Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 3)

Eins vorweg: I was very impressed with a quotation about reviewing and criticising literature that a friend of mine shared, and I wanted to share it further. That friend is Timmy Haase, who teaches Latin and Greek literature in the U.S. It's from Practical Criticism (1929!), by the apparently important I. A. Richards:

"Details of scansion [meter], opportunities for grammatical objection, for allegations of descriptive inaccuracy, for charges of logical inconsistency, share this attraction [i.e. of "objective" or measurable criteria for evaluating texts]. To put the point generally, all those features which can be judged without going *into* the poem, all details or aspects that can be scrutinised by the mind in its practical, every-hour, non-poetical capacity, are so many invitations to make short work of the task of critical appraisement. Instead of trying the poem on, we content ourselves with a glance at its lapels or buttons. For the details are more easily perceived than the *ensemble*, and technical points seem more obtrusive than the point of the whole."  

And later, 

"The sovereign formula in all reading is that we must pass to judgment of details from judgment of the whole. It is always rash and usually disastrous to reverse the process."

With those rousing words I will attempt to write just a little about the Royal Swedish Opera's production of Tristan och Isolde (here in Swedish), and my own experience viewing it.

First, the seats: I was at the highest elevation the house provided, with a good view of the stage.

Photo credit: operan.se (Crude red circle credit: mine)

This meant the singing came straight through -- the voices were huge and powerful, and I didn't really notice a major gap between singers' force in the beginning of Act 1 and in the end of Act 3. How this is physically and psychically possible I'll never know: Tristan's (Michael Weinius) singing in Act 3, after being mortally wounded, is agonizingly sustained (more on that later).

The effect really was such that I heard the singing far more clearly than the orchestra, as if the voices rose through the air and the orchestra stayed weighted in the pit. Perhaps they did: the music teacher at my school said that's how acoustics work in such a house. I'd say that between singing and orchestra, I'd prefer the singing to be on top anyway. It left me more detached and analytical that way -- as if I were in an auditorium, maybe, witnessing a virtopsy. In Der Zauberberg, Hans Castorp finds listening to opera on records to be like looking backwards through binoculars, everything crisply tiny and defined. I'm tempted to say it was a bit like that for me, even from within the operahouse. Less visceral, less rapturous, but utterly engrossing.

Costumes? Spacey-smocky-Victorian. Not steampunk, mind you, but a 19th-/24th-century mash-up all the same. This went with the set: lean, shallow, spacey, with a fractal triangle ship bow. It was not pretty, it was not coherent, and it was perfect for the task. From what I can tell, it's popular today to stage Tristan with a barren moonscape of some sort, and you won't hear any objections from me. There's something about this music that suggests vastness, ether, and abstracted yearning. I don't see a need to muddy it with sideshows. Even if the ties to our lived modern world are loose, the story survives, and so does the metaphysical.

Hats off to the Swedish taxpayer, as the tickets were far more affordable in wealthy Stockholm in 2015 -- between $20 and $80 dollars from cheapest to most expensive -- than they were for me in Munich in 2008 or New York in 2002, even with the student discounts I received in the last two places. State support matters, obviously.

As for Tristan in Act 3: His confusion, his pessimism, his delusion, delight turning into euphoria, his collapse and death, they all refuse to relent. Some fateful force finally ends his life, as it will yours and mine. But there's dying, and then there's Dying. Wagner's ecstatic sadism -- making the character and the audience suffer through very thickly tense music that is in turns importunate and morose -- reminds us that life is stubborn, foolishly heroic: the living refuse to let go; the living embrace the antiology of darkness as a chance to experience light. We meet death best when that death is anticipated by some impossible purpose in life. Real true love has the final word.



Part 4: Summary, with a review of the language puzzles of opera and of the difficulty of listening to opera untrained.