Tristan and Isolde: Perfection in a Former Hen House

 

Here we are, in an enormous converted hen-house, sitting in plush red velvet seats. They are a tiny bit too small for 21^st century bums, and they are numbered with gold-coloured tabs – a dead giveaway that they have been salvaged from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.  The man in the pit, Anthony Negus, is the UK’s most eminent Wagnerian. We are about to witness a performance of Tristan und Isolde in this pocket-sized Bayreuth – we’re at this season’s opening of the Longborough Festival. Though it is June 8^th, for the next six hours – including the two hours’ drink and dinner intervals – nobody so much as mentions the General Election.

No wonder: it is not easy to imagine a better Tristan, including the three or four I’ve seen at Bayreuth. How can that be, in this rural, D-I-Y opera house?  It’s as though the founders, Martin and Lizzie Graham, have been caught up in the spirit of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland 1938 movie, Babes in Arms: Hey, my uncle’s got a barn, let’s put on a show.  In Peter Wedd’s Tristan and Lee Bisset’s Isolde, Longborough has cast the operatic equivalent of Mickey and Judy. I intend this as the highest compliment to their professionalism and star quality.

We’ve seen them both before at Longborough, indeed singing the same roles in the original 2015 production. Perhaps the biggest congratulations are owed to the director, Carmen Jakobi, and movement director, Caroline Lamb, as (except for a not totally distracting moment in Act III) they have deleted the doubling-the-roles dancers that marred the original staging. What’s left is a near-perfect miniature Tristan, with wonderful Rothko-like, colour-field backgrounds that mesmerise you but keep you alert to the smallest changes, moving your moods and emotions, without calling attention to themselves.  These are the sterling work of designer Kimie Nakano, and especially of the lighting designer, Ben Ormerod.

When it comes to Wagner in this country, Anthony Negus is the musical heir to Sir Reginald Goodall, and the 70-ish-piece orchestra seems to seems to meet Wagner’s instructions about the instrumentation: Die Streichinstrumente sind vorzüglich gut und stark zu besetzen. (The string instruments are to be cast outstandingly both in quality and quantity.) From the beginning, it was clear that Negus was going to take the score at a good lick, which is harder on the orchestra than on the singers, and I thought, completely successful, as it increased the dramatic tension (very important in Acts II and III) and caught your attention from the get-go. Among the on-stage instruments Negus included a tárogató substituting for the cor anglais in the last passage of the Shepherd’s air in Act III. (I noticed this only because I was trying to work out the size of the band from the excellent programme. Take a 150-bar bow, Alistair Logan.)

Among the supporting roles, Stuart Pendred’s Kurwenal and Harriet Williams’s Brangäne deserve an extra round of applause for juicy beauty of voice. This, of course, is not a quality you normally expect from a Tristan or an Isolde, but in her relatively few quieter-than-f passages, Lee Bisset shows that she can sing beautifully, both from chest and head. What we need from both the lovers is not charm, however, but dramatic power and vocal stamina and Bisset and Wedd have plenty of both.  Very occasionally in Act III Wedd succumbed to the Bayreuth bark, but not frequently enough to distress anyone. Negus seems to be the sort of conductor who is thoughtful and careful about helping his singers to be heard above the orchestra, and Longborough is, after all, a tiny house. When it comes to volume, both Bisset and Wedd could even relax a touch, with no harm to their spinto or projection.

But the reason this production is so close to ideal is the acting. I have certainly never seen a better Act II;  their erotic business is totally convincing and moving. For the first time, I appreciated that their dialogue in their very long duet is actually an argument, an argument in the philosophical, logical sense. It is cast as a series of propositions in the form, if p then q.

         For example:

 

TRISTAN

The light! The light!
Oh, this light,
how long before it was extinguished!
The sun set,
Day ran its course
but it would not stifle
its spite:
lighting its dread signal
it places it
at the loved one’s door
so that I might not go to her.

 

ISOLDE

But the loved one’s hand
extinguished the light;
what the maid would not risk
I did not fear:
under the power and protection of the Love-Spirit
I bade defiance to Day

 

Thus, reduced to its very bare bones:

Tristan: If the torch is lit, then I am not able to come to Isolde

Isolde: If I want Tristan, then I must extinguish the torch.

 

The argument reaches its Schopenhauer-ean, Buddhist conclusion:

 

TOGETHER

O eternal Night,
sweet Night!
Gloriously sublime
Night of love!
Those whom you have embraced,
upon whom you have smiled,
how could they ever waken
without fear?
Now banish dread,
sweet death,
yearned for, longed for
death-in-love!
In your arms,
consecrated to you,
sacred elemental quickening force,
free from the peril of waking!
How to grasp it,
how to leave it,
this bliss
far from the sun’s,
far from Day’s
parting sorrows!
Free from delusion
gentle yearning,
free from fearing
sweet longing.
Free from sighing
sublime expiring.
Free from languishing
enclosed in sweet darkness.
No evasion
no parting,
just we alone,
ever home,
in unmeasured realms
of ecstatic dreams.

 
Thus, if (p) we die (expire) together then (q) we achieve freedom from: delusion, fearing, sighing, languishing and parting.

I realise this seems abstruse, but it is clear to me that Ms Jakobi, and Wedd and Bisset have grasped the didactic nature of the words of Wagner’s longest duet. They sing it so that you can hear the punctuation, especially the question marks, and their body-language does the rest (and her diction is superb, with every consonant in place). They obey the first law of opera production, which is that your character is always singing to someone else, and that is usually someone, or more than one person, on the stage, and rarely directly to the audience. This means that looking into the eyes of the person or people being sung to is essential. And nowhere is this more vital than in Tristan, where Wagner has written music indicating that Tristan and Isolde should gaze into each other’s eyes. Wedd and Bisset are brilliant at this, at using their body-language to capture and reflect the logic of the music and the libretto. When they do look away from each other, or look at the audience, it always seems to be called for by the drama.  Their world-class smooching respects the grammar and logic of the dialogue. (And they actually look right for the, which is especially important at Longborough, where the budget doesn’t extend to a wig department.)
This musically near-faultless production, with its abstract, minimalist, colour-led sets, exquisite lighting and mostly graceful movement, is a triumph of direction and interpretation. The director claims the authority of Jung for some of this in her programme essay. I feel this is a bit of waffle, but I don’t mind at all, because she has got the actual details of the performance so supremely right. If you have the chance, go and see this production, of which Wagner himself would surely have approved. I hope someone has filmed this production – not merely to give more people the pleasure of seeing and hearing it, but so that it can be used as a model for future productions elsewhere.

 

Further performances at Longborough Festival Opera (lfo.org.uk)

Saturday 10 June

Monday 12 June

Wednesday 14 June