San Francisco Classical Voice

October 10, 1998

Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" poses a notorious challenge to the interpreters of its title roles. Early detractors of the work held it responsible for the untimely death of the first Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, some weeks after the Munich premiere. (His wife, Malvina, who created the role of Isolde, survived the premiere, but soon became subject to delusional fantasies about communicating with the afterlife.) Wolfgang Schmidt and Elizabeth Connell met the opera's challenges more or less halfway on opening night of the San Francisco Opera's revival of its 1991 production, designed by Mauro Pagano and directed by Michael Hampe--Schmidt sometimes less than halfway, and Connell usually rather more.

Connell made a strong start in Act 1, giving emphatic expression to Isolde's assorted outbursts of rage, indignation, frustration, and stifled passion, without losing control of an even, controlled tone production. Schmidt began less well, the voice tending to sound tight and one-dimensional in Tristan's first extended encounter with Isolde in Act 1, Scene 5. High, sustained notes were consistently unstable. On the other hand, he speaks well when the voice is not pushed, and the stretches of socially constrained dialogue in Act 1 were delivered with unusual clarity.

The central, lyrical phase of the seemingly endless Act 2 duet scene, "O sink' hernieder, Nacht der Liebe," found both singers in good form (really Tristan's only opportunity for sustained "beautiful" singing of a cantabile sort). The outrageous demands of the Tristan role are mitigated somewhat in Act 3 by the fact that fatigue and stress are in a sense written into the part. The desperate, broken accents of the semi-conscious Tristan across the beginning of the act were rendered by Schmidt in a dramatically effective half-voice. At the climax of Tristan's delirium, casting furious imprecations at the love-potion and at himself in some of Wagner's most frenzied, tonally deracinated music, one sensed more stress than force, unfortunately.

Isolde received kinder treatment from Wagner, with a considerable intermission between the Act 2 love-duet and her final Liebestod or "Transfiguration." Connell is a powerful stage presence and a powerful voice, but she lacks the kind of sheer luminosity and delicate gradation of voice that, in addition to volume and stamina, are the requisites of an ideal Liebestod. It was at this point, and in some stretches of Act 2, that I began to regret the loss of Karen Huffstodt, who had originally been scheduled to take the part, and whose voice (at least when I heard it several years back) can bring fresher, more lustrous quality even to the heavy-hitting Wagner and Strauss soprano roles.

Mauro Pagano's set designs were stylized, streamlined, and functional. The rough-hewn, mossy steps, that provided the arena for the act 2 lover's tryst outside King Marke's castle offered some respite from the flat, bare planes on which the rest of the action unfolded, as well as changing hue and texture under the effectively managed lighting shifts between twighlight, darkness and dawn. The sailing vessel in Act 1 was suggested by the curved outlines of a hull, with Tristan and Kurwenal on a raised deck to the rear. (The remnants of this ship's hull that continued to frame the scene in Acts 2 and 3 became increasingly distracting with each act, however.)

Negotiating the space between the two women and the two men in Act 1 is always awkward; they are usually too close for comfort, under the strained circumstances. The vertical difference in placement helped here, without quite solving the problem. A large rectangular sail partially assumed the role of the curtain that Wagner directs to be drawn or opened to articulate communication between Isolde's part of the ship and Tristan's. As usual, though, one had little sense that this boat was going anywhere. Another relic of the first act that proved distracting in the third act (besides the ship's hull) was the shiny round disc which served as the central stage platform, suggesting that the decrepit fortress of Tristan's ancestors had recently been outfitted with some kind of glossy, scuff-proof kitchen floor.

More effective visual continuity was provided by the shifting view of the sky, streaked with clouds and lit according to the all-important symbols of "day" and "night" in their various phases, including a starlit nocturnal projection that connected the central love-duet with the climactic moments of idealized interiority at the end of act 1 (after the drinking of the potion) and in Isolde's final "Transfiguration." (The tiny pin-prick stars seemed unnecessarily discreet, however.)

"Tristan" does not offer stage directors a great deal to work with. Michael Hampe's direction achieved its stated goal of creating "a visually simple 'Tristan' which would give the music more prominence." Much of the time this meant allowing Tristan and Isolde simply to stand side by side and sing out at the audience in tried and true style. The blocking of the shipboard interactions in Act 1 was faithful to the basics of Wagner's directions, as were skirmishes at the end of Acts 2 and 3.

The extinguishing of the torch in Act 2, scene 1, the interruption of Tristan and Isolde at the climax of their love-duet, and the self-inflicting of Tristan upon Melot's sword were all paced much too slowly to achieve the appropriate dramatic effect suggested in the music. A felicitous touch, on the other hand, was Brangaene's gradual traversal of the stage horizon during her "Watch Song," suggesting the inexorable gravity of a celestial body in orbit marking the passage of the night.

The Brangaene, mezzo-soprano Violeta Urmana, making her U. S. operatic debut, brought the necessary warmth of tone to the "Watch Song," which should convey the musical effect of a sensuous lullaby even while its text is nominally a warning to the two lovers about the approach of dawn. Elsewhere one might have wished for more contrast between her timbre and Connell's often dark-hued soprano.

Tom Fox's Kurwenal adds another impressive performance to his growing list of San Francisco Opera roles of the past eight years. He was a much more vital stage presence than Schimdt's Tristan, at least in Act 1, belying the intended contrast between the characters, whereby Kurwenal's gruff simplicity is meant to serve as a foil to Tristan's hyper-sensitivity, by turns dreamy, melancholic, passionate. Victor van Halem gave a satisfying account of King Marke, rich and round, solemn and dignified, though perhaps lacking the vulnerable edge needed to win the audience's complete sympathy during his long harangue of the faithless Tristan at the end of Act 2.

Donald Runnicles proved once again his outstanding credentials as a Wagner conductor, whetting appetites for the upcoming Ring cycle. Tempos never dragged, as they can too easily in "Tristan." The orchestral introduction to Act 2 was taken at an unusually breathless clip, and the brisk tempos helped in getting through the long, rambling, and musically amorphous metaphorical colloquy about night and day that ensues when Tristan and Isolde first meet in Act 2 (done without cuts). The only rough spot occurred in the second verse of Kurwenal's mocking song to Isolde in Act 1, where voice and orchestra fell briefly out of synch.

Runnicles was able to bring out many distinct instrumental and textural strands of the score without overpowering the singers (aside from a few passages where I think, in fact, the singers' desperate plight is part of the expressive point). The production confirmed my sense that "Tristan," for all its psychological and musical drama, is simply not a very theatrical piece, but that, all the same, there are many things that only a live, staged performance can fully bring out.

(Thomas Grey is Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is author of Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, and editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Opera Handbook on The Flying Dutchman as well as the Cambridge Companion to Wagner.)

©1998 Thomas Grey, all rights reserved