Encounters

Susan Broadhurst is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of Performance and Technology at Brunel University, London, and is a writer and academic who has published widely in the field of experimental performance and especially, its interrelation with developing technology. She is Joint Editor of the Body, Space & Technology Journal (OLH), and of the Palgrave ‘Studies in Performance and Technology’ book series. She is the Chair of the 'Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts' Organization.

 

Introduction

In July 2016, I attended a production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at the Coliseum in London. This production was conducted by Edward Gardner, directed by Daniel Kramer, and designed by Anish Kapoor with digital assistance from Frieder Weiss.

            Wagner referred to the work as ‘eine Handlung’ (a drama, action or plot, translating the term used by the 17^th-century Spanish playwright Calderón) rather than as an opera. It is based on a fragmented and amended 13^th-century version, by Gottfried von Strassburg, of a far older Celtic narrative, spread over 40 episodes. From these Wagner selected only three, each comprising an entire act.

            The work was completed in Lucerne in 1859, in a long digression from composition of the third part of the Ring cycle, was premiered in Munich in 1865, conducted by Hans von Bülow, the first husband of Wagner’s second wife, Cosima. The first UK premiere was given at Drury Lane in 1882. It has become regarded as probably the most characteristic of Wagner’s individual music-dramas (as opposed to the Ring tetralogy), presented in much-lauded productions over the years, notably at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, built by Wagner to host performances of his own works.

 

Innovation in Music and Performance: a Rebalancing of Music and Text

Tristan and Isolde is a story of a socially impossible, yearning love, which cannot be legitimately realised until it is too late. Put like that, it could be the basis of any number of opere serie composed in the Italian tradition, in which a pre-written dramatic text, the libretto, is set to music which observes a constant functional distinction between recitative, where dialogue is clearly sung and sparsely accompanied, and arias, which amplify the affective situations of the characters.

            From its first manifestation in the late 16^th-century intermedi of the Florentine Medici court, opera can be said to have been an innately hybrid genre, at times not always easily straddling the competing demands of musical integrity and dramatic force. It is significant that the composer of its first great works, Claudio Monteverdi, himself argued for a new priority for textual content, and, following the elaborateness of baroque composition, Christoph Willibald Gluck, a later, self-conscious ‘reformer’ of the tradition, reiterated a need for fidelity to the words. In opera, the successful blend of both elements has always been a difficult attainment.

            Wagner’s approach to this matter involved a radical departure from established practice: consonant with his early ambitions to write plays, he generally wrote his own libretti. This overcame the persistent problem of divergence of creative intent between composer and poet, even if doubts were expressed as to the literary worth of his texts. Moreover, he argued publicly that the text was of equal importance, although privately he appears to have thought otherwise (Gutman, 1990: 13).

            The main ingredients of Wagner’s total art work were ‘dance, music and poetry’, of which existing traditions made scant use. Other forms of plastic arts were also drawn into the Gesamtkunstwerk to provide a further intermingling of art forms. Again, according to Wagner: ‘Not a single richly developed capacity of the individual arts will remain unused in the Gestamtkunstwerk of the future’ (Roberts, 2011: 75).

 

Musical Structure: Coitus Very Interruptus

The opening passage of Tristan, containing the celebrated chord, left music in a condition ‘after which nothing could ever be the same again’ (Service, 2016).  According to Gardner, conductor of the ENO production, the ‘chord gives you this lack of resolution and the colour of it, it gives you this unbelievable sense of yearning – it’s poetic in the most extraordinary way’ (Macleod, 2016). For Richard Strauss: ‘with Tristan, Wagner opened the door to new sounds’ (Strauss quoted in Osborne, 1997). But beginning with a dissonance was not of itself unprecedented, Mozart (Quartet K. 428), Spohr, and Liszt, in his song Die Lorelei, had all exploited its unsettling quality (Osborne, 1997). Indeed the ‘Tristan Chord’ can be seen as a variation of a similar chord in the Liszt, its first version published in 1843. Barry Millington comments that there it ‘is presaged (though never in its precise form)’ (2006: 74). According to John Snelson (2014):

            There isn’t even agreement on the chord’s technical name. It can be called a half-diminished 7th chord (F, G sharp, B, D sharp). It’s also the superimposition of a perfect 4th (D sharp, G sharp) on a tritone (F, B); or a French 6th (F, A B, D sharp) with an appoggiatura (G sharp leading to A).

            Had it been an arresting device which then settled down into orthodox tonality, perhaps the chord would not have had such an effect on musical history. But of course it enunciated a vastly extended dissonance and harmonic suspension across four hours of performance, in which the music frequently progresses towards new keys yet repeatedly postpones a key-strengthening cadence, in other words creating repeated ‘harmonic suspensions’. Although this device was commonly used to create musical tension, in Tristan it is the main developmental principle.

            The cadences, introduced in the Prelude, are not resolved until the final scene of Act 3, in the Liebestod sung by Isolde. The chord and its vastly deferred resolution provides an ‘exquisite pain’ with its unending state of ‘dissolution where we desire a resolution ending but never want it to come because we want to be suspended in this place where longing begets more longing’ (Service, 2016). As Barry Millington succinctly puts it: ‘the cadence, like the coitus, is interrruptus’ (1992: 819).

           This erotic power was evident from the first; Tristan was considered so scandalous that young women were not allowed to see it when it premiered in Munich. For Clara Schumann, writing soon after, it was ‘the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life’ (Ashmore, 2012). It was as if the equilibrium of mid-romanticism, with its bourgeois domestication of romantic passion (something her late husband Robert constantly evinced in his songs), had been irreversibly upset, indicating what Dionysian licence music could be capable of arousing.

 

A ‘Filmic’ Temporality

By letting the harmonic ramifications of one chord pervade such a large musical structure, Wagner had clearly changed the possible modes of audience response. In place of the busy alternation of speeds implicit in traditional operatic procedure, with discrete numbers juxtaposing keys and moods, he had let one musical, and therefore dramatic, moment wash through the entire performance. So to speak, the music is the drama, over which the sung characters float, buoyed along by it, as they are, dramatically, driven on by their passions. There is not much of a sense that they can do anything to arrest such a flow.

            As with the Ring, the kind of response that Tristan determines is of a new order of temporalisation: put simply, it is epically slow-moving, but for those who are up to it, this durational vastness is not empty, rather, it immerses the audience in a soundworld analogous to the parallel universe of infatuation in which Tristan and Isolde are trapped from Act 1 onwards. Considering this is four hours of performance, very little ‘happens’ on stage.

            Such a daring reliance on minimal action taken so slowly can be seen as prescient with regard to a medium Wagner never knew: cinema, particularly as its technical resources have increased since the thirties. As transmitted through Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, early Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Korngold, it is impossible to imagine the temporality of film music as it interracts with images without recognising Wagner as the precedent. It is apparent how much the intrinsic pace of his musical developments lends itself to the conventions of big screen camerawork and visual editing, so much so that it could be argued that the former actually helped create the latter. The sense of how images and sparse words can be given atmospheric resonance by music of this monumental slowness is itself so engrained in our visual culture that it is difficult to appreciate it freshly. The use of leitmotifs also presages film music’s exploitation of character-identifying phrases which act as anaphoric devices, subliminally reminding the audience of other moments or events in the narrative.       

            There are closer and purely musical debts too: an interpretation of the Liebestod (‘Love-Death’) is recognisable in both Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930) and in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958).

 

The Inner Landscape: The Wesendonck Lieder

Ever in need of funding, Wagner met Otto Wesendonck, a Swiss businessman, in 1853, who became a benefactor. In 1857, fleeing creditors and still a marked man after his participation in the 1848 European uprisings, Wagner and his first wife, Minna, were invited to live at the ‘Asyl’ (Asylum, Sanctuary), a cottage on the Wesendoncks’ estate. The ensuing ‘affair’ with Otto’s wife Mathilde is now thought unlikely to have been consummated, remaining largely epistolary. Wagner wrote to Liszt at the time:

Since I have never in my life tasted the actual happiness of love, I must raise a monument to the fairest of all dreams, in which from beginning to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head, Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but yet most full-blooded conception; with the ‘black flag’ that waves at the end of it. I shall shroud myself to die. (Gutman, 1990: 163)

The ‘black flag’ relates to a variation of the Tristan tale which Wagner did not use. The affair appears to have collapsed around 1858 following his wife Minna’s interception of a note between Wagner and Mathilde, consequently accusing both, and reporting to Otto. Despite both protesting innocence, the situation deteriorated, causing Wagner to move to Venice where he wrote the second act of Tristan. Minna left for Dresden for health treatment but before leaving she wrote acerbically to Mathilde:

Before my departure I must tell you with a bleeding heart that you have succeeded in separating my husband from me after nearly twenty-two years of marriage. May this noble deed contribute to your piece of mind. (Gutman, 1990: 182)

            As mentioned above, Wagner in his ‘mature’ years did not use any libretti other than his own. But during his passion for Mathilde, he, exceptionally, set five of Mathilde’s poems in his Wesendonck Lieder (Service, 2016). Wagner subtitled two of the songs ‘studies’ for Tristan, in effect trying out musical ideas which he later developed. In ‘Träume’ (‘Dreams’) can be heard the musical origins of the love duet in Act 2, while the verses address the power of infatuated fantasies. ‘Im Treibhaus’ (‘In the Hothouse’), the last of the five to be composed, rehearses the music of Tristan’s exile in the Prelude to Act 3, while identifying with the vulnerable sadness of a trapped exotic plant. Since he was scoring Act 1 at this time, it is easy to ascribe to this romance Wagner’s self-identification with Tristan, Mathilde with Isolde, Otto with King Marke, and, perhaps, Minna with the traitorous Melot, Tristan’s erstwhile friend. But these songs, more importantly, permitted him to develop more transparent sonorities than he had used during composition so far of the Ring. 

 

ENO’s Tristan and Isolde

This rendering of Tristan and Isolde was met with very mixed reviews, for instance: ‘a lethally perverse production’ (Tanner, 2016), ‘a fascinating, vexing riot of ideas’ (Maddocks, 2016) and ‘musically fine but a confused and illogical staging’ (Clements, 2016).

            The ENO’s tradition of both singing in English and surtitling the libretto makes it far easier to associate music and text. The sets, three for each act, were spectacular and on a grand scale (see performance images at BBC Radio Galleries http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04967nc/p04966f6), designed by the sculptor Anish Kapoor. As he said, this was in order ‘to hold the human figure at a certain scale’, though he was ‘not interested in illustrating either the music or text’ (Macleod, 2016). The use of light was extraordinary: ‘colour gives a quality to an object which is illusionistic, that’s why I am loving working with light here’ (Kapoor quoted by Christiansen, 2016).                                                    

            Act 1 of this production took place in a massive partitioned wooden sculpture with three separate spaces coming to a point upstage, presenting a pyramidal shape, reminiscent of a ship’s sails. Kapoor adds: ‘I was not bothered about referencing the ship; rather, I wanted his world and her world. A space where worlds collide’ (Macleod, 2016). Isolde’s space was on the left and Tristan’s on the right, with the centre space used for both subsequently coming together, and also for the chorus. The visual array was completed by some eccentric choices of costumes designed by Christina Cunningham. Isolde, sung by soprano Heidi Melton, wore a baroque wide panniered skirt in Act 1 which appeared to inhibit movement. Tristan, the Australian Heldentenor Stuart Skelton, was progressively dressed onstage as a samurai warrior. Their two respective servants were in ‘classic servant fops in the mode of a Cruikshank cartoon: frock coats and high, Brillo-pad-with-glamour wigs, all pout and mouth’ (Maddocks, 2016). King Marke’s soldiers (who were also the chorus) were Star Wars troopers.

             The libretto of Act 1 is the longest of the three, straightforwardly written to lay out the complex pre-existing layerings of the principals’ mutual feelings. They are hardly innocent victims of a substitution; each is presented to us as having violently ambivalent emotions. Isolde, daughter of royalty, is being taken by sea from Ireland to her familially ordained wedding to King Marke in Cornwall, cementing a peace treaty between them. She is ostensibly furious. In the preceding war Tristan had killed her fiancé, but, wounded himself, had travelled incognito to seek her healing skills. She had discovered his identity, but, intending to exact revenge, was checked by the moment their glances met. Now, as part of the peace deal, Tristan returned again to collect her; the libretto vaguely implies that in this, also, she was lured by her involuntary love for him. Tristan too has overruled his affections by offering Isolde to Marke solely to ingratiate himself at court.

            The musical settings of their speeches alternate between her torrential denunciations and his, almost Elgarian, bluff complacency. Though etiquette supposedly dictates he must keep distant, Isolde eventually forces Tristan to meet her; she wants ‘atonement’ for her fiance’s death. Tristan is honour-bound to drink with her what he is convinced is poison. But Bragäne, her maid servant, has substituted a love potion instead. It is a mark of the layering of affect, in this Act, that the potion’s effects are, dramatically, not magical transformation, but more of a truth drug; it has simply exposed repressed yearnings to the point that their bearers cannot resist them. By the time King Marke arrives they are both stripped of their previous false consciousness, even though they know its cause; as Tristan declares: ‘Our bliss now lives from lying! Joy, guile-inspired, I bless you!’ (Porter, 1993: 63).

            Act 2 sees the stage dominated by a massive textured hemisphere excavated out with a cave-like interior: ‘a kind of garden of delight’, which raises the singers up so they are above the stage. According to Kapoor, it suggests ‘falling in love, a state apart, where all reality disappears’, almost ‘a world removed where love happens’ (Macleod, 2016). It is lit by a deep blue nocturnal light. And it does not permit the singers much room for manoeuvre.

            This is where the lovers come together. King Marke is leading a hunting party nearby, and despite Brangäne’s fears that they will be discovered, the two sing their protracted ecstatic love duet: Liebesnacht (‘Love of the Night’). Following occasional practice, which reflects the sense some have that the duet is too digressive, in this production a ‘heinous 12-minute cut’ was made in it, prompting the outburst: ‘in what other opera is there a comparable act of barbarism?’ (Tanner, 2016).

            The text offers declarations of mutual infatuation which have now acquired connotations of fuga mundi (flight from the world), figuratively filling out a sensory inversion: daylight is the arid ‘empty and false’ world of action, reason and ambition; the darkness of night is love’s true reality. Tristan sings: ‘since we are by night enfolded, the envious day, so keen and spiteful, still may keep us apart yet not deceive our heart … all that remains is yearning … for holy night, where endless and always true, Love brings laughing delight.’ Isolde responds with: ‘So let us die and never part!’. Both sing: ‘no more Tristan, no more Isolde! Ever nameless, never parting … endless ever joined in joy, ever-glowing love, highest holy love’ (Porter, 1993: 71-76).

            But Tristan’s erstwhile friend Melot has betrayed them to the king.  Marke confronts Tristan, who is unable to explain, only asking Isolde to follow him into death. He challenges Melot to fight but offers no defence and instead, impales himself on Melot’s knife.

            The Act ends in this production with both Tristan and Isolde being strapped to hospital beds by paramedics in modern surgical dress, a staging innovation that was probably the most unpopular of all. In discussing this, Kramer relates ‘I spent about two years listening to the score to find original ideas’. His deepest ‘understanding of how sick they were, was at the climax of the opera … it was from the sick image of “so let us die and never part” that I realised Tristan and Isolde were committing suicide’ (Macleod, 2016).

            In Act 3, the hemisphere of the previous act is now hidden behind a scrim with a huge tear in it giving the resemblance of ‘a cave’, ‘a vagina’ or ‘an abyss’, for now Tristan is ‘locked out of the garden of love’. Movement is accordingly confined to the front of stage. As it progresses a blood red image is projected onto the scrim, giving the impression of ‘an open wound’. The stunning video projections, as elsewhere, are by Frieder Weiss, a Berlin-based digital artist, for whom they ‘all represent bleeding and suffering which eventually transforms all perception of space and leads to a blackout of all light and hope’ (Weiss, 2016).

            A filthy and dishevelled Tristan lies unconscious, having been exiled to his ancestral castle in Brittany, brought by his servant Kurwenal, now dressed as a down-at-heel clown in a fashion that Kramer attributes to the influence of Beckett’s Endgame (Macleod, 2016). A sorrowful shepherd’s pipe (a cor anglais) can be heard in the distance. Tristan begins slowly to regain consciousness, obsessed with being reunited with Isolde. Kurwenal tells him that she has been sent for. The text here hints at an increasing ambivalence, in which Tristan has a longing for a Buddhistic, absolute obliteration as the only release from the torment of unrequited Liebe: 'No healing cure, not death itself can set me free from the yearing pain' (Porter, 1993: 84).

              Isolde’s ship eventually approaches, but Tristan expires on their meeting. A second party arrives with King Marke. Kurwenal, believing they are pursuing Isolde, challenges them, kills Melot before being killed himself. But Marke, having learnt about the potion from Brangäne, is here to release the lovers from their ties. Isolde sings her final incandescent aria Mild und leise before succumbing to her own Liebestod. In a controversial departure from the score’s stage directions, while singing, Isolde leads a revived Tristan into the now unveiled aperture, at the centre of a blood red stain of light, where they ‘transfigure’ together in the ‘garden’ of the previous Act.

            Some critics were not convinced: ‘in one of his most outrageous interventions, Kramer had Tristan resurrected while Isolde sang, ignoring the crucial point that the whole pathos, as opposed to the ecstasy, of the last 20 minutes of the drama is that the lovers die apart, and deluded’ (Tanner, 2016).

            In defence of this departure it can be said that the attachment of the term Liebestod to Isolde’s final aria was probably the work of Liszt, Wagner’s future father-in-law and indefatigable populariser of Tristan through his own piano reductions. For Wagner, it was the Prelude that originally bore this label, while calling the final aria ‘Transfiguration’ (Die Verklärung). It is certainly a weirdly transcendental expiry by the standards of operatic death, rather closer perhaps to a massive overdose of LSD.

            This production commanded widespread applause for its musical qualities, Gardner ‘conducting a dramatically rich and emotionally sensitive interpretation of the score, superbly played by the orchestra’ (Christiansen, 2016). Vocally there are few tenors who can ‘sing the role of Tristan in English … with anything like the authority, sustained beauty of tone and intensity that Stuart Skelton brings to it’ (Clements, 2016). Melton as Isolde was felt by some to be overtaxed later on, but she was praised for her energy and volume in Act 1.

            The whole audiovisual array, as said above, was less successful for many. In creating Tristan, Wagner took sparse episodes from a medieval romance and invested them with layers of overwhelming oneiric, metaphysical content borne by music of indefeasible impact. Perhaps trying to match this richness with such monumental constructions onstage was not going to work if the very size of them would inhibit blocking and movement, which they appeared to do. Whatever the intriguing visual qualities of Kapoor’s designs, they cannot be said to have ‘collaborated’ with the music or drama; they were powerful exhibits fit for a gallery, but not perhaps for amplifying what took place around them. The lighting was far more adapted to this. Similarly, the heterogeneity of costume sources, including the ‘pathologising’ of the lovers’ plight after capture, surprised, but did not constitute, as it were, a vision of a strange world in itself; they remained simply a diverse collection.

            Without doubt, it is difficult to originate successful production designs for this work. Short of a hackneyed reversion to a Celtic twilight with overtones of Jugendstil, historical settings do not suggest themselves readily. Perhaps one avenue is to consciously react against the score; for instance, Heiner Müller’s 1993 Bayreuth production was experimentally minimalist, ‘influenced by the classical Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre and Robert Wilson’s postmodern mythico-theater’ (Frölich, 1999: 157), stripping the Music-Drama of both passion and eroticism, together with any Wagnerian notion of ‘the mystification of death as redemption’ (Frölich, 1999: 157), creating an austere, demystifying, defamilarised performance with no ‘cathartic release’. His Tristan is ‘ambivalent’ in his desire for Isolde and his political disloyalty to the State. In this way the visual quality is one of suffocating bathos, which might make the music even more vividly declarative, rather like maniacally emotional subtitles to a silent film.

            Perhaps Wagner’s work has a quality that associates it with our inherited cultural notion of the Sublime: it can never be fully or definitively presented, but there must be always be an attempt to do so. It instantiates a yearning for a completion that can never be, a satisfaction of a full presence, that, due to its disparity of elements, could never and can never be realised in everyday, reifiable existence, very much as neither Tristan nor Isolde could live happily ever after in the quotidian world.

References

Ashmore, Jo. 2012. ‘Clara Schumann: five things you didn't know about the Google Doodle star’. The Telegraph (13th September). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/9541127/Clara-Schumann-five-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-Google-Doodle-star.html Accessed 28th October.

Christiansen, Rupert. 2016. ‘Anish Kapoor has not been madly inspired’. The Telegraph (10th June 2016). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opera/what-to-see/tristran-and-isolde-eno-review-anish-kapoor-has-not-been-madly-i/ Accessed 15th September 2016.

Clements, Andrew. 2016. ‘Tristan and Isolde review – musically fine but a confused and illogical staging’. The Guardian (10th June). https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/10/tristan-and-isolde-review-kramer-anish-kapoor-eno Accessed 15th September 2016.

Frölich, Margrit. 1999. ‘The Void of Utopian Potentials: Heiner Müller’s Production of Tristan and Isolde’. The German Quarterly. 72 (2) (Spring): 153-66.

Gutman, Robert W. 1990. Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind And His Music. New York: Harvest Books.

Kramer, Daniel (dir.). 2016. Tristan and Isolde. Composer and Author, Richard Wagner, English National Opera. Coliseum Theatre, London (Premiere 9th June).

Macleod, Donald. 2016. ‘Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde’. Opera on 3. BBC Radio Iplayer. 2nd-31st September. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07xh8yr Accessed 2nd September.

Maddocks, Fiona. 2016. ‘Tristan and Isolde Review – a fascinating, vexing riot of ideas’. The Observer on The Guardian website (12th June). https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/12/tristan-und-isolde-english-national-opera-anish-kapoor-review Accessed 15th September 2016.

Millington, Barry. 2006. The New Grove Guide to Wagner and His Operas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Osborne, Richard. 1997. ‘Böhm Records ‘Tristan’ at Bayreuth’. Tristan und Isolde, Libretto booklet for the 1966 Performance at Bayreuth, reissued by Deutsche Gramaphon.

Porter, Andrew (trans.). 1993. ‘Tristan and Isolde’. In Tristan & Isolde/Wagner. Opera Guide 6, pp. 45-92. Opera Guide Series Ed. Nicholas John. London: English National Opera.

Roberts, David. 2011. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Service, Tom. 2016. Tristan und Isolde. The Listening Service. Radio Iplayer (Sunday 2nd October) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07xhfcz Accessed 20th October, 2016.

Snelson, John. 2014. ‘The “Tristan Chord”: the most significant chord in Western music?’. Royal Opera House website (20th November). http://www.roh.org.uk/news/tristan-und-isolde-musical-highlight-the-tristan-chord (Accessed 28th November, 2017)

Tanner, Michael. 2016. ‘A lethally perverse production: ENO's Tristan and Isolde reviewed’. The Spectator (18th June). http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/this-appalling-production-is-lethally-perverse-enos-tristan-and-isolde-reviewed/ Accessed 15th September 2016.

Tristan and Isolde website. 2016 ENO with production trailer, gallery, audio excerpts from ‘Liebesnacht’ and interviews with Daniel Kramer and Edward Gardner. https://www.eno.org/whats-on/tristan-and-isolde/ Accessed 18th November 2016

Wagner, Richard. 1983. My Life. Trans. Andrew Gray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weiss, Frieder. 2016. ‘Interview’ by correspondence with Susan Broadhurst (24th November).

 

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