Tristan und Isolde
Glyndebourne
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is a work of stark oppositions, which are overcome, or seem to be, in the final bars, as Isolde sinks lifeless over Tristan’s body, in a state of (her last words) ‘unconsciousness, highest bliss’. Well, which? you might ask. If you’re unconscious you can’t be in a state of highest bliss, and vice versa. But it is essential to this work that that central paradox is maintained throughout. Passion must lead to death. It undermines all civilisation and the concepts on which it is based and with which we work, and the lovers, a highly intelligent and speculative pair, think through, so far as they are able, the consequences of renouncing Honour, Duty, Fame, all the values of Day, and moving into ‘the wonder-realm of Night’, where only ecstatic Death holds sway. Is it nonsense? Yes, but listen to the music and see if you are not at least temporarily — or, through a whole lifetime, intermittently — tempted to assent to it as the only important truth. The ultimate test of an adequate performance of Tristan is that it renews your succumbing to that temptation.
Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s Glyndebourne production of Tristan, now revived for the second time, but with a wholly different cast and conductor, diminishes the tensions within the drama, by providing only one basic — very basic — set, a receding series of ellipses, and leaving all the work to Robin Carter, the lighting designer, and to Andrea Schmidt-Futterer, the costume designer. The work almost becomes an oratorio. At the end of Act I King Marke strides across the stage, but with no retinue, so anyone who didn’t know the opera might well wonder who this last-second interloper was.
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