‘I fear the opera will be banned — unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance — : only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, — I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ So Wagner famously wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, his muse while he was composing Tristan und Isolde, when he was writing Act III. If he’d seen the Glyndebourne production, first unveiled in 2003 and now revived with a largely identical cast, he would not have worried about the dangers of experiencing what everyone agrees is a uniquely intense work, unique both in kind and in degree. For this is an anodyne affair, with some attractive things about it and quite a lot that are not, but pacifying rather than exciting, let alone upsetting to the point where anyone’s sanity is put at risk.
Probably it’s a mere coincidence that Glyndebourne has mounted the two greatest Passions of Western culture in the same year, Bach’s Matthäus-Passion and Tristan.
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