Tristan und Isolde
That’s Wagner for you–the most perverse, willful, and magical figure in the history of music. Tristan isn’t so much an opera as a conjuring trick. Everything about it that seems most off-putting–its vagueness, its plotlessness, its cardboard characters, its Twilight Zone setting–is a deliberate tactic. Wagner’s other operas demonstrate that he was perfectly capable of contriving sturdy plots and creating vivid characters and settings; the world of Die Meistersinger, for instance, is so realistic you can practically calculate the barometric pressure. With Tristan he threw that all away, making a highly self-conscious gamble that he could hold an audience’s interest by his musical imagination alone.
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The imaginative world of the opera is just as vague. The setting is nominally Cornwall and Ireland, but the specifics of history and geography are gone. All we see are a few primordial landscapes: a forest, a shoreline, a ship at sea. The tangled society of the original, with its warring clans and conflicting loyalties, has been reduced to a pale schematic: there’s the king and his knights, and there’s a maidservant, a sailor, and a shepherd. Tristan and Isolde themselves must be the most indistinct lead characters in the history of opera: after more than five hours with them, we know next to nothing about their personalities or their past. We can’t even say for sure what they thought of each other before they drank the magic potion, because Wagner carefully plays up the ambiguous hints that they’d already fallen in love–in which case the only decisive act in the plot may be redundant. The closer you look at Tristan, the more things dissolve.
To describe this ecstatic anguish Wagner invented a new musical language. Any random page of the score studied in isolation seems conventional enough. It can be assigned to a particular key, and while the chromatic harmony is irregular, it isn’t wholly incomprehensible. And there are long passages, especially those concerning “daylight” characters such as King Marke, that seem positively old-fashioned in their tonality. Yet there are none of the regular structural elements of conservative opera–no set-piece arias or duets or ensembles, no formal markers of any kind to interrupt the ceaseless flow of melody. The music wanders all over the chromatic universe, through ever more remote and ethereal keys; it becomes a ceaseless froth of strange harmonies modulating into one another and melting away before they can resolve. In the years Wagner spent trying to get Tristan first staged, the rumor was solemnly passed around European operatic circles that any musician who tried to perform it would be driven insane. Even now some music theorists call it the real beginning of the modernist revolution, because when audiences proved willing to accept its formal anarchy, the game was up with all the old rules of classical style.
The Lyric’s Tristan rates about average on the inscrutability scale. The ship in the opening act is an art moderne luxury liner, and everybody wears what look like castoffs from a Gilbert and Sullivan revival. OK, you say, I can cope–until a panel slides back and you glimpse the engine room, a lurid red inferno where shirtless young studs do calisthenics and pantomime shoveling coal, as though in some kind of trendy health club. Is that supposed to be a joke? I don’t know, and I’d guess the production team isn’t sure either. Tristan and Isolde spend most of the last two acts, whether in the forest or on the shoreline, standing inside a box with one side open to the audience. I think I get the idea–isolation from the world and all that. But why is the box an abstract construction of steel and glass, as though it had been designed by Mies van der Rohe? And about that forest scene–the libretto makes it explicitly a lush summer night, so why is the Lyric’s forest squarely in the middle of winter?
It’s a crying shame that the remaining Lyric dates are sold out, that Heppner is leaving this Friday (his replacement is Jon Fredric West), and that no classical label has shown the slightest interest in doing a recording with this cast. I’ll gladly call this a once-in-a-lifetime event; I just wish I didn’t have to mean it quite so literally.
