Review: Death Drives a New ‘Tristan’ at Wagner’s Festival
The New York Times
Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany is an excellently conducted puzzle of grim symbols.
Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is not a love story. It’s a death story.
It’s an opera in which the central duet is an ecstatic, philosophical declaration of love through a pledge of mutual death. Tristan, his name itself rooted in sadness, welcomes his end as a release; the greatest act of devotion, for Isolde, would be to join him in a state of love transfigured.
OK, maybe “Tristan” is both a love story and a death story.
Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s new production, at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, emphasizes the death part more. (People in the country can stream it on BR Klassik.) He sets the opera in a purgatorial space and, instead of spiritual transformation, portrays a scarcely transcendent suicide, an act of self-destruction in service of love.
It’s a bleak but still Romantic outlook, conveyed with stubborn opacity and a loose grip of the dramaturgy. A director’s vision, though, is just one reason to visit Bayreuth, the pilgrimage-like festival that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago.
This “Tristan” belongs, above all, to the conductor Semyon Bychkov. He previously led “Parsifal” at Bayreuth with shocking speed, but he did something like the opposite here: not necessarily stretching the score, but relishing key moments to guide the audience’s emotions as commandingly as Wagner intended. At times, the passion was tidal; at others, teeming with anticipation.
