstances of his birth, visions of his parents appearing
in his delirium).
Is that all too specific,
though? Does it fall into the trap of making Tristan about the trappings of wealth? Not really, for there is an
intriguing, deadly game afoot. Tcherniakov does not treat the lovers as
identical, as two mere parts of ‘Tristan and Isolde’. He does not accept
Wagner, let alone Schopenhauer, at face value. Instead, he implicitly, even
explicitly, criticises some of their (neo-)Romantic premises. Is Tristan, perhaps
even Isolde at times, actually mocking whatever it is they play out? It is not
always clear, but there is a degree of unnerving alienation to the proceedings
that intrigues, questions, even (metatheatrically?) frightens. A woman fainting
in the second act seems to fall into their trap, or is she in on the game too? Or,
perhaps most important, is this a critique of the game we play, when we sit
around, almost as Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’, ‘disciples – benumbed,
pale, breathless!’, both at the performance, enraptured, and afterwards,
discussing how singular this work is, how it refuses directorial interventionism?
The question of aestheticisation is live, just as in the Staatsoper’s newproduction by Hans Neuenfels of Salome,
which I saw the previous evening: a fascinating, provocative pairing. Who, both
productions seem to ask, is the Wagnerian now, whether on or off stage? The
English horn player on stage (the excellent Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen) perhaps asks us something
similar, his deeds of music rendered unusually visible.
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| Shepherd (Linard Vrielink), Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen (English horn) |
Tcherniakov seems to me on
balance to succeed where many others have failed, presenting an element of alienation
that holds work and musical performance at arm’s length, without descending
into mere reductionist banality. In the separation of ‘work’ and staging, even
of musical performance and staging, the two become problematically, rather than
mystically, reengaged. Romanticism is decisively rejected, whether in work or
reception. It need not always be, perhaps, but it is here – and fruitfully. For
instance, Karol Berger has recently argued that that is, part way through
Tristan’s monologue, it ‘is clear thus far … that the escape from the
separating illusions of Day into the unifying truth of Night remains Tristan’s
goal, but a goal he cannot accomplish in Isolde’s absence, since they need to
escape together.’ Perhaps. I should certainly allow, at least, that that was
Wagner’s intention, most likely even what he thought he had achieved. The work
here, though, I think, knows better than its creator. Wagner’s need to ‘transcend’
at the close already betrays the relative poverty of such Romanticism, just as
Mozart’s terrifyingly clear-eyed coda to Così
fan tutte does (more knowingly, I think, although that may be debated).
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| Tristan and Isolde |
Tcherniakov’s treatment of the
so-called Liebestod – Wagner’s own ‘Verklärung’
is worth fighting for against Liszt’s well-meaning misunderstanding – seems to
me of particular interest here, sharing, even intensifying the ambiguity of
work, conception, and tradition. Tristan’s room returns to darkness, Isolde
having cocooned herself with him, safe from prying eyes – whether ours or those
on stage. The prior onstage separation between Shepherd and his instrument, the scenic and the musical, seems thereby at a remove almost to have been overcome. We could believe in what she is doing, she doubtless could too; but
we do not, and we doubt whether she does. Wagner’s reconciliation is false.
Which returned this listener at least to one of the most searching – as well
as, on occasion, utterly wrong-headed – of Wagner’s critics after Nietzsche:
Theodor Adorno. On the final page of his Essay
on Wagner, we read: ‘Tristan’s curse upon love [Minne] is more than the impotent sacrifice intoxication offers up
to asceticism.’ It is rather music’s rebellion against its own ‘constraint of
Fate’. In that rebellion, music will often benefit from enlisting the services
of ‘drama’, and vice versa. Negative
dialectics indeed.
