The 2015 Bayreuth Festival: Tristan & Isolde

The year before Katharina Wagner assumed her quasi-inherited reign on the Green Hill – Richard Wagner’s Festival House in Bayreuth, she gave her Festspiel-debut as a director with a production of Die Meistersinger. It being one of the most difficult-to-stage operas, for technical but also for political reasons (in Germany), Katharina Wagner delivered a controversial, partly panned product which I thought (and still think) was actually, sneakily, extraordinarily clever. She takes a shot at the all-too-quick conversion from rebel to reactionary and the danger of an original reformer becoming precisely the kind of gate-keeper to block all future reform which is necessary to keep anything – tradition included – alive: Topical for opera in general and especially so just before assuming leadership of such a festival.

Now, eight years later, she has put forth her second Hill-production, again amidst the air of scandals and succession-battles: her half-sister and co-director for the last eight years, Eva Wagner-Pasquier has allegedly been booted from the Festival grounds; Christian Thielemann, the ingenious conductor and a controversy-magnet himself, has been named musical director (a newly created position) of the Festival.

Katharina Wagner’s new production is one of Tristan und Isolde, perhaps the other most difficult opera of Wagner’s to direct. Unlike in Meistersinger, where so much is happening, the problem here is that not much seems to be happening at all. At least not on the surface of matters: Just two people, slowly, reluctantly, passionately falling in forbidden love and then dying over the agony of it all.

Or do they? Katharina Wagner presents a production that twists the usual story considerably, which one might think would make for diversion. Unfortunately it is clad in a direction and set that accentuate tedium over curiosity. It starts auspiciously, with the amazing set of Act 1 by Frank Philipp Schlößmann and Matthias Lippert. Literally, in that it is a maze of staircases and mobile connecting platforms with cues taken from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s “Imaginary Prisons” etchings. The set just about does more moving than the personae, though. When Kurwenal and Brangäne are tricked by Tristan and Isolde –already hotly in pursuit of each other and barely kept at bay by their respective side-kicks – and therefore play no longer an active role on stage, they are instructed to sit down out of sight, never to move again. Nor is there much movement among the protagonists – which, so shortly after seeing the action-stuffed, movement-teeming Frank Castorf-Ring, comes as something of a shock. Tristan and Isolde consider, for a while, to drink the death potion… then don’t… and continue going at each other with renewed, if theatrically restrained, vigor.

The second act, sadly, dominates this production. Sadly, because it is an exasperated gaggle of adjectives all trying to be first in describing just how boring and annoying and soul-deadening it was, watering down whatever qualities the first act had and overshadowing the clever third act. It takes place in what looks like a dungeon for bicycles – with security guards and their searchlights watching on from above. In theory, that would be a neat way of symbolizing the fear of light and love for shadow that the couple expresses. In reality, it didn’t work for me or most anyone I spoke to afterwards. The set gets more annoying by the minute, as semi-circled loops break off walls as they promise – and barr – escape… or emerge, unbreakable now, out of the wall to temporarily contain those who found themselves in just the right spot on the wall. Then the mother of these faux-bicycle stands magically lifts up in two parts, forming something like the ill-begotten love-child of a turn style and an iron maiden. Tristan and Isolde play about with it, otherwise just waggle with the mobile arms of the rickety structure, and eventually cut their wrists on one of the apparently sharper extensions.

Adding insult to injury, the singers, notably Stephen Gould’s Tristan and Evelyn Herlitzius’ Isolde, elected to scream non-stop, eliciting negative Wagner-stereotypes along the lines of ‘such beautiful music, if only one didn’t get yelled at, all the time’. The acting, not that all that much was asked of the singers, wasn’t anything to write home about; the nadir might have been Tristan being stabbed by Melot (Raimund Nolte), one of King Marke’s henchmen, who goes at Tristan with the clicking theatre-dagger, ostentatiously realizes what he has done (not sure if he meant to register regret or satisfaction) and then awkwardly hastens to the nearest exist. And then King Marke himself who entered, goodness gracious, all Colonel Mustard in a pimp-coat evidently tailored from the trombone-yellow carpet of Bayreuth’s last Tristan production (Christoph Marthaler’s, quite boring itself, but a thriller compared to this). I felt like playing a bored [sic] game: The mystery is solved! Melot! With the dagger! In the high-security bicycle shed! Nobody wins. Can we go home now?

Alas we cannot go home before act three (a few patrons did and speculative wanna-attendees outside waited with signs for tickets specifically for the third act), and it’s good that we didn’t, because however dismal this second act was, the third made up for a lot (if not possibly all). Here, on a stage drenched in impenetrable blackness, Tristan is haunted by visions of Isolde which appear to him out of nowhere in floating, superbly lit triangles. A good point to give Reinhard Traub, responsible for said lighting, all the credit he deserves! The triangles appear and dissolve – or display their unreality in other ways (through variously collapsing and de-materializing Isoldes that never were) and the whole thing is pretty darn cool and diverting by making something out of what might else be nothing.

The screaming more or less continued, but Gould at least had moments of rare nuance, evidently doing much better when not singing alongside the furiously pushing Herlitzius with her animalistic, dramatic, but less-than-graceful voice. Christa Mayer’s Brangäne followed their lead, except that her second act sounded better than the first or third, in which her wobbly voice (I had associations of rotten meat; not in a judgmental kind of way if you will believe it, but in a ‘pungently over-ripe’ kind of way) did not tickle my ears kindly. Tansel Akzeybek was somewhat frightful (off and brittle) as the young sailor in Act 1 but then considerably excellent (youthfully buoyant, with melancholic hints) as the shepherd in Act 3. Iain Paterson’s Kurwenal was notably pleasant to hear throughout, with warmth and compassion in voice and (whenever he got to do any) acting. Georg Zeppenfeld’s Marke, costume aside, was another asset. Partly for his fine voice, even as he lacked authority in the very low notes, and partly for his youth. Finally a Marke who is virile and age-appropriate, which makes the betrayal of Tristan’s actually poignant and meaningful, which it simply isn’t when he’s the kind old uncle (who couldn’t have put Isolde to proper use anyway and protests more as a matter of form than provocation and imperative need), all empathic benevolence.

Nor is Marke benevolent in this production, the twist of which is that Tristan and Isolde knowingly and quite freely express their love for each other from the get-go and that they are arrested and observed right off the boat between Acts 1 and 2. Nor Marke does travel to Kareol to bestow his belated blessing on the errant couple, all understanding and regret. He’s come to take back that which is his: Isolde. He lets her do her thing with the Liebestod and all that (one isn’t a monster, after all), but then he moves in, à la: ‘Have you gotten it out of your system now? Good, because the royal bedchamber at Cornwall awaits.’ And then he grabs her hand and drags her from the scene – she being perfectly alive, of course because, honestly, who just expires there and then over a bit of love lost?!

Much had been made of hearing two of the best possible conductors in the pit at Bayreuth, Kirill Petrenko and Christian Thielemann with their divergent styles: Petrenko, the earnest, note-perfect, near-pedantic and perfectionist accompanist… who subordinates everything, certainly himself, to being true to the artwork at hand. And Thielemann, the innate highlight-chaser and finder, with the invisible fast-forward button which he can employ whenever it matters. I prefer the latter in Wagner, on principle, but this week in Bayreuth it was really a non-contest in favor of the former. Even with Castorf’s production distracting from the music, and Petrenko’s zip-along style often furthering this effect, I got much more out of the score than I did in Tristan, after being dulled to death by the production. The wildly different quality of singing undid what would have been left of Tristan, musically. The preludes alone showed what the Thielemann-Wagner is made of: they were conducted like sweet, liquid poison of which one was compelled to drink and wished to drink indefinitely.

With Katharina Wagner in charge at the Bayreuth Festival (for now), and the happy tradition of Bayreuth being that it is a workshop, the might be hope to see the second act revamped and maybe a bit of acting added to the first and thus turn this Tristan from unmemorable tedium  to inspired delight. A different Isolde from Herlitzius, too, might help, though it should be noted that she substituted on relatively short-notice and still sang elsewhere (and sounded like) Elektra, between performances.