Tristan und Isolde (Opera)

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    A Death-Driven ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Bayreuth Festival

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    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.(Bychkov is in good company. The festival has had its share of conductor missteps in recent years, but the evening before I saw “Tristan,” Simone Young led a masterly “Götterdämmerung”; elsewhere at Bayreuth, Pablo Heras-Casado is returning for “Parsifal”; Nathalie Stutzmann is picking up a “Tannhäuser” once botched by Valery Gergiev; and Oksana Lyniv continues her fiery “Der Fliegende Holländer.” With three female conductors out of five total, Bayreuth’s gender distribution is applaudably better than many in classical music and opera.)Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s production abstracts parts of a ruined ship that, by the third act, is broken up and scattered around the stage.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jessye Norman Rejected These Recordings. Should They Be Released?

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      The maestro was in a foul mood. And the singer was unhappy. The Berlin Wall had fallen almost a decade earlier, but Leipzig, in the former East Germany, still left something to be desired when it came to an opera star’s material needs.The conductor Kurt Masur and the soprano Jessye Norman — whose album collaboration on Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” was already a classic — had joined the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to start recording Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” But things had quickly soured.“She and Masur quarreled,” recalled Costa Pilavachi, then an executive at Philips Classics, the label making the recording. “It was a very, very difficult couple of weeks.”With costs spiraling and spirits low, the label eventually abandoned its plan for a complete “Tristan” and focused on excerpts featuring Isolde, a character Norman had never put on record beyond the famous “Liebestod.” But even this curtailed effort was never released.Until now. Those “Tristan” excerpts are perhaps the most eagerly anticipated part of “Jessye Norman: The Unreleased Masters,” coming from Decca — part of Universal Music Group, which acquired Philips years ago — on March 24.Jessye Norman singing from “Tristan und Isolde”Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Kurt Masur, conductor (Decca)The collection consists of three albums recorded with different orchestras and conductors over a period of nine years. One thing they have in common: Norman, one of the most beloved singers of our time, did not approve their release before her death, at 74, in 2019.“When she passed on, I raised with Decca: Isn’t it time to revisit these?” said Cyrus Meher-Homji, an executive at Universal in Australia. The label approached Norman’s estate, which gave its blessing.James Norman, her brother, said in a statement to The New York Times, “There’s no way of knowing whether Jessye would ever have approved the releases per her very high standards, as the subject was not one we ever discussed.”But, he added, they had frequently discussed her philanthropic interests, “and we see the releases as a way to help the estate to advance those interests.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Fosse Dancers: The thrill of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” a revival of the 1978 musical is, aptly, its dancers. All are principals. No two are alike, not even a tiny bit. And that’s the way Fosse wanted it.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.However worthy the beneficiary, though, should labels and estates sanction the release of material that artists rejected?Sometimes, the label answers with a clear no: Maria Callas’s final studio recording, for example, was judged artistically inferior and canned. And sometimes, an unsanctioned album comes out during an artist’s lifetime. In the early 1980s, Deutsche Grammophon put out a “Tristan” against the wishes of the notoriously recording-shy conductor Carlos Kleiber, leading to the severing of his relationship with the label.After Kleiber died, his estate remained adamant that other material languishing in the vault should stay there. The family of Sergiu Celibidache, another conductor who frowned on recording, took the opposite position, allowing the release of many albums after his death.This question is more familiar in the literary world. Most of us are thankful that Max Brod didn’t burn Franz Kafka’s unpublished works at the author’s request. But in 2006, when a volume of uncollected material by the poet Elizabeth Bishop was published, the scholar Helen Vendler wrote that Bishop would have greeted it “with a horrified ‘No.’”Martha de Francisco, a record producer who worked with Norman (though not on the projects included in the new set), said, “We’re really all the time thinking of what is the artist’s integrity.”But the nature of that integrity is often far from straightforward. Artists’ wishes can be ambiguous or ambivalent. And some observers believe that the value to posterity of certain material can in some cases supersede even clear wishes. As far as the criteria, though, most admit that it’s more or less “I know it when I hear it.”For Norman, approving recordings was a painstaking and protracted process, even when the answer ended up being yes. “She was extraordinarily professional, and an extraordinarily severe critic of her own work,” said Anthony Freud, then one of her producers and now the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago.That would seem to give weight to her “no.” But those who spoke with her over the years about these unreleased projects suggest that she wasn’t always resolute about them, and that her reasons for not giving her approval were vague or fixable.“She was a great artist, and she had the right to decide what the public would hear and what the public wouldn’t hear in terms of her commercial output,” Pilavachi said. “She definitely did soften: She was less militant when I spoke to her, maybe 10 years ago, for the last time. She was much more willing to discuss some of this.”The earliest of the three projects is a collaboration with one of her champions, the conductor James Levine, drawn from live performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. The repertory includes the “Four Last Songs” — seven years after her sublime 1982 rendition with Masur — and, from 1992, Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder.”“She was thrilled with the ‘Wesendoncks,’” Pilavachi said. “But she wasn’t happy with one note in one song in the ‘Four Last Songs.’ She wanted us to redo that with Levine and the Berlin Philharmonic, and it just never happened. I had extensive conversations with her throughout the ’90s about it.”There was talk of using the Masur recording to patch the note she indicated. (While memories of her complaint are now blurry, it might have been in the first song, “Frühling,” though nothing in any of the four with Levine stands out as blatantly off.) But the original tapes of the older album turned out to have been recycled. The label couldn’t see its way to releasing the Wagner songs alone, so the whole project stayed in storage.These “Four Last Songs” are sleeker than the luscious version she set down with Masur, while Norman’s voice, even if it had lost some easy opulence, was still majestic and flexible. The “Wesendoncks,” which she had already recorded twice, are excellent: brooding, urgent and lush, the orchestra glistening.Norman came up with the idea for the next project, which brought together three queenly characters: Haydn’s “Scena di Berenice,” Berlioz’s “La Mort de Cléopâtre” and Britten’s “Phaedra,” all recorded with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in February 1994.Pilavachi said Norman had vague misgivings about the Berlioz; Meher-Homji said her complaint in that work was less about her performance than the sound.“By the late 2000s, she approved some of the material,” Meher-Homji said. “She approved the Britten, and she approved the Haydn, but she didn’t like the mix on the Berlioz. And I could understand why. The sound was really hollow; she wanted it tightened up. The orchestra sounded like it was playing in a bathtub.”The mix was adjusted for the new release, and sounds properly balanced, with the Bostonians glittering. Her singing in the Berlioz is slightly more pressed and less plush than it had been with Daniel Barenboim a decade earlier, but she is still fully in command. The Haydn is magisterial but tender; the Britten, blistering and articulate.There is a case to be made that Norman’s objections to these two recordings were minor, and that the performances are worthy of standing alongside her prime work. But that still leaves the “Tristan” — which poses the thorniest questions.In a way, it is the most precious of the set, setting down a role that Norman never sang in full, one for which her capacious but thrusting voice was, in theory, beautifully suited. Its afterlife has also been the messiest of the three albums: The documentation related to the recording is scant and faded, as are the memories of those who worked on it.The similarity between the surnames of Kurt Masur and the tenor Thomas Moser initially caused confusion about who had sung Tristan. More bizarre, when Decca announced the new set last fall, it led with the blazing news that through overdubbing Norman had recorded both Isolde and the supporting role of Brangäne. It took two and a half months for the label to correct itself: Brangäne was actually the mezzo-soprano Hanna Schwarz.Norman, left, performing with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Lutz KleinhansMeher-Homji said that at some point after the sessions had ended in April 1998, Cord Garben, the recording’s producer, flew to England to play the edit for Norman. “She listened and said nothing,” Meher-Homji said. “There were plans to continue, and she decided she didn’t want to.”Pilavachi believes the troubled recording process had irretrievably colored her view of it. “She didn’t have any objections to her own singing,” he said. “I think she didn’t want to listen to all the tapes, having had such a lousy experience in Leipzig. I don’t think she had ever listened to it properly so that she could say yes or no.”Dominic Fyfe, Decca’s label director, said: “Obviously this was done quite late in her career. We’re perfectly well aware there may be people who react and say this should not have been released. There may be some controversy around it. But I think on balance, collectively, we all felt that the strengths of the recording outweigh many of the weaknesses.”It’s true: There are strengths and weaknesses to the “Tristan” excerpts. Norman’s voice is richly vehement and full of mystery. Her sensibility is lively, even if Masur’s conducting tends to be limp. Her diction is pungent; the tone has her familiar echoey depth — far plummier than Schwarz’s Brangäne — if fewer sumptuous colors. Some longer phrases are heavy lifting; the high notes are not all comfortable; and some of the intonation wavers in softer passages of Isolde’s Narrative and Curse. The album gives great pleasure, but, more than the other two, one can understand Norman doubting it.When Pilavachi would see her in New York, he would ask her about these projects. “She became less negative about them as time went on,” he said. “But when I went back to London and I would follow up, I wouldn’t hear back. Or I’d send her the masters again, but I don’t know if she ever listened to them. With time she lost interest in them.”The liner notes for the new set thoroughly describe the equivocal position the recordings hold in Norman’s body of work. “It’s important that people appreciate that she had misgivings,” Fyfe said.But that context will not be available on streaming platforms. There, these albums will appear as indistinguishable from music that Norman did approve.“In a digital world,” Fyfe said, “it’s slightly out of our hands.”James Norman said in his statement, “We did agonize some about approving the release of something about which Jessye had some concerns.” But whatever the ethical quandaries, it is certainly the legal right of Norman’s estate and her label to approve the release of this new set. Now it is up to listeners — and to history — to judge.“Common sense is right to prevail,” said Freud, her onetime producer. “I’m not trying to second guess why an artist might have a problem with a recording. But there are clearly recordings that are of a quality that deserves to be heard, and there are other recordings that aren’t. I suppose logically, to me, the answer needs to lie in the quality of the result somehow. Is it good?” More

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      Review: A ‘Tristan und Isolde’ Plays Out in Shadows and Light

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      At Santa Fe Opera, Wagner’s work is being presented for the first time, in a striking, modest staging that makes space for the music.SANTA FE, N.M. — The play of light has always been part of the show at the Santa Fe Opera: its majestic, open-sided theater in the foothills making drama out of the darkening of the sky and the brightening of the stars, even the flash of a hopefully distant storm.But in Santa Fe’s admirably understated, lovingly faithful new “Tristan und Isolde,” the summer house’s first Wagner for more than 30 years and its only foray thus far into the composer’s dramas beyond “The Flying Dutchman,” light moves center stage.Day and night lie at the heart of “Tristan,” the former representing the glaring, intrusive reality from which Tristan and Isolde struggle to escape in their love, the latter their “wondrous realm,” as Tristan sings of it, of freedom, of passion and ultimately of oblivion.There was a time when that metaphor was treated as at least somewhat expendable; in deference to singers’ stamina, Wagner’s longest disquisition on the philosophical metaphor, in Act II, was traditionally cut.But the incompatibility of the worlds of light and dark are taken as an organizing principle in Santa Fe’s “Tristan,” with subtle projections by Greg Emetaz that build on smart lighting by John Torres. Co-directed by the hotshots Lisenka Heijboer Castañón and Zack Winokur, it contrasts bright white with pitch black, and often dwells in the shades in between.The result is filled with striking, poignant images. We meet Tristan as a towering silhouette, for instance, a projection onto which Isolde can fix her grievances; that image finds its echo hours later, as the shadow of absent Isolde paces the walls of Tristan’s hallucinating mind.Much of the first act takes place in a cramped box of light, as Isolde is entrapped on her voyage to wed King Marke. When she narrates her failure to kill Tristan earlier, to avenge his murder of Morold, her fiancé, spotlights track her as she explores the encroaching murk. Tristan, when he finally deigns to see her, is already in the shadow of night. No potion is necessary for them to fall in love — only to reveal what they both already know.Wilson, left, with Simon O’Neill as Tristan in the production, which features scenic design by the firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero and costumes by Carlos J. Soto.Curtis Brown/Santa Fe OperaThese kinds of touches are gently allusive, suggesting more of an atmosphere than pretending to some grand interpretation. But that’s the point. Heijboer Castañón, a Dutch-Peruvian director whose credits include assisting Pierre Audi on this opera in Amsterdam, and Winokur, gaining renown as the artistic director of the insurgent American Modern Opera Company, offer something of a welcome to a work that is often treated warily or, ironically, or rendered illegible in impenetrable symbolism.Heijboer Castañón and Winokur offer no drastic interventions in the plot, just a delicate understanding of it as a tale of intimacies, friendly and erotic alike. What few props exist are lightly used. The spare set, from blueprints by the architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, consists of four angled walls of mottled gray — cutouts evoking a castle tower, say, but no more than evoking it. Carlos J. Soto’s costumes hint at abstraction, rather than declaim distance as a goal.There is a refreshing feeling of trust to it all, a sensible desire not to get in the way of what clearly remains to these young collaborators a basically human story — and a willingness, perhaps above all, to make space for the music.And why not?James Gaffigan, typically lively on the podium for what is his first run of a full Wagner opera, sparked up a feisty intensity that supplied the energy the staging tended to resist, pushing the drama hard but not harshly. His was a take on the score both muscular and swift, blessedly so for a show that ended well after midnight.Greater experience might bring more deliberate harmonic and thematic direction, perhaps more purpose to transitions and more of a willingness to linger, just as making Wagner a habit rather than an exception here might, in time, sand down some of the rougher edges of the orchestra’s playing. Either way, the signs are promising for Gaffigan, who takes charge of the Komische Oper in Berlin next year.Never mind the future when it comes to the soprano Tamara Wilson. Renowned as a Verdian, she is slated to sing Elsa in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Lohengrin” next spring and Sieglinde in Vienna shortly thereafter; this Isolde, amply powerful yet ideally precise with the text, confirmed her as quite the Wagnerian already.Jamie Barton as Brangäne, a portrayal our critic describes as “magnificent.”Curtis Brown/Santa Fe OperaCornered, angry, spiteful, fearful, anxious, excited, enraptured, serene, each in turn — Wilson’s portrayal, like that of Jamie Barton’s magnificent Brangäne, was as authoritatively acted as it was movingly sung, an embodiment of the role in a production that fixed relentless attention on its principals.Simon O’Neill, a ponderous stage presence, suffered from that unsparing focus in the first two acts; in his third he surpassed himself, but the sharp, compressed quality of his voice still seemed less suited to Tristan than to some of the roles he has taken on in service to Wagner.The unstinting loudness of Nicholas Brownlee, otherwise a fine Kurwenal and the Dutchman in a David Alden production scheduled for next season here, made O’Neill’s frequent trouble slicing through the orchestra all the more plain; the affecting ease of Eric Owens’s King Marke likewise pointed up the tenor’s stilted, self-conscious delivery.But with Wilson dominating it by force of voice and clarity of personality, this is a “Tristan” that anyway seems rightly to imply — for it insists on nothing — that it should be “Isolde” to which we shorten the name of this singular work. And it is to Isolde that the final coup is reserved; as the music of her transfiguration resolves, the set’s walls open for Wilson to stride calmly to the back of the theater, and into the night.Tristan und IsoldeThrough Aug. 23 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More

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      Fake Rock Nearly Crushes Opera Star: Accident or Sabotage?

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      Feuding stagehands, falling props: It might sound like the plot of an opera, but in France it has been the subject of a court case.LONDON — The tenor Robert Dean Smith was lying onstage — eyes closed, pretending to be dead — when he felt something very close above him.Smith was appearing as Tristan in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France, and he assumed that what he sensed looming was his colleague, the soprano Elisabete Matos, who was singing Isolde. She’d probably decided to alter the choreography and had come to stand over him, he thought.But when Smith opened his eyes, he saw a 467-pound fake rock hanging just inches from his face. “I panicked and just threw it out of the way,” he recalled of the 2015 incident in a telephone interview. He rolled out from underneath the object, and quickly got to his feet — which likely confused an audience that had watched Tristan die a short while before. (His co-star kept singing throughout.)The cause of this dangerous mishap was at first a mystery. But the reality turns out to be so bizarre that it could be an opera itself.Robert Dean Smith and Elisabete Matos onstage in “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in 2015Partrice NinLast week, a court in Toulouse found a stagehand at the theater guilty of tampering with the computer system that controlled the prop rock’s descent. The production, which was directed by Nicolas Joel, intended for the object to stop about 30 inches above the tenor, and its continued descent at the performance in question was only stopped when another member of the technical staff realized something had gone wrong, according to a report in La Dépêche du Midi, a local newspaper.According to the prosecutors, the stagehand, Nicholas S., whose surname has not been revealed by French newspapers out of respect for his privacy, had long been in conflict with a rival stagehand, Richard R., whom he hoped would be blamed for the error. Two months before the incident, Nicholas S. had won a court case where he accused Richard R. of assault.Nicholas S., who denied the allegations that he had tampered with the computer system, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and made to pay a symbolic one-euro fine to the Théâtre du Capitole. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.Smith, the tenor, said he had never imagined someone had been trying to hurt him or had tampered with the equipment. “I’ve seen too many accidents onstage,” he said. “I’ve seen trapdoors open with people on them, and doors and walls fall down onto people.” Smith once cut his hand open while playing Don José in Bizet’s “Carmen,” because someone had forgotten to blunt the knife.In 2008, Smith was actually the beneficiary of such a mishap — making his Metropolitan Opera debut, as Tristan, after the tenor Gary Lehman was injured during a prior performance because of a prop malfunction. Lehman had been lying on a palette on a steeply raked section of the stage when the palette broke loose from its moorings and plummeted into the prompter’s box. Lehman hit his head and could not take part in the next performance.Given the frequency of accidents onstage, that the 2015 incident was the result of feuding stagehands was “just really bizarre and very unfortunate for the theater,” Smith said.After the 2015 performance, the tenor apologized to Matos for his part in ruining the show. After that, he said, he had tried to ensure he died onstage in positions where he could keep his eyes open to see if anything was coming.Constant Merheut contributed reporting from Paris. More

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      A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)

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      At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, it was hard for even beloved classics to live up to the elegant intensity of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered here on July 3.Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution’s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a “création,” as the French call it, succeeds.And “Innocence,” which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.“I have a long career in commissioning,” Audi told The Times recently. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in “Innocence” — a character crushing a handful of cake onto another — returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”The carnivalesque staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozzi di Figaro.”Jean-Louis FernandezLotte de Beer’s “Figaro” production is an intentional, endearing mess — an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell’arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing — a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars — and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.In the title role of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves’s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations — and with, at best, a dad bod.Christopher Purves’s incarnation of Falstaff is not the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit. As a careful master chef, he relishes his creations.Monika RittershausWhile Falstaff is often likable, Kosky’s implicit promise is that we’ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director’s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character’s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand “Falstaff” productions; the merry wives of Windsor’s revenge, little crueler.The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a “Falstaff” is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone’s staging — an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a Métro car — is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman’s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Stone, who moved the opera to modern-day Paris. Jean-Louis FernandezPerhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production’s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it’s hard to know who’s really betraying whom, who’s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme’s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she’s never been better as Isolde — singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton sings rather than barks Tristan, a tenor’s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like “Innocence.” In an enormous former ironworks at Luma — the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix — “The Arab Apocalypse” was created as part of the festival’s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.But based on Etel Adnan’s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, “Apocalypse” was dreary — the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.“Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory” was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.From left, Julie Roset, Valerio Contaldo and Etienne Bazola in “Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory.”Monika RittershausHer images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by Sébastien Daucé, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Théâtre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.Audi’s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music’s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)The program of concerts — which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse — will grow, as will the scope of the festival’s productions. With “Tosca,” Aix’s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.Commissions are also central to his agenda; “Innocence” is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.The production — like “Tristan,” directed by Stone — keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone’s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera’s impact wavers.But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, “Innocence” is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age’s travails. More

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      Opera Roars Back With Dueling Wagner Premieres

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      After a long absence of large-scale productions, there are two major new “Tristan und Isolde” stagings running in Germany and France.If you were watching closely, opera never truly disappeared during the pandemic.Some companies performed in empty houses, hoping to reach audiences at home. A few took the risk of an early reopening, and were forced to abruptly cancel their shows if a coronavirus test came back positive. Composers began to skip the stage entirely and write for streaming platforms.But now opera as we remember it — starry opening nights, full orchestras and choirs, cheers coming from over a thousand people in formal wear — is back. It’s still rare in the United States, but not in Europe, thanks to rising vaccination rates, newly opened borders and relaxed safety measures. And, after a long absence of large-scale productions, there are two of Wagner’s immense “Tristan und Isolde,” with A-list singers and creative teams to match, running at the same time in Munich and Aix-en-Provence, France.In a binge driven by deprivation, I saw them back-to-back: Sunday in Germany, and Monday in France. On the surface, the shows share virtually nothing, except maybe a belief in the timelessness of a wood-paneled interior.But both are excellently conducted — by Kirill Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and by Simon Rattle, leading the London Symphony Orchestra at the Aix-en-Provence Festival — though in different ways that demonstrate the interpretive elasticity of Wagner’s score. And the two productions are the work of directors known for their radical approaches to classics: Krzysztof Warlikowski and Simon Stone.In Aix, the title roles are being performed with ease by two “Tristan” veterans, the tenor Stuart Skelton and the soprano Nina Stemme; in Munich, the stars Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros are making their debuts as the doomed lovers.Jonas Kaufmann, left, as Tristan and Anja Harteros as Isolde in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new production at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Wilfried HöslWarlikowski approaches the opera with shocking, if disappointing, restraint for a director who typically layers his productions with provocations. His staging (which will be livestreamed on July 31) is relatively straightforward, with legible metaphors and a concept guided by Freud’s death drive, which was theorized long after Wagner wrote his work yet is prefigured throughout, as in Isolde’s Act I exclamation “Todgeweihtes Haupt! Todgeweihtes Herz!”: death-devoted head, death-devoted heart.Freud is ever-present. The set changes — within a frame of three sleekly wood-paneled walls designed by Warlikowski’s collaborator and wife, Malgorzata Szczesniak — but two furniture pieces remain fixed: at one side of the stage an analyst’s divan, where Tristan recounts his childhood trauma, and at the other a glass cabinet filled with deadly instruments.Warlikowski’s melancholy Tristan and Isolde are bound for death, no love potion required, from the start. They attempt suicide in each act and are, perhaps, traumatized by the bloody history that precedes the opera’s action. And they aren’t alone: The young sailor who sings the first line, here the gently voiced tenor Manuel Günther, blindly wanders in his underwear and a childishly crude crown and cape, his wounded eyes wrapped in bandages. Recovery proves impossible for some. In the final scene, at “Hier wütet der Tod!” (“Here death rages!”) from Tristan’s servant Kurwenal — the bass-baritone Wolfgang Koch, with a ferocity out of place in this production — characters simply collapse, as if happy to welcome their fate.In the pit, Petrenko led a patient prelude, letting its searching melody of desire waft organically. But then he paused, in breathtaking silence, before the orchestra’s first outburst of passion, which gave way to an evening of erotic intensity, druglike though never unwieldy. His Act III prelude had the thick texture of molasses, entrapping and hopeless.Death looms over Warlikowski’s production, in which Tristan and Isolde attempt suicide in each act.Wilfried Hösl Kaufmann and Harteros never quite rose to the level of the orchestra, or at times the assured sound of their colleagues Okka von der Damerau, as Brangäne, and Mika Kares, as King Marke. Kaufmann’s Tristan was a soft-voiced one, more fragile than heroic. And Harteros brought an unusual lightness to her role, delivering a “Liebestod” occasionally difficult to hear and marred by troubled intonation.They were at their best near the end of the marathon love duet in Act II: Harteros achieving a delicate beauty as she considered the “and” of the phrase “Tristan and Isolde”; and Kaufmann calm yet crushing as he sang the morbidly romantic words that introduce the “Liebestod” theme.In Aix, Skelton and Stemme’s performances reflected their growth in these roles over the years — Skelton especially, who didn’t merely survive Tristan’s punishing Act III monologue, as he did at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, but delivered it with herculean grit and shattering dramatic acuity.With a cast that includes a mighty Jamie Barton as Brangäne and Franz-Josef Selig, vigorous but touching as Marke, and with the London Symphony propulsive and clear under Rattle’s baton, Aix’s “Tristan” is, musically speaking, an achievement. (The production will be broadcast on France Musique and Arte Concert on July 8, with streaming to follow on Arte.)Rattle’s conducting was less sensuous than Petrenko’s, but it had a fiery command of the drama amid an insistence on precision. Unfortunately the prelude, one of the most effective mood-setters in opera, was difficult to focus on as Stone’s staging lifted the curtain to reveal a party inside a fashionable Paris apartment with — you guessed it — wood-paneled walls. Wagner’s music of teeming passion and longing underscored the sounds of clinking glasses and crinkling gift wrap.Like many of Stone’s productions, this one — designed by Ralph Myers — features a set so realistic and thoroughly furnished it would be called “turnkey” on an HGTV show. The purpose of it, here, is to juxtapose it with fantasy in what amounts to “Tristan” by way of “Madame Bovary.”During that opening party, a woman spies her husband kissing another woman in the kitchen, and reads incriminating texts on his phone. With a flicker of lights, Stone’s hyper-realism turns surreal: The view outside is no longer a Parisian cityscape but the open sea. Escaping into an old romantic tale like Emma Bovary, the woman imagines herself at the center of the Tristan myth.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Stemme and Skelton in Simon Stone’s production, which blends hyper-realism with fantasy.Jean-Louis FernandezThese reveries continue with each act — in ways that, at best, crowd the opera and, at worst, betray it. As the lights flicker in a design office overlooking the hill of Montmartre in Act II, the windows reveal a moonlit sky; when, in Act III, the woman and husband ride the Métro to a night at the theater, joined by a young man — in her fantasies, the jealous lover and tattler Melot (Dominic Sedgwick) — the train car appears to pass through real stations and a verdant countryside.No one dies in this “Tristan,” but when the woman returns to reality with the “Liebestod,” she removes her wedding ring, hands it to her husband and abandons him in the train as she walks off with the young man.That ending, like other moments in the production, was as puzzling as it was exasperating — why not let her leave alone and empowered? Yet from the pit came, at last, the resolution of the “Tristan” chord, a serene send-off from the London Symphony. It was a potion of its own, almost enough to inspire forgiveness.Perhaps that colored my gaze as, during the curtain call, I looked around and saw, for the first time since March last year, a full house. It was a privilege to be there, as it had been in Munich. I had my critical quibbles, but the sentimental side of me felt like Nick Guest in “The Line of Beauty,” seeing the ordinary as extraordinary and marveling at the fact of grand opera at all — in the light of the moment, so beautiful. More