Wagner, Richard

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      ‘A Stone in the Mosaic’: A Director Enters the House of Wagner

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      At 33, Valentin Schwarz is taking on the monumental “Ring” cycle at the theater Wagner built for it in Bayreuth, Germany.New productions of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, a 16-hour epic taking place over four evenings, are always a highly anticipated event, and even more so when they take place at the annual Bayreuth Festival.Opera houses most often roll out stagings of the four “Ring” works — “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” — over multiple years. But Bayreuth, which is still managed by the descendants of the composer himself, presents the entire cycle all at once. And its newest production, by the Austrian director Valentin Schwarz, opens July 31.Since World War II, there have only been nine Bayreuth productions of the “Ring” — among them Patrice Chéreau’s storied 1976 staging, which introduced critical, political dramaturgy to the piece, and the most recent one, a divisive 2013 interpretation by the Marxist firebrand Frank Castorf.A new “Ring” had been scheduled to premiere there in 2020, taken on by a team of surprisingly fresh faces: Schwarz, 33, and the Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, 42. The pandemic delayed the project, and last week, Inkinen fell ill with Covid-19 and had to miss crucial rehearsals. He was replaced by Cornelius Meister, who had originally been engaged to lead “Tristan und Isolde.”In between recent rehearsals, Schwarz discussed his vision for the “Ring” in a video interview. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How are you holding up in the heat?Well, the coolest place in Bayreuth is on the stage. The audience generates the heat.And the building sort of cooks all afternoon, right, when people are about to take their uncomfortable seats?Yes, and I think this kind of torture has to have its reward — especially a “Ring,” which is basically one week of torture. You should get one big plot, one tale, one big story that you enjoy each evening and have the feeling that you want to know how it’s going to turn out in the next piece.What is your approach to the cycle?It’s long and there’s an Everest-like quality to it, but, in fact, it’s not so many characters for these 15 hours of music. It’s 30 or 40 people. It reminds me very much of the typical stories of today — TV series, big novels — where you can dive in and experience getting to know the characters in a way that is not only one-dimensional.We follow Wotan, we follow Brünnhilde, we follow Siegfried, and never get just one impression that one is a hero and the other is purely evil. Instead, we get to know the scratching, the deep dive into unconscious motivations. The “Ring” is mainly about one big family. We take this tale through different generations, through children and grandchildren, and this long stretch of history within the people and this family.There are guests — wanted and unwanted — who interfere in this family story. The basic conflicts are Greek conflicts. Motivations of anger, of hatred, of love, the will to power. This stays within this family, and that informs my, you could say, Nietzschean approach. What is the thing that motivates every person in the piece? It’s knowing the end: that they will die, that it will end, that time ends. All of them are trying to find a solution for this.This summer’s production will have many singers switch roles between productions instead of, for example, casting one single Wotan and Brünnhilde throughout the entire cycle. Is this related to that generational approach, or is it a more prosaic choice?Like most things in a theater, there’s the basic mundane thing, which is that we have not so many Wagner singers, and they are reducing in number every year. There’s maybe five people in the world who can sing Wotan. Bayreuth gives those singers a chance for singers to evolve within the pieces. Over time, someone can sing Fasolt and go on and sing Wotan afterward, for example.For the casting, I was of course very involved with Katharina Wagner. In many cases, it’s interesting to show how the role, the character changes between pieces. Irene Theorin, for example, sings Brünnhilde in “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” and in between, in “Siegfried,” it’s Daniela Köhler. To make this big transition, it was great to see — at the end of Walküre, Irene Theorin is trapped on the cliffs by Wotan behind the magic fire, but this person is changing.When you talk about approaching the work as a TV series or film, is this something that at least partly comes from the filmic quality of Wagner’s music?Most modern medieval movies and TV series are unthinkable without that Wagnerian aspect. Even in “Game of Thrones,” as soon as it’s medieval, it has to sound like Wagner. What you describe as filmic is for me more about Wagner being a very practical man of theater. He knew about filmic effects long before movies existed. He built the Festspielhaus here at Bayreuth precisely for this work. It’s democratic. You can see the same stage from every seat. The invisible orchestra. He wanted to have this approach — you could call if filmic — from a visual perspective as well.From the structural side, it’s even more interesting, because of the leitmotifs. He figured out how to construct this piece as a collage. I’ll take this idea from the Eddas, I’ll take this from the “Nibelungenlied,” I’ll invent something there. It’s not a myth; it’s a myth of other myths. And to make it not just a car crash but something which fits together well, also musically, over a 30-year creation time with a long break from composing, there’s this narrative structure in which the orchestra, through its use of the different musical motives, is an all-knowing storyteller. It’s not a logical thing about knowing all the motives before you enter but something that comes from an unconscious layer of enormous emotionality, which makes it approachable for everybody.That all-knowing storyteller quality might clash with the immediacy of storytelling in a TV series, no? So much of the piece isn’t action but people describing things that have happened or will happen.Of course it has to be psychologically gripping. I have to know why this person is telling us the thing that happened half an hour ago. Wagner didn’t think we were so stupid we would forget. In most cases, the interest is that it’s not a monologue where someone stands onstage and sings into a mirror, but someone who is communicating to someone else. Psychologically speaking, this act of speaking is the first step in therapy. In many of these monologues, the characters give their own approach to the thing that has happened, and their position changes within the monologue.The second thing is that it has to do with the relationship of the characters to the myth. Everyone in the piece knows about the ring, has their imagination of what it does. But knowledge of different things in the piece moves like a telescope; it shifts position and zooms out and in. We explore this three-dimensional sphere of the myth and the story. It grips me that these moments, when they tell us things that have happened, are creating the past itself.You’re directing this work in the house that was built for it. What is that like?You arrive, and you are baffled. You sit down in the audience for the beginning of “Rheingold,” and the sound comes out of nowhere. This experience is singular. To come to this place is also to come to the history of this place. We know that there were very dark hours in the history of the festival. They have done a good job in the last years of reflecting on these: to hire Jewish directors like Barrie Kosky, to process the past and try to create something new.It’s enormous, in this place, how the common knowledge of Wagner still exists, in every orchestral musician, in every stage technician. They remember that this is where Wolfgang Wagner wanted the curtain to rise or fall. And the audience, which is the most advanced Wagner audience in the world — they know everything about the reception history of this repertoire. So it’s not my job to tell them the story that Wagner has written, but instead it forces us to have a new vision and approach every time.In the last few years, I realized that the intrinsic feature at Bayreuth — where the works cycle and nothing lasts forever — means I don’t have to make the “Ring” production for all time. I am making something for this moment, not something that lasts. A stone in the mosaic of the big picture of the history of Wagner. This makes me humble, feel down to earth, reminds me of what small insignificant pieces of stardust we all are in the end. More

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      Wagner’s Early Operas Shouldn’t Be Mere Curiosities

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      A survey at Oper Leipzig provides an opportunity to reassess the youthful efforts that have been excluded from the composer’s canon.LEIPZIG, Germany — How quickly Richard Wagner changed his mind about “Rienzi,” his first successful opera.In his self-aggrandizing memoir, “My Life,” assembled at the request of the Bavarian King Ludwig II and dictated to his wife, Cosima, Wagner described the 1842 opening night as something like the apotheosis of his artistic coming-of-age. “No subsequent experience,” he said, “has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of ‘Rienzi.’”Granted, that was written before bigger achievements: inaugurating his Bayreuth Festival Theater with the first “Ring” cycle in 1876, or premiering his final work, “Parsifal,” six years later. But Wagner nevertheless regarded “Rienzi” with affection.Affection, and then indifference. By the time he was working on “Lohengrin,” in the mid-1840s, “Rienzi” had become, he said, “a work that no longer interested me” — a welcome, much-needed source of income, but not a reflection of the poetry, mystery and singular musical language that would come to define his mature operas.And so, when the non-“Ring” and “Parsifal” works were slowly introduced to the Bayreuth stage by Cosima after her husband’s death in 1883, she stopped short of “Rienzi,” going back only as far as its successor, “Der Fliegende Holländer,” and codifying the 10 canonical operas that continue to be performed at the festival today.Doomed to exclusion and obscurity were his three earlier efforts, which in addition to “Rienzi” include “Die Feen,” a work never performed in Wagner’s lifetime, and “Das Liebesverbot,” from 1836. All have appeared onstage throughout the years, but they remain curiosities.Should they? At Oper Leipzig, in Wagner’s hometown, a survey of his entire stage output — a festival called Wagner 22, which continues through July 14 — offers a fresh opportunity to assess his early works in juxtaposition with their canonical siblings, and in chronological order.The trio of rarities reveals an impressionable composer who, before finding a voice of his own, knew how to expertly draw on those he admired; and who, before pioneering a declamatory style of operatic dramaturgy, rapidly developed a keen sense for theatrical storytelling and a grasp for the fashions of his time. In some ways, he is himself from the start, writing less in a mode of entertainment than of profound exploration — in the tradition of Mozart’s collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, like “Don Giovanni,” and of Beethoven’s fiercely political “Fidelio.”Mozart especially looms over “Die Feen,” composed when Wagner was 20 years old. It came after he had abandoned an earlier work, “Die Hochzeit,” and after he had rejected a suggestion to compose an opera about the life of the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He wrote the libretto himself, inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s “La Donna Serpente,” setting a precedent for all of his works.“I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto,” he later recalled, “for now I realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.”Renaud Doucet’s production of “Die Feen” blends the opera’s dreamy fantasy with the realism of a contemporary apartment.Kirsten Nijhof“Die Feen” didn’t premiere until 1888, five years after Wagner’s death. So he was spared the pain of the public reception it might have had in his youth. It’s impossible to say what that would have been, but from the perspective of 2022, the opera is, frankly, not very good. And that’s not the fault of Oper Leipzig, which — in a reminder that the performing arts continue to tread carefully under the threat of Covid-19 — put on its production last week with last-minute replacements for not only the two leading roles, but also the conductor.If anything, the staging, by Renaud Doucet, helps orient viewers with a work they probably don’t know, aided at every turn by the clear and luxurious sound of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the pit. Doucet’s production is set in the present, at the home of a man who tunes in to a radio broadcast of the opera, which provides a contextualizing introduction. The dreamy action begins to intrude on reality; this evening is as much about discovering “Die Feen” as performing it.The libretto features the subplots of a Mozart comedy and the Romanticism of Carl Maria von Weber, whose “Der Freischütz” was formative for the young Wagner. Stylistically, the music is indebted to them as well. These arias are designed to open up the inner thoughts of the characters, without the grace that would come in, say, the incidental ruminations of Hans Sachs or the delirium of Tristan.“Die Feen” is a number opera — far from the “endless melody” Wagner would describe in his 1860s essay “Music of the Future.” And it’s a clumsy one, attempting in the third act to weave aria pauses into a breakneck pace and an abrupt, Orphic turn. Like Wagner’s instrumental works from around that time, it doesn’t need to be taken out of the curio cabinet except for the occasional dusting.A similar fate shouldn’t befall “Das Liebesverbot,” Wagner’s first staged opera. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” it was mostly met with shrugs at its premiere. But, while still a world from the mature works, it is a skillfully, entertainingly told story with depth and resonance.The Italianate overture, which begins with a ringing tambourine and festive percussion, isn’t recognizably Wagner. But the opera’s substance is. His librettos were like subtweets; that’s why, Wagner believed, the critic Eduard Hanslick cooled on him after a reading of the text for “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” a cri de coeur against artistic gatekeeping. Here, Wagner’s target is chastity-obsessed conservatism and the bad behavior it breeds.He would later wrestle with socially unacceptable sensuality in “Tannhäuser” and “Tristan und Isolde,” not without an element of autobiography. Neither of those works, though, is as barbed as “Das Liebesverbot,” which skewers hypocrisy — with crimes and punishment for the #MeToo age — while arguing that morality is a malleable thing on which we can only try to force rigidity.Tuomas Pursio as Friedrich, the moralistic governor who gets his comeuppance in “Das Liebesverbot.”Kirsten NijhofFor close listeners, there are flashes of the future Wagner. And coincidences as well; the line “Es ist ein Mann” recalls its opposite, “Das ist kein Mann!,” which Siegfried exclaims upon discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde in the “Ring.” Early on, when the heroine, the novice Isabella, is introduced with a prayer, the music seems to prefigure “Parsifal.”Much closer to mature Wagner is “Rienzi,” a sprawling, five-act adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel about Cola di Rienzo, a 14th-century tragic figure of Italian politics who took on a new importance in nationalistic movements of the 1800s. If “Tannhäuser,” another transitional work, is on unsure ground stylistically, “Rienzi” is even more so: transparently an answer to the grand operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, yet also contending with a new musical language that would take shape with “Holländer.”In Leipzig, “Rienzi” was, understandably, presented with extensive cuts. Employing requisite elements of grand opera, like a plot-stopping ballet, the original version ran more than six hours. It was so long, it was later split into two evenings, “Rienzi’s Greatness” and “Rienzi’s Fall,” but reverted to one after audiences responded negatively to paying for multiple tickets.After cuts, the Oper Leipzig “Rienzi” still lasted a little more than four hours, and unfolded on an expansive scale, despite missing 21 chorus members out with Covid-19. The work is best known today for its overture, a staple in the concert hall and the easiest way to share the music, which otherwise demands a substantial investment for an enormous cast and production, along with a tenor with the stamina to endure a punishing role on the level of Siegfried and Tristan. (Here, Rienzi was fearlessly sung by Stefan Vinke, a veteran Siegfried.)“Rienzi” speaks as much to the present as its own time, and not just because it includes a scene in which a mob storms a capitol building. As in “Lohengrin,” Wagner interrogates the limits of charisma and the burden of leadership, and begins to deal in the ambiguity and complication that would course through his canonical works. And he does so in an increasingly declamatory rather than melodic mode, never more than in Rienzi’s Act V prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater.”The work was a hit when it premiered in Dresden, admired by colleagues and audiences alike. Less well received was “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which debuted at the same theater about two and a half months later and signified an entirely new direction for Wagner — one in which he would call his librettos “poems,” and in which he would bear out his vision of “The Artwork of the Future.”“The management saw itself compelled to prevent my reputation from being tarnished by putting ‘Rienzi’ back on the boards in short order,” Wagner said in “My Life.” “And now I had to ponder the success of this opera, as well as the failure of the other.”“Holländer,” as we know, won out. Yet Wagner’s achievements are now accepted wholesale, so there isn’t a need to categorize any of his operas as successes or failures — except, perhaps, for “Die Feen.” The doors of Bayreuth have long been shut to the early, worthy works of its founder. It’s time to open them up. More

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      Exhibit at German History Museum Reckons With Wagner’s Legacy

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      A new exhibition at the country’s national history museum examines the strong feelings stirred by its most famous 19th-century composer.BERLIN — Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner. Especially here in Germany — where Wagner’s work is understood as a combination of national cultural jewel and national political embarrassment — the composer’s work is laden with meaning and interpretation.Along with his music dramas, Wagner’s legacy includes his antisemitic and nationalist political writings, and the Nazi dictatorship celebrated his musical works as a symbol of the pure German culture they hoped to promote. Hitler was a regular at the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where he was welcomed warmly by the composer’s descendants, and the regime used Wagner’s music in rallies and at official events.“You can’t have a naïve and beautiful production of a Wagner opera in Germany,” said Michael P. Steinberg, a cultural historian at Brown University who, along with Katherina J. Schneider, co-curated an upcoming exhibition on the composer at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. “It’s impossible.”That show, “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling,” opens April 9 and runs through September. The first exhibition dedicated to a composer at Germany’s national history museum, it explores the relationship between Wagner’s politics and his artistic output and influence.“If Wagner had only written his 3,000 pages of prose, he would be remembered as a kook, a second-rate maniacal thinker,” Steinberg said.Instead, Steinberg added, he is mostly remembered for the opus of music dramas that made him “without doubt the most transformational composer of the mid-19th century, without whom one cannot understand European art music after him.”Wagner was a “technician of emotions,” he said, who orchestrated collective experiences of feeling that embedded his ideas in his art. That means the music and the poisoned politics can’t be separated, Steinberg said. “The ideas come out on the stage in subliminal ways,” he added, “through worlds of feeling that are transmitted through music and text.”For this reason, he and Schneider have organized the show according to a series of emotions through which they argue the composer’s legacy can be understood: from the alienation Wagner felt as an 1840s revolutionary; to the sense of belonging as he began to be institutionally accepted; to the eros that characterizes the seductiveness of his work; and, finally, the disgust and loathing that animated the composer’s prejudices.These feelings, the curators argue, were “national” ones because the popularity of Wagner’s music helped embed them in the German national consciousness, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871.“During the Break,” a portrayal of the Richard Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by Gustav Laska, 1894.Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth – Leihgabe der Oberfrankenstiftung, BayreuthTo support their case, they have assembled objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection, combined with video clips from performances and stagings, and interviews with notable Wagnerian artists.The curators also commissioned a new audio installation from Barrie Kosky, the director of the Komische Oper in Berlin, whose Jewishness is a major part of his artistic identity. He has spent the last few years pursuing what he calls a “public cultural exorcism” of his own Wagner demons, exploring the composer’s antisemitism through a series of acclaimed productions that culminated with an acclaimed staging of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at Bayreuth, which ended with the composer literally on trial.His point of departure for the installation, he said in an interview, was Wagner’s infamous essay “Jewishness in Music.” The essay, an antisemitic screed that argues Jewish composers could only imitate, and never truly create, also lingers on the composer’s visceral hatred for the Jewish “voice.” Arguing that art music arose from race-based folk cultures, Wagner describes Jewish folk music as a “sense-and-sound confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle.”Kosky said he heard echoes of those hated sounds in the music for Wagner characters who embody antisemitic archetypes: the pedantic critic in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” for instance, or the gold-hungry dwarves in the “Ring” cycle.Kosky’s sound installation plays out in a small dark room at the museum. Visitors hear jumbled-together recordings of synagogue music, excerpts from old recordings featuring the “Jewish” Wagner characters and sentences from “Jewishness in Music,” read by a woman, in Yiddish. Kosky called the effect “deliberately nauseating.”The entrance to Barrie Kosky’s installation “Schwarzalbenreich” in a chapter of the exhibition called “Ekel“ (“Disgust”).Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerKosky said he would continue to direct the composer’s music dramas, even though there was antisemitism in them. Having completed his “exorcism,” he added, he felt personally and artistically free to approach the composer’s work from new perspectives.“It’s the combination of things: the music, text, and cultural specificity of what he is using that makes Wagner’s work, to me, so deeply problematic and fascinating,” Kosky said.Mark Berry, who leads the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has published widely on politics and religion in Wagner’s work, said Wagner had become something of a scapegoat in German attempts to come to terms with the country’s past. It was, he added, as if guilt about the murderous consequences of German antisemitism could be outsourced to one man who died long before the Nazis came to power.“Clearly there are romantic nationalist elements in Wagner’s thought,” he said, “as there were in just about any German artist of that time. If one looks at his theoretical writing, however, he is adamant that the time of national characteristics in art is over, that this is to be an age of artistic universalism.”Yes, Berry said, there were antisemitic tropes in Wagner’s music dramas, and antisemitic politics in his essays. But, he added, that doesn’t make the music itself antisemitic, and Wagner wasn’t the main conduit by which antisemitism became prominent in the German national mood, and the basis of genocidal state policy.Daniel Barenboim, one of the most prominent Jewish figures in classical music in Germany and the music director of the Berlin State Opera, has written that Wagner can hardly be held “accountable for Hitler’s use and abuse of his music and world views.” He declined to be interviewed, but in an article on his website, he describes Wagner as “a virulent anti-Semite of the worst kind whose statements are unforgivable.”The show features objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection.Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerIn that article, Barenboim, who will conduct a new “Ring” in Berlin this October, asks: why allow Hitler to have the last word on Wagner when so many Jewish artists — singers, conductors, directors — have made careers from the composer’s work, and his work has inspired so many Jewish composers?That same essay opens with a meditation on the storm scene that opens Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” with Barenboim laying out the precise, almost mathematical structure through which Wagner sketches the feeling of being in a forest and a snowstorm, and the emotions of an alienated outsider on the run. The phrases swell and recede before an explosion in the winds and brass and an abrupt roll of the timpani. In the audience, your heart skips a beat. These are the techniques by which Wagner manipulates emotion — on the scale of a phrase, or a melody, or an opera, or a nation. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Wagner

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      Rian Johnson, Patti Smith, Alex Ross and others offer favorite highlights of a composer best known for his sprawling length.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos and music for dance.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the music of Richard Wagner, with very short tastes of his very long operas. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Rian Johnson, filmmakerThe problem with isolating a piece from any of Wagner’s operas is insidiously twofold: You’re going to miss (for my money) the real source of its power, and you’re not going to realize you’re missing it because the music is so damn good. Take the prelude from “Das Rheingold.” Put on good headphones, close your eyes, and it’ll transport you, I guarantee.But it wasn’t meant to live in a vacuum. Wagner is a storyteller, and when the piece sits in its proper place in the pre-curtain dark, birthing you from a pinprick of light into the blinding sun of elemental harmony whose theft will launch an epic, tragic saga of gods and betrayal and love — well, that’s the real stuff.“Das Rheingold”Vienna Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Katharina Wagner, Bayreuth Wagner Festival artistic directorI grew up with the music of my great-grandfather, but until today the “Liebestod” is my favorite passage of “Tristan und Isolde.” Isolde expresses her deepest feelings and sings the most beatific passage with great euphoria. Birgit Nilsson, in the recording under Karl Böhm from the 1966 Bayreuth Festival, testifies to the dramatic power and passion of her performance, the size and fullness of her voice, the beauty and purity of her intonation, and her brilliant stage acting. She is rightly considered one of the most important singing personalities of her era.“Tristan und Isolde”(Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Michael Cooper, Times editorThis is the five minutes (well, the scene) that made me fall in love with Wagner. When I first heard it in a college music survey course I was already an opera fan, but I knew little about Wagner other than his antisemitism, his reputation for tedium and bombast, and, of course, Bugs Bunny and “Apocalypse Now.”This was not what I was expecting: The sheer beauty of the orchestra and the unexpected tenderness of a father’s loving, lullaby-like farewell to his daughter was a revelation. I became obsessed that year, investing in a whole “Ring” cycle (not cheap in the pre-streaming era); buying Ernest Newman’s book “The Wagner Operas” to guide me; and scoring a seat in the second-to-last row of the top tier at the Metropolitan Opera. This was the gateway drug to what became a not-too-unhealthy addiction.“Die Walküre”Hans Hotter, bass-baritone; Vienna Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Simon Callow, actor, director and ‘Being Wagner’ authorThe death of Siegfried, the hero in the “Ring” who was to have saved the world, draws out of Wagner an astounding panoply of orchestral sounds of infinite majesty and splendor. It also represents the climax of the system of leitmotifs — melodic and rhythmic fragments associated with particular aspects of characters and their emotional history. Wagner weaves them into the texture with cumulative power so that it is as if Siegfried’s entire past passes before our ears — his energy, his idealism, his passion, so that one feels that an entire life is being commemorated. At the same time, we mourn what might have been. The sense that we shall not look on his like again is deeply affecting.“Götterdämmerung”English National Opera Orchestra; Reginald Goodall, conductor (Chandos)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerYou might think of Richard Wagner as the composer of gods and myths, of the end of the world and a love that destroys — and you would be right. But if his sheer ambition makes him someone to be repulsed by and swept away with, in not quite equal measure, he was capable, too, of tenderness of the most affecting kind. His “Siegfried Idyll,” initially a private birthday gift to his second wife, Cosima, was first performed by a small ensemble at their home on Christmas morning in 1870; in the later, expanded orchestration we hear more often now, its ending is a touching depiction of blissful contentment — the warmest, most humane music he ever wrote.“Siegfried Idyll”Berlin Philharmonic; Rafael Kubelik, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Alex Ross, New Yorker critic and ‘Wagnerism’ authorWagner’s “Ring” is, simply put, a study in the futility of power, with the god Wotan as its chief exhibit. The crux of his fall comes at the beginning of his epic monologue in Act II of “Die Walküre,” after his wife, Fricka, has demolished his delusions. He cries, “O heilige Schmach!”: “O righteous shame! O shameful sorrow! … Infinite rage! Eternal grief!” Wagner’s orchestra delivers the sound of power grinding itself to pieces, with monstrous dissonances piling up over a drone of C. In Joseph Keilberth’s great 1955 “Ring” from Bayreuth, Hans Hotter is a howling pillar, magnificent in collapse.“Die Walküre”Hans Hotter, bass-baritone; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra; Joseph Keilberth, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Patti Smith, performerI have chosen Waltraud Meier’s exquisite performance of the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde.” I was privileged to attend the premiere of the opera in December 2007 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chéreau, it was the most beautiful and moving production of Wagner’s great romance I have experienced.Waltraud Meier is a fine actress as well as being one of our great singers. In this piece, she projects the full range of Isolde’s devotion, desire, madness and loss. She brought to her performance humility and expertise, comprehending fully the meaning of transcendent love.Backstage, I saw her in the shadows. She was yet spattered with Tristan’s blood and still contained in her countenance something of Isolde.“Tristan und Isolde”Waltraud Meier, soprano; Teatro alla Scala Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerDo Wagner’s operas feature almost endless melodies? Certainly. But he knew how to write conflict, too — sometimes even in short bursts. Take this climactic scene from Act II of “Lohengrin.” The plot is complex, but even if you don’t know what’s being said, you can feel the heat of the moment: the sorceress Ortrud, near the entrance to a church, barring the arrival of Elsa, there as a bride-to-be. The townspeople in the chorus gasp as these Real Housewives of Antwerp go at it regarding the comparative status of their mates; you may feel yourself in rapt league with those assembled voyeurs as you listen to the mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig and the soprano Elisabeth Grümmer.“Lohengrin”Vienna Philharmonic; Rudolf Kempe, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Celia Applegate, historianCompassion is at the core of “Parsifal,” Wagner’s last and, for many, greatest opera. The music of the prelude connects all living things in its embrace. It’s not heavenly music. It’s music of this world, expressing suffering, struggle, the inevitability of death and the peace of understanding and acceptance. Its slow tempo and gorgeous sounds draw you almost into a trance. But somehow, too, you feel the presence of all things on this earth — and our responsibility to care about it and for it.“Parsifal”Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Morris Robinson, bass“Das Rheingold” is just going along, with ebbs and flows, when suddenly, without warning, this incredibly loud, obtrusive, majestic musical theme “debos” its way into the score. Everyone — within the story and in the audience — realizes that something massive and potentially destructive is about to make an appearance.I’m thinking Incredible Hulk vibes, except Wagner has created a pair of Hulks, the brother giants Fasolt and Fafner. Having played Fasolt several times, I can assure you that the theme music brings the moment into focus, and also gets the singers pumped to go out and mentally invest in their characterization. I make it my goal to ensure that my vocal quality immediately following this fabulous introduction matches the intensity and volume of Wagner’s fabulous orchestration, which consists of extremely heavy brass and pulsating, pounding timpani.“Das Rheingold”Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; James Levine, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorOne word associated with Wagner is “cinematic,” in part because of his innovations at the Bayreuth Festival Theater — where the stage, surrounded in darkness, is given the focus of a silver screen, and where the hidden orchestra’s sound fills the auditorium like a Dolby system. But I also see film in his patient moments of diegetic music, such as when Tannhäuser returns from the orgiastic Venusberg, freshly earthbound. The orchestra fades, first to a clarinet solo, then seamlessly to an English horn, standing in for the pipe of a shepherd, who sings an a cappella ode until pilgrims pass through with a hymn. Wagner weaves the pipe and chorus, beautifully but with a sense of naturalism: The orchestra doesn’t even come back until Tannhäuser, overwhelmed by what he sees, exclaims, “Praise to You, almighty God!”“Tannhäuser”Ying Fang, soprano; Johan Botha, tenor; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus; James Levine, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporter“Der Fliegende Holländer” is the opera that launched Wagner’s career. He was 29 when it premiered in Dresden, and it is generally regarded as his greatest early achievement, with hints throughout of the dramatic intensity and musical flow that would come to characterize his later works. The rousing “Sailor’s Chorus” from the third act shows his early mastery of grand orchestral and choral sound.“Der Fliegende Holländer”Vienna State Opera Chorus; Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Stephen Fry, actor in ‘Wagner and Me’Who’d present a single block from a pyramid to give a picture of all Egypt? The epic scale of Wagner is surely his signature quality. But here goes: The last five minutes of “Tristan und Isolde” offer one of the most astonishing moments in all art. Echoing the great pounding of the sea by which she stands, Isolde sings herself to death by way of a shattering musical climax. The orgasmic passage is known as the “Liebestod”: love-death. Its ravishing, horrifying rise and fall still astounds. Finally, it levels out across the sands in an exquisite release.“Tristan und Isolde”Kirsten Flagstad, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor (Warner)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorFive minutes to make you love Wagner, and hate him. At the end of his sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg,” a speech from the kindly shoemaker protagonist, Hans Sachs, takes a dark swerve as Sachs warns of foreign invaders who seek to contaminate “holy German art,” his praise of which is taken up by a fervid crowd — a communal celebration turned nationalistic rally. This stirring choral melody was perhaps the first bit of Wagner I loved. But it is one of the moments in his work that for me now mingles thrill and nausea. Here it is conducted in Vienna in 1944 by Karl Böhm, whose complicity with the Nazis was profound.“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”Vienna State Opera Chorus; Vienna Philharmonic; Karl Böhm, conductor◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Review: Wagnerian Comedy Is No Joke in the Met’s ‘Meistersinger’

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      The sprawling opera returned to the Met after seven years, with Antonio Pappano on the podium and an excellent cast.There were swaths of empty seats at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, when Wagner’s sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” returned to the house after seven years.Was it the limits on foreign tourists, lifting soon? Persistent fears about the Delta variant, despite a vaccinated and masked audience? More permanent changes to viewership habits, egged on by the pandemic? Wariness about a performance of very Wagnerian, six-hour length?It’s likely all of the above, and more; arts institutions around the country are grumbling about soft ticket sales as they reopen. But whatever the reasons at the Met, it’s a shame: This “Meistersinger” is excellent, a paean to a community joyfully bickering and making music together that touched me deeply in this period of reckoning with all we lacked for a year and a half.A love story intertwined with a song contest, set in a storybook vision of medieval Germany, it brings back to the company after 24 years the eminent conductor Antonio Pappano. He takes on one of the scores most closely associated at the Met with James Levine; the last time someone other than Levine led a run of this opera there was 1985.With Levine in “Meistersinger,” there was grandeur, richness, not heaviness but glowing weight. Pappano, the longtime music director of the Royal Opera House in London, offers a lighter, lither reading, not rushed but evenly flowing, airy even when agitated. From the prelude to the first act — more lyrical than majestic — this was tender, mellow Wagner, most notable in quieter moments: the warm curlicues of the orchestral reactions to the song rules in the first act, the glistening music of nightfall in the second, the hushed prelude to the third.As the cobbler Hans Sachs, the leader of Nuremberg’s guild of tradesmen who moonlight as singing poet “masters,” the baritone Michael Volle is fiercely articulate. He is not the kindly Santa Claus figure often associated with this role, but rather a changeable, ambivalent, even peevish, very human Sachs.Klaus Florian Vogt — the tenor playing Walther, the knight who bursts onto the Nuremberg scene with an innovative approach to songwriting and a crush on the young Eva Pogner — remains one of the oddest major artists in opera. His appeal has been his uncannily pure voice, which, emerging from classically handsome blond looks, gives him an otherworldly quality in otherworldly roles like Wagner’s Lohengrin.But that voice has in recent years been turning more nasal and glassy. While some high notes, particularly toward the opera’s end, sail out like sunshine, and while he’s an effortlessly noble presence, Vogt’s sound is ever more an acquired taste.There are no equivalent quibbles about this revival’s playful, assertive Eva: the soprano Lise Davidsen, whose voice is luminous when soft and startlingly big at full cry. Her soaring embrace of Sachs and sublime start to the quintet that follows in the third act aroused only excitement about the remarkable Met season she is embarking on, with the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Chrysothemis in his “Elektra” to come.The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was comically bumbling but sang with straightforward earnestness as Beckmesser, the officious town clerk competing (at least in his own mind) for Eva’s hand in marriage. The resonant bass Georg Zeppenfeld, one of Europe’s finest Wagnerians but an unaccountable absence from the Met over the past decade, was splendidly genial as Veit Pogner, Eva’s father. The tenor Paul Appleby was lively as Sachs’s apprentice, David; the mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke made a characterful Met debut as Magdalene, Eva’s attendant; and the bass-baritone Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang with calm consolation as the Night Watchman.It is to Volle’s credit that he doesn’t stint the darkness that suddenly engulfs the piece in its final minutes, when Sachs, trying to persuade the victorious Walther to join the masters, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art.” It’s a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd, and it’s hard not to hear in it premonitions of what was to come in Nuremberg four decades after Wagner’s death.The Met’s utterly literal, quaint staging by Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, now nearly 30 years old, offers no comment on this notoriously explicit swerve toward chauvinism — nor on the sense many have had that Beckmesser represents Wagner’s antisemitic obsessions, nor on much of anything else beyond the letter of the libretto.But Volle, at least, forces us to reckon with a scene as discomfiting as any in opera — a vivid depiction of the ease with which communal celebration can tip into nationalism, a reminder that even good guys can harbor awful leanings. Sachs’s monologue isn’t a reason not to perform “Die Meistersinger.” It felt on Tuesday, more than ever, a reason it should be seen.Die Meistersinger von NürnbergThrough Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: At Wagner’s Festival, a ‘Dutchman’ Never Sails

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      With neither ship nor sea, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new Bayreuth Festival staging recasts the opera as a tale of violent revenge.BAYREUTH, Germany — The pilgrims to the Green Hill, who have been making their way to the storied festival Richard Wagner founded here 145 years ago, looked more like cattle on Sunday. The theater’s bucolic grounds had become a network of roped-off, one-way sidewalks and checkpoints.With stricter pandemic safety measures than many other European opera houses, the Bayreuth Festival’s opening night — a new production of “Der Fliegende Holländer” (“The Flying Dutchman”) — lacked some of its usual glamour. Indeed, the romance ended at the sight of mobile bathrooms outside the theater; the ones inside had been deemed too risky. The audience was limited to 900, less than half the house’s capacity.Yet the unpleasantness of these restrictions faded as the lights dimmed, the hall resounded with the stormy opening of “Holländer,” and the Bayreuth experience began to work its usual magic.And what a sound it was: The orchestra, propulsive and spirited from the start, was led by Oksana Lyniv, the first female conductor in the festival’s history. Much has rightly been made of that milestone, however embarrassingly overdue.In Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production, the opera takes place firmly on land, with the opening scene at the bar of a small town.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleLyniv’s “Holländer” was occasionally a little brash, but it was always both driven by and driving the drama, with sharp attention to detail and pacing — in a work whose repetitive score can easily sag under a less assured baton.She wasn’t the only newcomer at the festival this summer: Dmitri Tcherniakov, virtually unavoidable at European houses in recent years, was directing his first Bayreuth production. And Asmik Grigorian, a steel-voiced soprano and one of the finest acting talents in opera, was making her debut here as Senta — a performance met with a roaring ovation.There was polite applause for Grigorian’s colleagues, as well; the audience seemed ready to warmly greet whatever they saw after Bayreuth was canceled last year. But although there were some elements of normalcy on Sunday — Chancellor Angela Merkel was even back in her usual box — the festival was still far from its former self.The full forces of Bayreuth’s fabled chorus, for example, were not allowed onstage. Instead they were divided: half singing in the theater, complemented by an ensemble of lip-syncing actors, and half broadcast from a separate hall. The effect was at times acoustically disorienting.From left, Marina Prudenskaya as Mary, Eric Cutler as Erik and Grigorian as Senta.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleAs a director, Tcherniakov is often interested in trauma: the ways in which it is overcome, sublimated or succumbed to. Here, that was manifest in the Dutchman’s origin story, recounted in a series of vignettes during the overture.The Dutchman, in this telling, grew up in a small town — possibly coastal, though there is neither a ship nor sea in sight — with uniform, clean, monochromatic, rather sinister architecture. His single mother had an affair with a married man, who violently broke things off with her. Gossip spread, and she became an outcast, isolated in an already isolating place. So she hanged herself; the boy, unable to help, was left mournfully holding onto her swinging foot.He leaves his hometown and later returns — like the libretto’s cursed Dutchman, docking his ship every seven years in search of a love that will redeem him. Now an adult, with an imposing build and furrowed brow, he is unrecognizable at a local bar, where he tells his tale to a half-interested crowd. (The baritone John Lundgren’s delivery of the monologue was strained, and misaligned with the menacing force of his demeanor.)Among the people the Dutchman meets at the bar is Daland — in the libretto a sea captain and the father of the opera’s heroine, Senta, but here a clean-cut, middle-class man. (Indeed, the one who ruined his mother’s life.) The bass Georg Zeppenfeld portrays him with a warm tone and a touch of naïve insouciance.From left, John Lundgren, Prudenskaya, Georg Zeppenfeld and Grigorian in Act II of the opera.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleThe cityscape shifts between scenes, its buildings fluidly rearranging into new configurations. At the beginning of Act II, they create a plaza-like space for the “Spinning Chorus,” led by Mary, Senta’s nurse (though in Tcherniakov’s staging presented as her mother and played, often silently, by Marina Prudenskaya with weary exasperation).This scene introduces Grigorian’s Senta, a young woman with Billie Eilish hair and a defiant streak. She sings her Ballad — which recounts the Dutchman legend, with an emphasis on his redemption by a woman who will be faithful to him until death — with dramatic gesticulations and a sense of ironic overstatement. But later, when she is alone onstage and her theme returns, Grigorian delivers the tune with quiet, sincere longing, perhaps seeing in the Dutchman a kindred spirit.She and the Dutchman meet over an awkward dinner at her house, separated by her parents and seated at opposite ends of the table, which is laid out slowly and fussily. It’s not exactly a meet-cute, but something clicks, and the parents fade to invisibility as Senta and the Dutchman sing what came off on Sunday as a mismatched duet, Grigorian luxuriously lyrical and Lundgren a little thin. (Eric Cutler, who sang the role of Erik, the Dutchman’s rival for Senta’s affections, similarly struggled to rise to her level.)The Bayreuth Festival’s chorus was divided in two, with half singing onstage, complemented by silent actors, and the others broadcast from a separate hall.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleAct III opens like most any “Holländer” production, with the town’s women bringing the men food — only here they gather to enjoy it together. Off to the side, though, is a group of sullen men whose dark clothing contrasts with the earth tones of the locals. Traditionally, they would be the Dutchman’s ghostly crew, and they provide one strategic use of the broadcast choir. As their lines are played through speakers, the men onstage remain threateningly silent.They are, it becomes apparent, willing collaborators in the Dutchman’s plot to exact deadly revenge on the town. After Erik confronts Senta about their now-broken promises to each other, a fight breaks out in which the Dutchman coolly shoots someone while the crowd retreats back into the town — which the mysterious men have set on fire.As smoke fills the space and the Dutchman violently casts Senta aside — just as her father once did to his mother — Mary enters with a shotgun, aims it directly at the Dutchman’s chest and pulls the trigger. It’s a lot of violence in not a lot of time, and it wasn’t easy to follow on opening night.But one thing was clear. Even though this production, as it had been described in advance press, is focused on the psychology and background of the Dutchman, the redemptive power of Senta was inescapable. Rather than join him in an act of eternal devotion, she takes the gun from her shaking mother and holds her, bringing a sense of calm as the curtain comes down.So while Tcherniakov might have been most interested in the psyche of an angry and vengeful man, the only character who truly changes — and, indeed, matures — in his staging is Senta. Especially with Grigorian onstage, it’s very much her opera.Der Fliegende HolländerThrough Aug. 20 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. Also streaming Tuesday on DG Stage; dg-premium.com. 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