San Francisco Classical Voice

OPERA REVIEW
Tristan und Isolde und Amplifyer
May 19, 1999

Ben Heppner

Tristan set, Act I

By Robert P. Commanday

Florence, Italy
All over Florence, as elsewhere in Italy, workmen are busily restoring churches, monuments, artworks in preparation for the "Jubilee" (Millennium) year. Music however, seems to be exempt from this, to judge from a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, a major offering of the city's famed Maggio Musicale, its 62nd May Music Festival. (It actually extends from April 8 through July 28). With a cast featuring the American tenor Ben Heppner and the soprano Deborah Polaski, Zubin Mehta, the festival's chief conductor (since 1985) on the podium, and a new production shared with the Salzburg Festival, expectations ran high.

But no restoration here, not under thick layers of a defiantly perverse stage direction by Klaus Michael Grueber and the even more distracting crass amplification used in the perfectly serviceable and musically sympathetic Teatro Communale of about 1800 seats. So the pit is higher and the large orchestra more exposed than that of a dedicated opera house--a deft conductor can manage the balance, especially with singers as strong and focused as these!

No, with microphones on stands in the pit, Polaski's splendid voice boomed out over speakers on either side of the proscenium and roared around the house. It covered even the Wagner orchestra, sounding synthetic, well -- amplified, and made her colleagues when off-mike, seem small or at best, distant. Marjana Lipovsek, the Brangaene, was particularly at a disadvantage in Act I, her voice, bright and edged, sounding less dramatically engaging than we know it to be. (She was better in Act II.) When three or four were onstage, it was difficult to get a sense of who was singing what, the amplification frustrating any directional effect or feeling of direct, live singing contact by an individual character. Might as well have been a movie.

Mehta conducted a rich-textured, deeply expressive performance. After a thin-sounding, imprecise Prelude and Act I, the Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, rose to the occasion and played very well. His acceptance of the amplification is simply a mystery explicable only as an act of pragmatism in protection of his job. This policy of the intendant Francesco Ernani and artistic director Cesare Mazzonis to use amplification removes the Maggio Musicale opera productions, no matter how well-cast, from serious consideration.

In contrast with Polaski, Heppner simply ignored the mike placement, singing the role as he is accustomed to, and his sterling, sinewy tenor came across strongly in a seamless line. The King Mark of Franz-Josef Selig was deep and dark in voice, the impressiveness of that undermined by Grueber's direction and the portrayal of Mark as a pitiable, broken man, bent over almost double, nobility out of the question.

The Kurvenal was Falk Struckman, his baritone brusque and often harsh. Carlo Morini sang handsomely as the Steersman, also Enrico Cossutta who had a fine, lyric manner as the Shepherd, Ezio di Cesare effective as Melot.

Grueber's staging was exemplified by an Act II in which the concept was apparently to make it seem as if the protagonists didn't know each other. The lovers remained far apart, stationed separately, each by one of the thick trees, their faces erratically illuminated by follow spots guided by operators with imperfect vision and tremulous hands. Then the ending: we have seen Isolde meet her love-death in an upright, standing position, but never before stepping around the corpse to a position in front of the closing curtain, all by herself and bathed in light as the music concluded.

The set by Eduardo Arroyo offered a skeletal horizontal ship of steel pipes (in the manner of George Tsypin's designs perhaps), the crew moving about distractingly "below decks" as the lovers and Brangaene and Kurwenal performed topside. The second act forest was dense, dark, and more ominous than romantic. Tristan's castle in Brittany was built of symmetrical, modern-looking bricks, serving the purpose more or less, but heavily.

The fancy opening night crowd loved it. Astonishingly, the influential critic of Florence's conservative La Nazione went beyond comparing the performance favorably to that of the production's premiere at this year's Salzburg Easter Festival, with essentially the same cast but with Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Recalling the booing of Grueber's staging at Salzburg, he thought that it was better integrated with Mehta's performance, a compliment for Grueber no doubt but hardly for Mehta. His failure even to mention the amplification, indicated that it's standard practise in Florence's Teatro Communale.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)