Tunnel of Love

No musical phrase affects die-hard Wagnerites as deeply as the Tristan chord, “the password, the cipher for all modern music,” as the German conductor Christian Thielemann has called it. This revolutionary break with harmonic convention—a combination of F, B, D-sharp, and G-sharp played by cellos, clarinets, bassoons, oboes, and an English horn, followed by a sequence whose haunting lack of resolution points the way to the once unimaginable realm of atonalism—appears in the opening measures of Richard Wagner’s music drama Tristan und Isolde. It hovers in the imagination much as it does in the concert hall, with a primal insistence that never diminishes no matter how often one hears it.

The Tristan chord resounded once again at the Metropolitan Opera on March 9, at the premiere of its tenth new mounting of the epic work it first staged in 1886. This was an event eagerly anticipated among opera fanatics for several reasons. It marked the first Met Isolde of the much-admired Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen as well as the house debut of Yuval Sharon, the forty-six-year-old opera director known for his radical reimaginings of the genre, as he sets forth in A New Philosophy of Opera. (Every article about Sharon seemingly must mention his La Bohème, performed with Puccini’s four acts in reverse order, and his Götterdämmerung, presented in a Detroit parking garage.)

There was also much speculation as to whether the new production’s Tristan, Michael Spyres—a self-described “baritenor” because his range encompasses that of a baritone and a tenor—would have sufficient vocal stamina to make it through a nearly four-hour work he had not yet performed in public. And the fact that the first night occurred the day after an alarming New York Times article titled “The Met Opera’s Desperate Hunt for Money,” which detailed the organization’s deepening financial woes, only added to the drama.

As it turned out, Davidsen and Spyres enjoyed a joint triumph seldom encountered in opera, let alone in Tristan und Isolde, which has always been notoriously difficult to cast with two principals equal to those titanic roles and to each other. There has never been a surfeit of singers able to meet Wagner’s fiendishly taxing vocal demands, but a well-matched hochdramatische Sopran (high-dramatic soprano) and Heldentenor (heroic tenor) have emerged simultaneously only a handful of times. Most importantly, Davidsen and Spyres have a rare and palpable chemistry that invites comparisons to the two finest Tristan duos of the twentieth century: Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior during the 1930s and 1940s and Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen during the 1950s and 1960s.¹

Although I saw Nilsson’s phenomenal Isolde several times, on only one of those occasions was she paired with a comparably worthy Tristan: the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, in a legendary Met performance in 1974. (The Stuttgart-based Windgassen, who disliked international travel, made very few US appearances and died later that year at age sixty.) Having attended numerous performances of the work worldwide, I can attest that Davidsen and Spyres’s rapturous Act Two duet, the Liebesnacht (night of love), was as gorgeously sung as any I’ve heard live.

The Met’s new Wagnerian prima donna easily fulfilled her followers’ highest hopes with a portrayal that was both gloriously sung and convincingly acted. In Isolde’s lengthy Act One monologue—the narrative and curse—Davidsen blazed with intensity, by turns affronted, mocking, outraged, then suddenly tender, especially in her heart-wrenching rendition of the transformative line “Seines Elendes jammerte mich” (“His misery tormented me”), which revisits the moment she fell in love with the wounded Tristan. Davidsen hit all of Isolde’s high notes with aplomb, although she did not extend them with the prodigious breath control that was Nilsson’s hallmark. The warmth with which she imbued her characterization harked back less to Nilsson than to the Isolde of her great Norwegian compatriot Flagstad.

The evening’s biggest surprise was the Missouri-born Spyres, who displayed an authoritative mien as well as a beautiful voice with a smooth legato line seldom encountered in this punishing part. Far from sounding forced, stressed, or harsh, as can happen with even the most seasoned Wagner specialists, his intonation remained not just powerful but remarkably fresh from start to finish, even during the attenuated anguish of Tristan’s delirium in Act Three.

The rest of the ensemble was uneven. The Russian mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova, as Isolde’s devoted handmaiden, Brangäne, brought believable empathy to the part, but her voice was often wobbly. As Tristan’s loyal sidekick, Kurwenal, the Polish bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny delineated a bluff, fully inhabited character. The evening’s biggest disappointment was Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who caused a sensation at the Met two seasons ago as the lead in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones. (His father, a bodybuilder, named him after the sporting goods brand.) Here, as King Marke of Cornwall—whose Breton knight, Tristan, and Irish princess bride, Isolde, betray him—he had commanding stage presence, but his tone was bone dry. Even worse, his German diction was abysmal, a deficiency more glaring because both Davidsen and Spyres were models of textual clarity.

A great audience favorite was the Met orchestra’s English horn soloist, Pedro R. Díaz, who played the shepherd’s song onstage in the opening scene of Act Three in a broad-shouldered all-white outfit that recalled a 1980s Claude Montana number. (The unflattering costumes were designed by Clint Ramos.) This poignant little composition is meant to evoke the pastoral Brittany boyhood of Tristan, who recognizes “die alte Weise” (“the old melody”) during his delirium. Unaccompanied by the orchestra, it is usually performed from the pit and mimed by a supernumerary, but Díaz’s graceful movements and note-perfect rendition gave the interlude a rare veracity.

Because I’d never seen a Tristan that included dancing, I was startled to find a choreographer listed among the Met’s creative team. Annie-B Parson was responsible for the pointless gyrations that further burdened this already overwrought production. Amid Tristan’s Act Three fever dream, backup dancers flailed around the hallucinating hero and induced visions of a 1970s TV variety show. The eight-performance run was conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. My heart sank during his lackluster reading of the stupendous prelude, which was devoid of the requisite throb, tension, and momentum and hinted at his want of a thoroughgoing conception of the work. Nézet-Séguin provided little of the captivating detail that fairly leaps out of this splendiferous score when a first-rate conductor delivers it with attentiveness and insight.

In the run-up to the new production, Sharon explained his Tristan in an interview with the Met’s creative content director, Matt Dobkin:

As the opera opens, we will see a couple approach a table and undergo a kind of ritual. They will take objects on the table, and these will act like magic mirrors that become portals into another dimension—so we’ll have the world of the table, and the world of the fable.

In the foreground will be the table with this very relatable couple, who could be living right now. And then, as we enter the various portals, the set will open and reveal another version of Tristan and Isolde who are closer to the opera’s original setting—but not in a historical way, as we want to present this story as a kind of recurring myth…. The couple at the table will have contemporary clothes, while in the world of the fable, we will be closer to the realm of the medieval.

This accords with perspectives the director offers in A New Philosophy of Opera, which is less an investigation of the genre’s essential nature than a polemic on how to attract young people to half-empty venues like the Met, where, as the joke goes, the average audience age is deceased. There is no doubt that Sharon is thoughtful and well intentioned or, as he repeatedly points out, that the presentation of opera has changed a great deal throughout the four centuries since its inception. His book includes a chapter titled “Toward an Anti-Elite Opera,” but the demographic shift in the audience for classical music drama is of relatively recent vintage. During the 1920s, working-class American families often owned a Victrola and listened to records by Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, and other operatic household names. And when movies incorporated sound, a steady stream of opera stars from Lily Pons and Grace Moore to Lawrence Tibbett and Mario Lanza became Hollywood headliners. That broad-based opera-loving public—many of Italian, German, and Jewish heritage, ethnic groups that valorized high culture and integrated it into everyday life—persisted until the late twentieth century, when Luciano Pavarotti and Beverly Sills often appeared on TV talk shows.

As the audience entered the Met auditorium for Sharon’s new Tristan, the proscenium was hung with a scrim onto which was projected the grisaille image of gigantic concentric swirls like the iris of an analog camera, or perhaps stylized overlapping sails of the sort commonly used in Tristan to evoke the ship on which the first act takes place. As the prelude began, that pattern faded, and Sharon’s long table was revealed. Seated at either end facing each other were the non-singing stand-ins for Wagner’s main characters, whose drawn-out, Kabuki-like movements, which involved the trite symbolism of overturning a sand-filled hourglass, owed a great deal to the attenuated stylization favored by the director Robert Wilson. (On one evening the hourglass shattered during the prelude, which caused the performance to be halted while the shards were removed from the stage.)

The apparent compulsion that opera directors nowadays feel to stage every moment of a score—whether an overture, a scene change, or some other transition—suggests a fear that viewers addicted to electronic screens must be fed a constant stream of visual imagery because they cannot imagine anything for themselves. In Sharon’s Tristan this predilection was underscored by the many large-scale live video projections, devised by Ruth Hogben, which included an interminable close-up of a broken plate on the tabletop as King Marke fiddled annoyingly with the pieces, a banal metaphor for his broken trust after Tristan and Isolde cuckolded him.

Although the table appeared in all three acts, most of the action took place in the upper portion of the sets, which were designed by the British artist Es Devlin. Her main organizing element was a series of foreshortened cones that evoked both the human birth canal and the tunnel of light described by many survivors of near-death experiences. Devlin’s portals to the infinite, by turns round and ovoid, were mechanized to drift slowly back and forth across the proscenium, bringing much-needed animation to the static proceedings—a besetting problem in Tristan, which has so little action. This mesmerizing effect seemed inspired by Wilson’s fondness for mysteriously levitating objects, such as his space machine in Einstein on the Beach. Serendipitously, the tunnels also acted as megaphones to project voices deep into the enormous Met auditorium, although they reportedly impeded the flow of sound to various parts of the hall.

This mobility was most effective during the Liebesnacht, when the tunnels morphed into black discs rimmed with a thin white border like a solar eclipse. During that delirious duet, which ends abruptly when the lovers are discovered by King Marke—to music that mimics coitus interruptus and still shocks—these celestial orbs floated around serenely and brought to mind the wheel-shaped space station in Stanley Kubrick’s 200l: A Space Odyssey, which rotates to Johann Strauss’s lilting Blue Danube waltz. But the staging ran into trouble during the increasingly hectic transfers of the singing and nonsinging characters between the two zones. Sharon attempted to dignify these by having the performers move at a stately pace. But in the final act, when the dining table was repurposed as a surgical slab, Tristan’s constant up and down during some of the most challenging vocalism in all of opera amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Too often, details of Devlin’s design broke the magic by diverting attention away from the characters. For example, after Isolde delivered her curse and bid Brangäne to bring her the case that contained both the love and the death potions, there appeared a long shelf of large crystal flagons more suitable for a 1940s MGM Scheherazade than for a ship on the Irish Sea. Then Hogben’s lingering video close-up of the love potion’s spherical container resembled an ad for a designer fragrance named À Mourir.

A pivotal moment in operatic history came with the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1951. That annual convocation, dedicated to performing the music dramas of Wagner in the theater that he built to stage them under optimal conditions, had been closed since the end of the war.² Because of the Wagner family’s close ties to Hitler and the operas’ long association with ideologies of German nationalism and Aryan racial superiority, the new codirectors, the composer’s grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, were determined to avoid any symbolism in their productions that might appear even remotely reactionary or antisemitic.

The festival also faced a lack of funding, and those two conditions forced the adoption of an extreme minimalism. The initial postwar stagings relied primarily on lighting effects rather than elaborate scenery and on reusable robes instead of individualized costumes. Out went the spears, horned helmets, and iron breastplates, as well as the composer’s strangest whims of stage business. Live animals—from a bear on a rope in Siegfried to Brünnhilde’s horse in Götterdämmerung, all specified in the stage directions—were eliminated. These stripped-down presentations also allowed viewers to interpret the composer’s more discomfiting ideas as they saw fit.

Ever since then Wagner directors have felt empowered to drop any troublesome bits of staging rather than come up with some credible way to present them.³ But the limitations imposed by politics and cost led to the adoption of theatrical reform ideas that had been gestating since the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in the work of Adolphe Appia, the Swiss architect and influential theorist of modern stage design whose passion for Wagner verged on the mystical. He is the subject of The Appian Way: Adolphe Appia and the Scenography of Modern Architecture, a lavishly illustrated and exhaustively researched monograph by Ross Anderson, a professor of architecture at the University of Sydney.

Anderson deftly interweaves the life story and artistic output of this eccentric visionary, who seemed incapable of making even the slightest compromise and therefore rarely was able to bring his concepts to the stage. Appia employed the simplest of means to maximum effect: stacking two vast, barely differentiated expanses of blue-gray atop each other to suggest a seascape horizon or using a few broad, shallow steps to denote a sacred space. He also believed that gradually modulated sidelighting could do more to shift mood than a cumbersome set change.

The New Bayreuth Style, as the postwar renascence became known, derived in large part from Appia and seemed more insightful than routine stagings because its stringent simplicity refocused attention on the music. The young Wagner brothers’ aesthetic caught on for both its economy and its expressiveness, and it became the predominant Wagnerian mode internationally for the next two decades. But in due course attitudes began to change, and the influence of other mediums began to be felt, especially that of film.

In 1971 I attended the Met opening night of August Everding’s Tristan, and his almost cinematic expression of Isolde’s ecstatic finale, the Liebestod—epitomized by Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s phantasmagoric set design—has remained indelibly etched in my memory. This tour de force of stagecraft was enabled by the advanced technical capabilities of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which was then just five years old. Nilsson rose up slowly on a concealed mechanical lift that tilted back slightly while her upturned, masklike face was illuminated by a pinpoint spotlight. In the multilayered shadows that swirled around her motionless body, she seemed to dissolve into a skein of drifting Art Nouveau tendrils, an effect achieved through scrims and lighting in those days before digital sorcery. This gradual process of disembodiment continued with a calm inevitability until Isolde seemed to be wholly absorbed into the universe.

There was no such sense of cosmic wonder at the conclusion of Sharon’s Tristan. He evidently felt that this ineffable tragedy needed a happy family ending and thus imposed one of the most egregious liberties I’ve ever witnessed in a classic theatrical work. Although some late medieval variants of the Tristan and Yseult legend include children born to the lovers, there are no such intimations in Wagner’s libretto. Nonetheless, Sharon’s Isolde arrives in Act Three, Scene 2, visibly pregnant, although her condition at first escaped my notice because a voluminous cloak of stiff material obscured her body. Sharon’s decision to make Isolde’s Liebestod a paean to childbirth instead of the orgasmic love-death of tradition was likewise initially lost on me, because even from my orchestra seat I could not discern the newborn child at her feet. Only when the spotlight on Davidsen was extinguished after her final, perfect high F-sharp did I notice King Marke downstage, where he cradled a swaddled doll in his arms and bent to kiss it, subverting a moment of the utmost profundity.

Many of this adventuresome director’s ideas are half baked, as he seems somewhat aware. Sharon’s admission about the doppelgänger couple in his brief essay for the Met’s Tristan program is symptomatic: “I don’t have a single answer for who these two are, and yet I’d like to think it is also possible to enjoy not knowing.” If the director has no idea who these intrusive personages are, why should the audience have to puzzle it out? The saving grace of Sharon’s shadow couple conceit—which in Shakespeare’s time was called a dumb show—is that the production design allowed one to ignore most of what was going on downstage and to concentrate on the elevated vocal activity in the tunnel of love up above.

The most important line in Tristan und Isolde comes in Act Two, Scene 2, when the couple, enthralled amid their Liebesnacht, sing the words “Selbst dann bin ich die Welt” (“I myself am the world”), which capture the mindless abandon of sexual bliss better than any other artistic representation I can think of. That sentiment, like this towering work itself, is at once immediate and universal. Yet despite Yuval Sharon’s attempts to unite the mythic and the quotidian in what Germanophone wags might call his Tisch-und-Tunnel (table-and-tunnel) Tristan, only fitfully did he locate the essence of Wagner’s masterpiece.