Tristan und Isolde
Royal Opera House
Tristan und Isolde is a masterpiece that can be given widely different interpretations, since even by Wagner’s standards it is permeated by ambiguities. He may have intended, as he wrote in that famous letter to Liszt, to write ‘a monument to that most beautiful of dreams’, that is, completely fulfilled love, but is that what he achieved? Whatever the answer, a performance that fails, in the first place, to leave you shattered, and in the second to make you think very hard about what you think passionate love is and whether you really want it, is a failure. Glyndebourne’s recent production left one in a kind of purple daze, mesmerised by its anodyne beauty. No one could accuse the new production at the Royal Opera of that.
However, before giving my tentative thoughts about this violently controversial staging, I’d like first to celebrate the musical triumph of the evening (I went to the second performance): for it was a triumph, and it’s decades since an account of Tristan at Covent Garden has been that.
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