The last time Tristan und Isolde was seen in Lille was in March 1944. In those days, the Lille opera house had been renamed "Deutsches Theater" by the German occupiers, and the musical direction of this wartime Tristan lay with Hendrik Diels, then artistic director of the Antwerp Opera. Diels was sentenced to 3 years in prison after the war for "cultural collaboration." What Tiago Rodrigues, current artistic director of the Avignon Festival, is showing us so many years later is really little more than a non-staging. "There are too many words in Tristan and Isolde," the director says. "Tristan and Isolde is like writing 300 love poems to avoid saying 'I love you.' For us, it's about changing the audience's view of the opera." And yet it is mostly words that define Rodrigues' handling of the work: new words, many words, in an attempt to recode the work for a contemporary audience.
The opening image shows an immense archive that Fernando Ribeiro has equipped with thousands of hanging files. It seems as if Rodrigues wanted to capture a director's sisyphus work : that everything has already been said and done, that the director can only look back on a multitude of words and interpretations of iconic pieces like Tristan und Isolde. It is an idea that he can only exploit once. As such, this is Tiago Rodrigues' first opera production. Despite the many words, he calls it his favorite opera.
The hanging folders turn out to be cardboard sheets. Two dancers juggle them around showing the director's explanatory texts, making the surtitles, with their influx of words, completely superfluous. For the uninitiated spectator, a new kind of libretto suddenly emerges in a condensed form, not infrequently embellished with some humor. In Rodrigues' mind, archetypal characters also emerge : Tristan as "the sad man," Isolde as "the sad woman," Marke "the powerful man" and Melot "the ambitious man." This works well as long as Cornelius Meister has not given the upbeat to the opera. When he does, a powerful moment triggered by the context arises and the opening prelude gives both dancers the opportunity to indulge in an ecstatic dance. In fact, this opening dance is the scenic highlight of the evening. Throughout the evening, both dancers will present hundreds of text fragments synchronously with the action, a feat I still wonder how they managed to pull off. For the seasoned spectator, this is obviously even more distracting than the usual surtitles (which you may or may not reject) because the director can also insert some personal commentary, thus requiring a greater mental effort on the part of the spectator. I myself quickly decided not to follow the texts. The mental click to not perceive them as disturbing is quickly made. What remains is a quasi-concert performance of the piece. It shows once again that Tristan und Isolde is one of those operas that least require a director. Too bad Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz will not get around to dancing anymore after the prelude.
If in the second act the archive is still decorated with houseplants, in the third act only a skeleton of it remains next to a high stack of used up text sheets. The dying hero can rest his head on it. All the usual props are banished. Everything is symbolically presented with the text sheets. Fear nothing, being pierced with a cardboard sword can look more convincing than with a real sword.
Daniel Brenna's bright tenor, colored with a light baritonal timbre, sounds similar to Bryan Register. It's a straining part for Brenna but he manages to drag you along interpretively in his love-drunk agony of the third act. Reasonably convincing is the searing "Sehnen" climax. Does Bryan Register do better ? We will be able to judge him next month in Essen.
Annemarie Kremer, on crutches and with a foot in a cast, did not have to be very mobile in this production. She handles the register transition with difficulty; in the chest register the voice becomes very thin and unable to project sufficiently. The timbre is not unpleasant but neither is it warm. These are imperfections that make the first act something of a chunky track. We get to hear Kremer's best work in the second and third acts where the aforementioned flaws are much less prevalent. She turns the love duet into a personal highlight while Brenna has some trouble with the mezza voce sections. With an uninhibited flowing soprano she manages to bring the reunion with the dying hero and the Liebestod to a crowning conclusion .
Marie-Adeline Henry surprised with a decisive Brangäne, articulated with sufficient sense of style and with a good command of the German text. The voice projects wonderfully and has a beautiful and sensuous timbre. I had not heard her since her remarkable Madame Lidoine in Brussels. Perhaps more of Wagner is in the pipeline. Alexandre Duhamel as Kurwenal was at first rather dull interpretatively, getting out of step with the orchestra at times but managed to boost his performance noticeably during the third act.
If the second act became the best from a musical point of view, it was also due to the castrating appearance of the "powerful man": David Steffens as King Marke served a fantastic cocktail of disbelief and rage. I had not heard him live since Kaspar in Strasbourg (2019), a role with which he will be heard again in Bregenz this summer. Steffens is not a basso profondo but a high bass, the appropriate voice type for Wotan, and I can hardly imagine that he is not currently studying Wotan. This was masterful of interpretation and with all the requisite explosive bursts of temper in the finale of his demonstration of rhetorical self-pity. King Marke has the advantage of only having to sing against a bass clarinet, thereby also drawing all the attention to himself and therefore effortlessly acquiring additional lustre in the hands of a well-articulating bass. If this had been an Italian numbers opera the audience would have erupted in applause. David Ireland also sounded compelling in the small role of Melot. Except for Kremer, all of these were debuts! The chorus sang from the first and second balcony, flanked by the brass in the side lodges in a slightly too noisy finale to the first act.
Cornelius Meister was immediately convincing in the controlled build-up to the climax of the prelude. The Orchestre National de Lille may not always sound super transparent but it will never sound garish or out of balance with the soloists. The waves that Meister elicits from the orchestra beat violently over the edge of the orchestra pit, the injections of fatal love fever are exhilarating, the passages in ppp are finely chiseled, the prelude to the third act hangs draped over the orchestra pit like a black and purple shroud while the English horn plays its mournful song from the highest balcony. Very beautiful was the hunting fanfare from the corridors of the theater that seemed to surround the auditorium.