Wagner at the Proms

It would be interesting to know why Tristan und Isolde was placed in the Proms programme in between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. You might as well programme Othello between acts four and five of King Lear. Wagner wrote Tristan and Die Meistersinger between acts two and three of Siegfried, and to be really chic some company should have mounted the Ring and the two others in that order. But dramatically it makes no sense, and that partly accounts, I think, for the lukecool reception that the performance of Tristan has had in the press. All told, I found it one of the more striking performances I have heard of Wagner’s masterpiece in recent decades. For one thing, it was performed complete, as it now never is at the Royal Opera, so the great Act II duet was shown in its full non-stop inspired glory. Reviewers who were at the Albert Hall have claimed that the orchestra drowned the singers, but that didn’t happen at all listening on the radio, where one marvelled at the sustained climaxes and the balance between the voices and the orchestra, equal partners, as in no opera before, in creating the nightmare-cum-ecstasy of what Wagner described as this ‘most beautiful of dreams’, but which is much more about the sufferings of love than about its fulfilment or satisfactions.