A “Baritenor” Soars in “Tristan und Isolde”
On the topic of “Tristan und Isolde,” Richard Wagner once said, “Only mediocre performances can save me! Thoroughly good ones would drive people insane.” Fortunately for the body politic, perfect performances of Wagner’s love-death epic seem impossible. During my time in the classical-music watchtower, I’ve seen a dozen or so productions of the opera, and something is always out of whack—often, many things. At the Met in 1999, amid semi-abstract mood pictures and under the direction of Dieter Dorn, René Pape delivered a transfixing portrayal of King Mark, while James Levine cultivated sonorous inertia in the pit and Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen struggled to animate the title roles. At the same venue in 2016, the musical values were superb—Simon Rattle conducting with sinuous authority, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton lending vocal richness to the doomed lovers—but Mariusz Treliński’s staging groped around in modern-dress murk. Of the productions I’ve witnessed, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola’s video-centered collaboration came closest to highest bliss, especially in the version I saw at the Paris Opera in 2005, with Waltraud Meier in full, ferocious dramatic flight as Isolde. Yet even the finest efforts leave countless avenues unexplored.
Perhaps the most striking thing about “Tristan” is the way it combines the metaphysical-philosophical with the psychological-realistic. The piece is steeped in Schopenhauer’s meditations on the futility of worldly striving and the necessity of accepting oblivion. It is also infused with Wagner’s paganistic worship of desire and his matchless ability to translate longing into perpetually unresolved musical phrases. At the same time, “Tristan” observes the Aristotelian unities in a way that puts its characters under enormous dramatic pressure. Each of the three acts unfolds in real time, and each has one node of decisive action: Tristan and Isolde drink the presumed death potion that makes them fall in love; they are discovered in the garden of King Mark, Isolde’s betrothed; Tristan dies, with Isolde following. Furthermore, Wagner insists on showing how every mad love affair makes others suffer. After the volcanic duet of Act II comes Mark’s howl of sorrow, for which the listener is never really prepared. The impossibility of the opera lies in resolving those two vastly different spheres, the cosmic and the intimate.
The Met’s latest production, under the direction of Yuval Sharon, is stronger on the philosophical than the psychological. Sharon, who first drew notice for astounding multimedia spectacles with the Industry company in Los Angeles, is an experienced Wagnerian who presented a persuasive feminist take on “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2018. He has a grounding in Brechtian theatre and is not one to dawdle in Romantic atmosphere. He sees Tristan and Isolde not as isolated flesh-and-blood characters but as archetypes who recur across tellings and retellings of the legend, from medieval times to the present. The opera unfurls on two planes. One, at the front of the stage, is centered on tables where rituals take place—a shared drink, a meal, a deathbed watch. The other, filling the Met’s proscenium, is an iris-like portal that suggests a gateway into dream worlds and the beyond. The singers are accompanied by doubles performing parallel actions on one or the other plane.
In Act I, the stage picture is cluttered, the meaning unclear. This is an all too familiar issue at the modern Met, which, under the aegis of Peter Gelb, the general manager, more or less mandates clutter: hulking sets (by Es Devlin, in this case), choreography (by Annie-B Parson), video and live projections (by Ruth Hogben and Jason H. Thompson). The audience is often left unsure about what it should be looking at. Lost in the melee of imagery—ocean waves, bottles and potions, knives, and so on—is the crux on which the opera turns: Isolde’s uncontainable rage at being carted off to marry King Mark, in the clutches of the man who killed her beloved.
Later on, Sharon’s conception snaps into focus. In Act II, Devlin’s set becomes a floating fantasy realm where the lovers lose themselves in their forbidden desires. They sing from the inside of a conelike apparatus that has the property of amplifying their voices. At times, segments of the cone separate and carry the lovers in opposite directions—an excellent visual metaphor for the narcissism of their passion. In Act III, as the wounded Tristan suffers, hallucinates, and dies, he is seen both lying on a hospital table and wandering in a tunnel populated by white-clad figures. The singer and his double change places as the character passes in and out of consciousness. At the end, Isolde is seen giving birth to a child and joining Tristan in the beyond. The images are at once affecting and jarring—dream and nightmare intermingled. The confusions of Act I notwithstanding, Sharon has passed the “Tristan” challenge. He will next take on the “Ring,” beginning in the 2027-28 season.
The chief musical pleasure of this “Tristan,” on the second night of the run, was Michael Spyres’s portrayal of the damaged hero. This Missouri-born, Vienna-trained tenor has the capacity to sing almost anything, his repertory encompassing Handel, Mozart, bel canto, grand opera, and Wagner. Even more remarkably, he can assume baritone roles as well as tenor ones. He calls himself a “baritenor,” and the label fits. He is thus well suited to Tristan, whose music often borders on the baritonal. Lauritz Melchior, the part’s most storied interpreter on recording, had a similarly broad range. If Spyres cannot match Melchior’s trumpeting high notes, he traversed the score with unfaltering stamina, retaining clarity of diction and breadth of phrase throughout. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Tristan sung so securely and so musically.
The heavily promoted Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen proved problematic as Isolde. She has been appointed the Met’s leading lady in Wagner and is slated to sing Brünnhilde in Sharon’s “Ring.” Her high notes are glorious, spurring comparisons with Birgit Nilsson and other legends. But Isolde isn’t about high notes. Large tracts of the role lie lower in the voice, where mezzo-ish resonance is required. Davidsen’s power drops off markedly in the octave above middle C. Often, the part jumps in and out of that zone, as on the words “Fluch deinem Haupt” (“A curse on your head!”), which falls from the G at the top of the staff to the G below and then climbs up again. The fluctuating volume in such passages—“FLUCH deinem HAUPT”—made for a weirdly uneven line. Beyond that, Davidsen’s diction was mushy, and she lacked the expressive fury of Meier and other great latter-day Isoldes. Yes, the upper register is phenomenal, but I’d rather hear an Isolde who has squeaky high C’s and can sing the rest at full strength.
The subsidiary roles were a similarly mixed lot. The veteran bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny delivered Kurwenal with roughshod interpretive conviction; he is a born Wagner singer. Ryan Speedo Green, as King Mark, may not have matched Pape’s raw grandeur in the role, but he supplied an affecting sense of shattered nobility. Ekaterina Gubanova, who sang Brangäne glowingly in 2016, was less lustrous this time around.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, might have resolved some of the evening’s inconsistencies if he had shown more consideration for the singers and generated more intensity at the climaxes. Yet long stretches, the awesome Prelude included, unspooled with no sense of urgency. For decades, the Met orchestra was the prize of the institution; individual players remain excellent, but the collective now lacks distinction. One of Sharon’s brightest inventions is to bring Pedro R. Díaz, the Met’s English-horn player, onstage for his long solos in Act III, so that he becomes a denizen of Tristan’s tunnel of delirium. His melancholy seems symbolic on another level. Under Gelb’s leadership, the Met has steadily lost money, audiences, and artistic eminence. The company is not yet in its death throes, but it is in need of drastic intervention. ♦