Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Georg Zeppenfeld and Stephen Gould in Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth festival.
Raw and pitiless … Georg Zeppenfeld, left, and Stephen Gould in Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth festival. Photograph: Enrico Nawrath/EPA
Raw and pitiless … Georg Zeppenfeld, left, and Stephen Gould in Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth festival. Photograph: Enrico Nawrath/EPA

Tristan und Isolde review – radical reimagining marks new chapter for Bayreuth

This article is more than 8 years old

Bayreuth festival, Germany

Christian Thielemann and co were on top form for a raw, impressive new production by Bayreuth boss Katharina Wagner

There is personal and institutional credibility riding on Katharina Wagner’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, which opened the 2015 Bayreuth festival. In many respects, the new Bayreuth boss delivers. Her Tristan is not beyond criticism, but it is a serious and interesting staging. With fine singers in all roles and Christian Thielemann delivering high musical standards from the pit, it marks a turn away from the directorial indulgence that has seemed to be Bayreuth’s hallmark in recent years.

Christa Mayer (left), Evelyn Herlitzius and Stephen Gould in Tristan und Isolde. Photograph: Enrico Nawrath/EPA

Act one is particularly impressive. From the start, there is no mystery about what Tristan and Isolde want. The principals, on stage throughout, prowl ceaselessly in search of one another through Frank Philipp Schlössmann and Matthias Lippert’s inventive three-dimensional maze of stairs, platforms and hydraulic lifts – part Piranesi prison, part MC Escher topological fantasy. Their retainers, Kurwenal and Brangäne, spend the first act desperately trying to fight off the inevitable. In the end, of course, they fail. No love potions are required for these fates to be fulfilled.

Act two is just as radically rethought. Instead of the usual interrupted erotic but wordy idyll between Tristan and Isolde, Wagner has the lovers cast straight into a torture chamber by unforgiving mafioso King Marke. The two take refuge under an improvised awning as Marke and his guards train searchlights on them from above. In a brilliant effect, the lovers imagine themselves walking through the prison walls. As the climax builds, however, they force themselves together in a cage before Tristan is seized, blindfolded and executed by his rival Melot as Marke pulls Isolde away.

The pitiless nature of Katharina Wagner’s reading of the first two acts means there are some impossible to ignore loose ends. One of these is the characterisation of Marke as cynical and vengeful, which the music – to say nothing of Georg Zeppenfeld’s deeply sympathetic singing of the role – tells us he is not. The other, even more important, is that it banalises too much of act three. Tristan’s third-act ravings, one of the great achievements of the work, feel inconsequential, while Isolde’s closing liebestod is no longer the consummation of the work that Richard Wagner manifestly intended. In his great-granddaughter’s hands, it becomes a piece of pure self-delusion, after which an impatient Marke drags the still-living Isolde off to resume her wifely duties.

This disjunction is made even more raw by Evelyn Herlitzius’s radiant account of the scene and by Thielemann’s unerring conducting of the final pages, which cap a reading of enormous orchestral sensitivity. Stephen Gould is a prodigiously good Tristan, singing with great beauty of tone and never a bark, even in the most exposed passages in the third act. Herlitzius is a notch less consistent, but enormously sympathetic and still out of the top drawer. She is often glorious and thrilling in act one, with well-supported tone, only occasionally wilting in the lower register. Iain Paterson’s Kurwenal is as fine as British audiences have come to expect, while Christa Mayer’s urgent and despairing Brangäne and Zeppenfeld’s Marke ensure the secondary roles are of a high order.

Thielemann may be controversial in other respects, but no praise can be too high for his reading, which has pace, weight and fire. Time and again he takes enormous care over balance and colour, and the Bayreuth orchestra plays on top form for him. With scarcely a boo to be heard after the final curtain, and Angela Merkel in the first-night audience, this new Tristan could just mark the start of the more confident new artistic chapter that the Bayreuth soap opera badly needs.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed