Michael Tanner

The unkindest cut | 17 March 2012

issue 17 March 2012

Tristan und Isolde is a perfect opera, but where are the perfect performers and, just as important, the perfect listeners to do it justice? What very often happens to me in a fine performance is that I am wholly caught up in the drama of Act I, which, for all its revolutionary musical means, is a readily comprehensible confrontation of two people who half-know what they feel but are determined to conceal it, until that is no longer possible. Then in Act II, when we meet a quite different Isolde, equally determined but now ecstatically lyrical, the exorbitant demands the work makes on me are ones I can rarely meet, because for the most part conflict is replaced by unimaginable rapture. And then, with any luck, in Act III, perhaps Wagner’s greatest and certainly his most gruelling, I am reabsorbed into the drama, half-identifying with Tristan in his unbelievable self-searchings, half with Kurwenal who realises that the love which is destroying his master is ‘the world’s most wonderful illusion’.

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