Something like that is actually a premiere thing of impossibility. A new “Tristan” to open the festival. Because in Bayreuth, no further premiere is usually scheduled in addition to a new “Ring”. This “Tristan” was originally only planned for 2024, but the idea was born six months ago and has now been brought to the stage.
The additional production should guarantee the ability to play on the Green Hill in the event of a pandemic. With an experienced, imaginative director from the second row, who thus gets his really big chance. With two experienced protagonists, of which the tenor also has to lift one of Siegfriede and Tannhäuser. And with a Wagner-steadfast conductor making his debut here, who had just one stage rehearsal with an orchestra because he had to replace his colleague, who was also switching to the new “Ring”, with a corona castling at this podium.
And it worked. Even more: It became a pop-up version of the actually plotless “Action in Two Acts”, which can be seen and heard. Everything revolves around the mythical, mysterious couple who don’t want to live out their passion on earth. A story that evokes chaos and the cosmos, death, decay and oblivion, a dark land of the otherworld, only shot through by the electric surges of an untamable passion. Which will be played twice this year and scheduled just as often in 2023. Which the audience accepted with emphasis (yes, trampling for the conducting). Because it doesn’t disturb, encourages you to keep dreaming, never leaves your very own art world, despite its absoluteness it ends with a highly forgiving metaphor.
Director Roland Schwab directs his main characters abstractly, without contact and often without moving. But after the gray-green curtain has gone halfway up like a Wagner curtain, with an erotic swing of the fabric, so to speak moved by the chromatic moaning of the prelude that ripples up directly below him from the invisible, gently glowing ditch, he shows a gentle, clear picture: a couple of children, mute and motionless nestled together on the prompt box.
In the second act, the couple sits dreamily smoking pot as adolescents on a night of love on a balcony. For the finale, Isolde has lost herself lonely in “Liebestod” and collapses for the last time, two old men stand in front of the veil on the ramp, facing each other in eternal love. On this side, Philemon and Baucis find that fulfillment which Tristan and Isolde in their adultery and betrayal can only – perhaps – be granted in another dimension: as an orchestral resolution in pure B major.
You can find that comforting or cheesy. Also flat, in view of the seemingly simple but philosophically inflated fable of the three-act play. Of course, it weighs more heavily that Roland Schwab’s insightful interpretation of the “world flight opus” he sees in this way doesn’t really work out. Either because he didn’t work enough with his main couple to direct the characters, or because they weren’t able to implement them or at least develop vocal chemistry with each other. Where everything emotional is handed over to the score, it should be realized that at least tenor Stephen Gould can cope with this – he proved that at the same place in the much stricter and more pessimistic view of the predecessor Katharina Wagner’s work in 2015.
At that time Georg Zeppenfeld was also there as the evil, obsessively vengeful King Marke, who is now disappointed again. And when he moves in a cruel robe, designed by Gabriele Rupprecht, in a highly reduced manner, but with an always clear ability to speak and a subtly dimmed or escalating bass, it then becomes immediately clear what Schwab is telling, how he is telling the drama, following Wagner entirely , to which music wanted to outsource.
Schwab, with the best support of his stage designer Piero Vinciguerra, delivers beguilingly beautiful images, which, thanks to the narcotic-sounding acoustic drug intoxication, don’t become a “Tristan” trip, but all too quickly – bored. Because nothing happens between Tristan and Isolde. Thus the opera has a most annoying vacancy.
Designed to keep us drifting deeper and deeper into the couple’s psyche, the little-changing set is a cleverly constructed throwback to the once-revolutionary disc and cyclorama playstyle of the Wagner brothers Wieland and Wolfgang. Which of course was technically pimped digitally. Two mirror-image, sloping ellipses in the floor serve as a basin and part of the sky. They are connected to each other by a shaft with a square exit. In the first act, on the boat trip to Cornwall, this appears to be a luxury spa with lounge chairs; a wellness oasis with a water pool and cloud eyepiece designed to look magically luminous by James Turrell.
At first, people run here, act little and stand a lot. Catherine Foster’s poodle-haired Isolde in a glittery top, trousers and a wide coat looks like the big sister of Claudia Roth, who is present, and sings powerfully, furiously, erratically, but also harshly and sharply. Not a word can be understood, not even later from Stephen Gould’s Tristan, who is statically planted in a velor track suit and stoically stoically chants his powerful tones.
Isolde talks about Tristan’s wound, which she tended, then the pixel water turns red and becomes a source of blood. After enjoying the love potion from the designer tube, both walk over the artificial water, finally squirming isolated and sluggishly like beetles kicking on their backs over the increasingly hectic movement-diffusing picture floor area, until the ship enters the Klanghafen with Wagner boom.
Markus Poschner does it fabulously with the dreamlike, stormy, urging festival orchestra that follows. Is close to the scene, but sets independent accents. He manages quite naturally to steplessly switch the dynamics up and down, the imperceptible shifts in tempo that are so important in this marvelous score. The guest performance with the orchestra in Abu Dhabi in 2019, the cover presence at the last festival summer, but also the Wagner experience of the 51-year-old from Munich as Kapellmeister at the Komische Oper Berlin all paid off. A Bayreuth target point run, you can already say that.
The orchestra also pulsates passionately in the second act. Unfortunately not on stage. Again and again (as with Katharina Wagner) searchlights are directed at the side-jumping, largely immobile couple. We are in an apartment room with a green gallery, the stars are twinkling above and below. Here Tristan and Isolde in white Walle robes perform a kind of esoteric pajama pantomime under the outraged Milky Way. Here, too, the cinematic pull of the planets on the video screen and the music, methodically increasing to the sound of infinity, suggest an involvement, even an amorous frenzy that the scene does not support. A picture-meaning scissors opens up.
As the bright day of Marke returning from the hunt falls, Tristan is centralized in a chair. The (self-inflicted?) wound from Melot’s non-existent sword is symbolized at best by the mercilessly white neon tube grating descending through the ceiling. In the meantime, Isolde is sitting on the ramp, quite disinterested. Catherine Foster doesn’t push her character beyond the spelling out of director’s instructions. Nor does she make up for it with the subtlety or emotional suggestion of her mostly over-the-top professional singing.
The third act marks the underworld. The green tendrils now hang to the ground like weeping willows; the fine cor anglais player has taken his seat between rocks above. The shooting stars have become fewer. Tristan lies as if laid out between candles. The strong Kurwenal of the baritonal rock-solid Markus Eiche now has his grand entrance: He even tries to save and reactivate his master with a rope from the video eye.
The gentleman, of course, trudges his Tristan, who is not at all deadly wounded, very healthy. Only the Gould tones are now placed with technical rather than artistic expertise for staying power. Once again Zeppenfeld and Ekaterina Gubanova’s thick, large-arched, even dramatic Brangäne show their vocal ability. The inconspicuous Melot Olafur Sigurdarsons is assassinated between leaves.
But the tireless conductor Markus Poschner alone can’t tear it out anymore. Wherever the orchestra takes off, trying to catch cosmic expanse of sound, the scene repeatedly thuds out dully. And the pensioners’ togetherness idyll at the end, it’s just kitsch after all.
