Greg Stepanich

'Tristan' at the movies: The way we were

Time was when a Wagner performance was the talk of the town, even here in the United States, where the striving classes of the late 19th century worshipped at the feet of Anton Seidl.

These days, the operas of Richard Wagner come to the movies, where this year the houses of La Scala and the Metropolitan have offered broadcasts of Tristan und Isolde.

Earlier today, I saw the Met broadcast with Deborah Voigt, Robert Dean Smith, Michelle DeYoung, Matti Salminen and Elke Wilm Schulte. I enjoyed it — the singing was generally quite good, exceptional much of the time (I particularly liked DeYoung and Salminen), and the orchestra was wonderfully alive, giving every bit of this music color, power and vigor.

I also liked that the staging, while effectively minimalist and not at all cozy, didn’t detract from the overall regular-people-in-love vibe I got from the performance.
Today, more than any other time I’ve heard this work, I was aware of how little distance there is between the moonings of Tristan and Isolde during the second act and the moonings of all of us when we’re the grip of romantic infatuation.

The libretto goes on and on about wanting to be annihilated by the night, where Shakespeare’s Romeo wraps it up in a few lines:

Juliet: ….Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo: It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops.

The great American cultural critic Jacques Barzun, who turned 100 in November, wrote in his 1941 book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner that Act II of Tristan is more about sex than romantic love. “Anything more remote from the true romantic’s passion for awareness, for communication, for analysis and the sharing of intellectual pleasures, it would be hard to imagine.”

And in the main, he’s absolutely right. This is an opera with music and text that are about that moment when everything in your life is about the person you’ve just fallen hopelessly in love with. Tristan and Isolde are absorbed in each other and their relationship to the point of boredom for everyone else — which is exactly the way we are when we first find that object of our affection and make idiots of ourselves.

And Wagner is able to find the right music for it, too, a continually unfolding, restless tapestry that pants just as breathlessly as the characters. I don’t know quite why this familiar music (I brought the score with me to the theater) has never quite struck me this way before; today, though, it was the soundtrack to a lot of happy memories. (Here’s another blogger’s opinion about today’s broadcast.)

And here's Waltraud Meier singing the Liebestod that closes the opera: