Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde: an absurd production – but still a magnificent night

Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that, leaves you wondering what to do with the rest of your life, as Wagner both feared and hoped it would. What Tristan does — one of the things — is to present an image of romantic love, in both its torments and its ecstasies, which makes everything else seem trivial; and at the same time to undercut that image by asserting the claims of ordinary life, but in the subtlest way. So, however swept away one is by the agonies of Tristan in Act III, and the raptures of the love music in Act II — and for the first time in decades the duet was given uncut, with the 12 minutes of music in which the lovers make their transition from the everyday world to their private one — there are these things to be remembered.Tristan