Contrary to popular belief, “Tristan und Isolde” does not end with a Liebestod, or “love-death.” In the final minutes of the opera, Isolde indeed collapses, lifeless, after singing an aria of serene ecstasy over Tristan’s body. But Wagner called that monologue Isolde’s “Transfiguration.” He applied the word “Liebestod” to the music of groping longing that appears in the Prelude and recurs in Act I, as the lovers partake of the potion that they mistakenly believe to be poison. It was Franz Liszt who, in an 1867 piano paraphrase, dubbed the ending “Isolden’s Liebes-Tod.” In its original context, Liebestod indicates a death that turns into love. The later usage implies the opposite, a love that turns into death. The misnomer is particularly ironic because the dying Isolde never mentions death: instead, she hears Tristan’s voice immortally resounding. Her transfiguration unveils a metaphysical realm indistinguishable from music itself.
The migration of the “Liebestod” from the beginning to the end of “Tristan” encouraged the impression that the opera is a ritual of erotic suicide. In Gabriele d’Annunzio’s 1894 novel, “The Triumph of Death,” a Wagner-besotted nobleman tries to persuade his beloved to undergo a Liebestod, and, failing to do so, hurls her and himself over a cliff. In Yukio Mishima’s 1966 film, “Patriotism,” a Japanese lieutenant and his wife commit seppuku as “Tristan” plays. And, in more than a few latter-day stagings, Isolde meets a grislier demise than what Wagner envisaged. Mariusz Treliński, in a production now playing at the Metropolitan Opera, goes farther than most. Not only does Isolde slit her wrists before singing her farewell; Tristan suffers a self-inflicted wound, and, in a flashback presented as a black-and-white film montage, Tristan’s father shoots himself. Such bloody-minded scenarios tend to wipe away the sensuous mysticism of Wagner’s creation.
Treliński’s staging, with sets by Boris Kudlička and costumes by Marek Adamski, is a consistently gloomy affair. The first act unfolds on a modern warship of indeterminate nationality. The second act, with its immense love scene, is set largely in a munitions storage room. The third act takes place in a hospital with cold tiled walls. Black, gray, and silver tones predominate, accented by radar-screen green, searchlight yellow, and, for a happy moment, a multicolored, shimmering aurora borealis. Electric fans rotate noirishly; grainy surveillance video flickers. I kept thinking that Matt Damon was about to run onstage and get into a shoot-out with King Marke’s beefy guards. The unrelenting grimness matches the opera’s darkest moods but misses its flashes of joy—and hence its complexity. Dark is not always deep.
Still, Treliński is a thoughtful, meticulous director, and he brings to “Tristan” the same finely observed detail that distinguished his prior Met effort, a double bill of “Bluebeard’s Castle” and “Iolanta,” last season. The military setting yielded some striking, unsettling images: for example, the intersecting flashlights of rival groups during a blacked-out fight in Act III. (Less pleasing was the muddy amplification of offstage voices.) And, however dubious the emphasis on suicide, the final tableau was heartbreaking: the lovers sitting on a bench, Isolde resting her head on Tristan’s shoulder.
On the second night of the run, musical values reached the stratosphere of modern Wagner performance. The Swedish dramatic soprano Nina Stemme has been singing Isolde for more than a decade, and her voice shows little wear; if anything, she sounded fresher and more youthful than she did last season at the Met, when she had the title role in “Elektra.” Her high notes burn through the orchestra; her lower range has a dusky gleam. Perhaps her greatest asset is her diction: in her Act I entrance, you could make out every biting word of “Wer wagt mich zu höhnen?” (“Who dares to mock me?”). The missing element may be a warm, rounded tone in quieter stretches. “Mild und leise” (“Softly and gently”), the first words of the “Transfiguration,” were a touch hesitant. Yet the voice was never anything but beautiful.
No less thrilling was the Tristan of Stuart Skelton, who first sang this cruellest of tenor roles in March, when Treliński presented his staging in Baden-Baden. Skelton, a forty-eight-year-old Australian, has the musical intelligence to undertake the part and the physical stamina to survive it. Only a few rough high A’s in the extended delirium of Act III betrayed fatigue, and these seemed in character for a dying man. Best of all was his poignant ardor in such passages as “Wie sie selig, hehr und milde wandelt” (“How blissfully, bravely, and gently she wanders”). René Pape repeated his tour de force as King Marke, which first awed Met audiences in 1999. Ekaterina Gubanova was a burnished Brangäne, Evgeny Nikitin a punchily affecting Kurwenal.
Simon Rattle, in his second conducting assignment at the Met (the first was “Pelléas et Mélisande,” in 2010), achieved wonders. The performance had a masterly architectural shape; it was phenomenally precise (you could hear every note of the upward-rushing violins in the Prelude); it allowed the singers to be heard without strain; it did not stint on Wagnerian majesty and mystery. If only the frenzy of feeling that erupted in Act II had been visible onstage.
Eight hours after “Tristan” ended, I was on a plane to Chicago for the first installment of a new “Ring of the Nibelung” at the Lyric Opera. David Pountney’s playful, buoyant production of “Das Rheingold” came as a relief after all the bleakness at the Met. Pountney, who recently won praise for reviving Mieczysław Weinberg’s Holocaust opera, “The Passenger,” disclaims any grand revisionist agenda. In a program note, he writes, “The emphasis in our case will be to tell the story.” The question then becomes: what is the story, when Wagner drew not only on Teutonic and Norse legends but also on Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Calderón de la Barca, and Schopenhauer?
Pountney avoids the digital tricks that, at the Met, too often substitute for theatrical craft. Instead, working with sets designed by Robert Innes Hopkins and the late Johan Engels, the director repurposes quaint, pre-cinematic devices. The waters of the Rhine are evoked by billowing blue banners yanked by ropes; the giants are conjured with heads atop towers and with oversized puppet arms. The gods, attired in an amusingly garish array of caps, coats, breeches, and gowns (the costume designer is Marie-Jeanne Lecca), resemble Restoration-comedy and opera-buffa characters who have wandered into a Norse comic book. The dwarfs wield Jules Verne-looking contraptions. Members of the stage crew scurry about in plain sight, and the singers pitch in. When Donner summons his storm, you see a thunder sheet shaking on one side of the stage, and Loge operating it.
At times, the whimsy proliferates to excess, crowding out Wagnerian politics and psychology. Wotan builds Valhalla to compensate for a loveless marriage; Alberich forswears love to forge the Ring. The motivations of Pountney’s sashaying gods and cackling dwarfs are less clear. The great American bass-baritone Eric Owens was singing his first Wotan onstage; the opera world has long awaited the occasion, but Owens was curiously reserved on opening night, his voice not quite booming out at climactic moments. Still, his portrayal offered a characteristic wealth of nuance: this god seemed haunted and melancholy from the start, at odds with the scherzo-like mood of the production. Samuel Youn, a mainstay at Bayreuth, sang Alberich with manic force, even if his curse upon the Ring lacked the anguished menace that Owens evinced at the Met in 2012. Štefan Margita all but stole the show with his sly, antic, liquid-voiced Loge, and it made sense that the gods’ mischief-maker dominated Pountney’s conception.
The Lyric Opera cast had impressive depth, with fine younger Germans (Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as Fricka, Okka von der Damerau as Erda) joining ascendant Americans (Zachary Nelson as Donner, Jesse Donner as Froh). Andrew Davis led a performance of vigor and heft: the horns were idyllic at the start and steel-plated at the end. As at the Met, the musicians delved into territory that went unexplored onstage. Wagner remains, on most nights, a theatre of the mind. ♦
