I'm leaving my original preview up here, but after seeing the performance I have to report that though it was many things, Gesamtkunstwerk it ain't.]
The last Tristan und Isolde I saw was Katherina Wagner's production at Bayreuth 2015. Interesting moments, striking designs, but by and large it was a disappointment. Firstly because there seemed no coherence between the three acts - the style of each was so different that a massive disconnect ensued. Secondly, and more importantly, it imposed on the opera a heap of stuff that simply isn't in it and ultimately subverted the whole point. King Marke is not a vicious dictator. It's not in his music or his words or the drama. And in this miserable vision's finale, he simply dragged Isolde away from the dead Tristan's bed and marched her off. Liebestod schmiebestod.
Having just seen a Manon Lescaut in Munich that didn't make much sense either until the final Kaufmann-Opolais act (which was stupendous), I started to wonder if I was going off Regietheater.
I love radical reinterpretations when they bring us new insights and "relevance" that is actually relevant to the opera as well as the supposed audience. Hats off to Calixto Bieito's The Force of Destiny at ENO, which just days ago won a South Bank Sky Arts Award. But when I talked to Iván Fischer a couple of months ago, I did begin to wonder if he was right: we need to start exploring a "third way" to present opera that does not alienate newcomers and fans alike, yet that also isn't stuck in some imaginary golden age of pretty dresses, painted backdrops and park-and-bark. Something, instead, that brings the music and the drama into one "integrated" whole.
So with Tristan and Isolde opening tonight at ENO - Daniel Kramer directing, Ed Gardner conducting, designs by Anish Kapoor and singers including Stuart Skelton, Heidi Melton, Karen Cargill and Matthew Rose - I wrote this little think-piece for the Indy about whether a refreshed take on Wagner's notion of Gesamtkunstwerk can help to save ENO. First, a foretaste of the love duet from rehearsals...
Tonight English National Opera opens a new
production of Tristan and Isolde, Richard Wagner’s gigantic, groundbreaking
hymn to love and Schopenhauerian philosophy. With designs by the artist Anish
Kapoor, ENO’s ex-music director Edward Gardner conducting, direction by Daniel
Kramer – the company’s artistic director elect – and a starry cast featuring
the Australian tenor Stuart Skelton as Tristan, it promises much. ENO, strapped
for cash and mired in controversy, badly needs a smash hit, other than Sunset
Boulevard; hopes ride high that this could be it.
Kramer has described the production as “a
very poetical, mythical, simple world that Anish Kapoor and I have created to
let the music and the singers just become gods”. This feels unusually close to
Wagner’s own ideal. In 1849, the composer wrote a series of essays entitled The
Artwork of the Future, expounding the idea of a “Gesamtkunstwerk”: a complete
art work, fusing together music, drama, design, dance and more, in which a
fellowship of artists would work together towards one shared goal.
Today, though, this is radical in its own
way. And here’s why.
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| ENO's image for Tristan |
There’s a Facebook group called “Against
Modern Opera Productions”. No, really, there is. It loves “beauty” and often pours
vitriol upon “Regietheater”, the director-led concepts that have dominated
European lyric stages for the past several decades. Some critics, academics and
opera professionals watch its hatred with a fascination of horror. It feels
reactionary; as if operas’ blood-and-guts tales of sex and violence can only
succeed if prettified for some imagined 1950s golden age. Yet this group currently
boasts well over 35,500 “likes”. That’s enough people to fill the beleagured
London Coliseum for nearly a fortnight.
Is the operatic audience really in revolt
against Regietheater? Recently the Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer told me in
an interview here that he was seeking ways to develop “organic, integrated opera
performances”. In his view, the disconnect between staging and music that can
result from focus on supposed originality in the former and on historical
accuracy in the latter has run its course. It’s become a cliché and it’s time
for a change.
When Regietheater is inspired and coherent,
when it truly casts valuable new light on a familiar masterwork, there is
nothing better. I admire and enjoy the finest of it. Yet reluctantly I’m
starting to agree that the operatic sphere needs to find new types of approach
less likely to put off newcomers and frustrate fans. Success stories seem to be
thinner on the ground than duds and in certain territories audiences have
started to vote with their feet. As for the singers, I once asked the tenor
Joseph Calleja what the most outrageous thing is that a director has asked him
to do on stage. His answer: “Singing the Duke of Mantua [in Verdi’s Rigoletto]
wearing a monkey suit.” The production was set on the Planet of the Apes.
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| Tannhäuser at Bayreuth Enrico Nawrath/© Bayreuther Festspiele |
A couple of years ago I attended Wagner’s Tannhäuser
at Bayreuth, the festival founded by the composer himself. It was staged as an
opera-within-an-opera: a supposedly futuristic society putting on a show. The
set was dominated by a huge processing machine glooping away throughout; the concept must have cost a pretty penny to design and produce, yet added to the opera…precisely
nothing. Last year the same festival’s new Tristan und Isolde imposed a
vicious, dictatorial character on King Marke that simply isn’t in the music or
the drama. And the lovers had to sing their heavenly duet with their backs to
the audience.
That festival appears still to be able to
afford controversy, indeed to court it. But in the UK cash for opera companies
is ever more difficult to come by and increasingly requires justification. If a
new staging of a popular piece goes clunking to an early death, there’s a sense
of tragic waste. Yes, artists and companies need space to fail. But that space
is getting smaller every year.
Still, the Metropolitan Opera in New York
has not been enjoying much success of late with supposedly safe, traditional productions.
The current season is projected to reach only 66 per cent of potential box
office revenue, its lowest ever. Some punters, and even some critics, would like
ENO to stay safe and traditional too: middle-of-road productions of popular
repertoire for middle-class audiences. But that’s not how London works these
days, or New York. These audiences can mingle eager newbies with knowledgeable,
cosmopolitan types; and none like to feel they’re being fobbed off with
something predictable and second-rate any more than with something pretentious or
incoherent. If opera houses want audiences, they have to find out how that
audience functions now and what its needs are. These are not the same as the
1950s. They’re not even the same as the 2000s.
And so a radical readoption of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk
principles might hold some answers, along with Fischer’s “integrated” approach.
It’s possible to be wonderfully imaginative, sophisticated and stylish while working
in harmony, rather than in a seeming struggle between inherently opposed
ideals.
If Kramer can indeed bring ENO a strong,
simple, transcendental Tristan, perhaps he can signal a way forward for the
troubled company. Can Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk save ENO? It’s time to find out.
Tristan
and Isolde, English National Opera, London Coliseum, from 9 June. Box office: 020 7845 9300
