Arts & Events

Splendidly Sung TRISTAN UND ISOLDE Adrift in A Quirky Staging

Reviewed by James Roy MacBen

Saturday December 21, 2024 - 08:50:00 PM

Under General Director Mathew Shilvock, San Francisco Opera now offers yet another arbitrarily quirky staging, this time of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und IsoIde, which I attended on Sunday, Oc-tober 27. Such examples of director overreach have, alas, become alarmingly frequent during Mathew Shilvock’s reign at San Francisco Opera. Indeed, so systematic are these quirky stagings that responsibility must be laid at Mathew Shilvock’s feet. It seems that in his effort to offer modern takes on the standard operatic reportory, Shilvock tells the directors and set designers he hires that as long as they “make it new” they are free to do whatever they want with little or no regard for tra-dition. 

In the case of Tristan und Isolde, what we get here is a stage set that only barely suggests the wooden ship on which Tristan escorts Ireland’s princess Isolde to Cornwall where she is to marry Cornwall’s King Marke, who is Tristan’s uncle. The opening Act II set is an oval interior with high windows and a staircase hidden behind a wooden screen.. My seatmate commented that this bi-zarre set looked more like a vision of the Titanic than a faithful rendering of Tristan’s ship. Was this comparison intended, as if to suggest that the Titanic and Tristan’s ship were both doomed ships. Further, Tristan himself, who is identified in Wagner’s libretto as at the helm of this ship, here merely climbs the stairs occasionally to peer momentarily out one of the high windows of this bizarre set. Meanwhile, below the high windows, Isolde and her close friend- attendant Brangaene converse at length about the circumstances of Isolde’s by-proxy betrothal to King Marke carried out by Tristan,. Isolde also recounts how she once cured Tristan of a wound he incurred in man-to-man combat with Ireland’s Morold, who was Isolde’s promised betrothed. In Wagner’s characteristically lengthy exposition, Isolde also recounts that she once lifted Tristan’s sword intending to wreak revenge for Tristan’s killing of Morold. But as Tristan lay weak and bedridden from his wound, he looked her in the eyes and she let drop the sword and went on caring for Tristan and used her healing skills to cure him. Yet now Isolde expresses her resentment that Tristan won’t even look her in the eyes and totally avoids her.  

When Tristan’s friend Kurvenal tells Isolde that Tristan won’r come to her until the ship approaches Cornwall’s shore, Isolde angrily tells Brangaene to prepare a potion, and the potion Isolde wants is a deadly one. But fearing the worst, Brangaene substitutes a love potion for the lethal one. When Tris-tan finally appears to ask Isolde to ready herself to meet King Marke, Isolde suggests they drink to reconciliation and forgiveness. Tristan agrees, and they both drink the potion. As the ship’s sailors shout that they have dropped anchor and await the boarding by Kng Marke, Tristan and isolde sud-denly rush into each other’s arms and embrace passionately. Or at least this is what they do in eve-ry other production I’ve seen of this opera. Here, however, they drop to the floor separately, as if dying, then, gradually, they begin to crawl toward each other, finally embracing, only to be hastily pulled apart by Kurvenal and Brangaene.  

Scholars have debated for centuries whether this love-potion is a real aphrodisiac or simply an ob-jective correlative of the previously unavowed sexual attraction Tristan and Isolde feel for each oth-er. As I wrote in 1974 when reviewing this opera for Berkeley Barb, ““the timing of these events is of particular importance. For it is the essence of sexuality to be blind not only to the moral conven-tions of society, but also to time. It can erupt at the most inopportune moments!” In this case, the immediately imminent arrival on board of King Marke may actually precipitate this last chance moment for Tristan and Isolde to acknowledge the mutual sexual attraction they have previously left unavowed, perhaps even to themselves much less to each other..  

Act II opens on a new set, one that ineptly tries to blend what normally entails a scene change. Here we get a castle courtyard with a central post-modern metal sculptural tree. When Marke leads a party on a nighttime hunt, Isolde signals Tristan that she will rush to meet him in the forest. When these lovers unite, there ensues the most wordy, overly verbose love scene in all opera and all llit-erature. Tristan and Isolde, together for the first time since declaring their passion, just balk endless-ly, wallowing in verbal love-talk with phrases like “Unnaming, Unknowing, Uncaring,” as they pro-claim their unwillingess to submit to any outside strictures on their passion, which, however, they only express in prolix verbosity. To me, this scene is Wagner at his worst, full of verbal bluster and real timidity. Watching this so-called passionate love-scene unfold, one can only wish Tristan and Isolde would silence the talk and get on with it. Wagner’s grandson, Wieland Wagner, who reigned at Bayreauth in the 1970s, once acknowledged that he’d like to stage this scene with Tristan and isolde shedding their clothes and going naked at each other in sexual intercourse, for he argued that this scene actually expresses music’s most clear expression of coitus interrruptus. Indeed, it does. But directors have always been reluctant to visualise what the music clearly describes. Here there is a suggestion that the lovers begin to undress, shedding only their outer cloaks. But they’re never naked, much less entwined in sexual intercourse, even while the music says that this is what is happening until King Marke’s hunting party, led by Melot, encounters the lovers in exremis, or, more aptly, in flagrante delicto.  

Look, if I’ve thus far complained about so much quirkiness in this staging, I must acknowledge that this Tristan und Isolde was splendidly sung and deserved far better directorial support. . Among the vocal principals, soprano Anja Kampe as Isolde and mezzo-soprano Annnike Schlicht as Brangae-ne were outstanding Kampe’s soprano soared ecstatically, while Schlicht’s mezzo- soprano was a burnished counterpart. As Tristan, tenor Simon O’Neill started out slowly but sang mpre forcefullky as the opera progressed. Baritone Wolfgang Koch was a robust Kurvenal, and bass Kwanchul Youn was a thoroughly moving King Marke. In the small but important role of Melot, tenor Thomas Kinch was more than adequate. Likewise, in small roles tenor Christopher Oglesby was a fine sailor-shepherd, while baritone Samuel Kidd was as an adequate steersman. The chorus of sailors, led by Opera Chorus Director John Keene, chimed in adeptly when needed.  

Where conductor Eun Sun Kim is concerned, I found her tempos in the opening Prelude very prob-lematic. They were at first unusually slow, with huge silent pauses between the opening chords, the famous “Tristan chords.” Later in the Prelude, the tempos picked up though they also slowed down again toward the end. I didn’t know what to make of these uneven tempos in the Prelude, and I wondered what they might suggest for Eun Sun Kim’s take on the entire opera. Were the Prelude’s orchestral silences emblematic of all the emotions that are silenced by Tristan and Isolde until they finally burst forth at the end of Act I and then are voiced, in prolix verbosity, in Act II? In any case, , I found Eun Sun Kim’s tempos for the rest of the opera beyond reproach and beyond questioning.  

Act III opens on yet another bizarre stage set,. This time we get the Titanic-like ship interior now split in two and tilted at an extreme angle, as if this ship is now foundering and near its end. But in Wagner’s libretto this finak Act takes place in Tristan’s homeland. So are the director and set de-signer suggesting that not only is Tristan dying of his wound by Melot’s sword but Tristan’s entire homeland is foundering and about to sink? As Act III unfolds, Tristan seems to go in and t out of consciousness, in and out of recognition of where he is and what is happening. Tristan repeatedly thinks he sees Isolde’s ship arriving at his shore. When her ship finally does appear, it is too late, for Tristan can only sing Isolde’s name with his dying breath. When Isolde sings her famous Liebestod, she does not do so lying prostrate on Tristan’s dead body. In this production she stands upright over his inert body. Thus, in this Liebestod, director Paul Curran allows Isolde no tod ,no death, thereby denying her of the supreme bliss, the hôchste lust, that merges eros and thanatos, love and death. I this suggesting that Isolde can only icelebrate Tristan’s experience of this union, though she herself,, who still lives, cannot do so? This interpretation of the end of Tristan und Isol-de is contrary to every previous interpretation I’ve ever encountered, either on stage or in the critical literature. 

Finally, a line in director Paul Curran’s brief article in the program for this Tristan und Isolde rein-forces my belief that ultimate responsibility for quirky modern stagings lies with general director Mathew Shilvock. As I read the final paragraph of director Paul Curran’s article, he alludes to the task of making ”a modern staging of Tristan,,” and this suggests that the desire for ”a modern stag-ing of Tristan’ was what Mathew Shilvock ordered when he signed on Paul Curran as director and Robert Innes Hopkins as set designer. All I can say in this regard is, please, stop this misguided ap-proach, it is offering us nothing but arbitrary directorial overreaching that distracts from the drama implicit in the operas themselves.