Warlikowski, Krzysztof

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    Has the Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Time Finally Come?

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    With an opera at the Salzburg Festival and recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, the music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg may be taking root.It’s difficult to define a comeback in classical music. A neglected composer may be championed by the artists of one generation only to be ignored by the next, or resurface during an anniversary only to return underground.Take the works of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-96), a Polish-born composer who found refuge in Soviet Russia, but whose reputation in the West is largely overshadowed by that of his good friend Dmitri Shostakovich. There has been increasing interest in Weinberg this century, and there are signs that his music is finally taking root in the repertoire.The latest milestone is an excellent revival of his opera “The Idiot” at the high-profile Salzburg Festival in Austria under the baton of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a conductor with a Deutsche Grammophon contract who has, with scholarly authority, brought Weinberg’s works to something like the mainstream.Still, as a figure in music history he remains mostly unknown to modern listeners: a Jewish composer who wrote with unwavering beauty and peace in the face of some of the 20th century’s worst atrocities; whose identity and experiences suffused more than 150 works, as well as dozens of soundtracks that await attention and interpretation; who, under no outside pressure, according to his family, converted to Christianity at the end of his life.Weinberg was born in Warsaw but fled in 1939, after hearing on the radio that a German invasion of the city was imminent. (He traveled alone; it wasn’t until the 1960s that he learned his family had been murdered in a concentration camp.) He went to the Soviet border, and settled in Minsk. Nearly two years later, he left there as the Nazis pushed eastward, joining the wartime refugee community in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.He ultimately made it to Moscow, with the help of composers including Shostakovich, who had secured an invitation for Weinberg from the State Committee on the Arts. He enjoyed some modest prosperity and rising prominence, but a Stalinist crackdown on music, combined with institutionalized antisemitism, led to his arrest in early 1953.We 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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      A Decidedly French “Hamlet” Returns to Paris

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      Starting in March, Ambroise Thomas’s version of the Shakespearean tragedy will be revived at the Opéra Bastille for the first time since 1938.Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” had all the elements to become a blockbuster at the Paris Opera in the 19th century. With a gripping plot that unfolds over five acts, a leading baritone in the title role and innovative orchestration deploying newly invented instruments, the work had an enduring hold at the box office after its 1868 premiere.Like so many “grands opéras” that were born and bred for the company, “Hamlet” fell out of repertoire around the turn of the 20th century. Only since the 1980s has the work received a revival on stages worldwide. From March 11 to April 9, Thomas’s Shakespearean adaptation will return to the Paris Opera for the first time since 1938, in a new production directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski and starring Ludovic Tézier at the Opéra Bastille (a pre-opening for viewers under 28 takes place on March 8. Thomas Hengelbrock conducts).The company’s general director, Alexander Neef, has made it a goal to create a more specific identity for the Paris Opera by commissioning research and programming the French grand opera that once flourished there. Having experienced and admired a production of “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera some 20 years ago, Mr. Neef said that the work “came up rather naturally” after his appointment.Mr. Tézier, whom he considers “not only the leading French baritone but maybe the leading baritone in his repertoire,” was also a natural choice. The singer, who is particularly coveted in the music of Verdi, in turn suggested Mr. Warlikowski as director following their collaboration on a 2017 production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at Opéra Bastille.For both lead performer and director, the production provides an opportunity to deepen their interpretation of a work that has played an important role in their respective careers. Mr. Tézier made debuts in both Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy, in the title of role of Thomas’s “Hamlet” about two decades ago, while Mr. Warlikowski staged the original play by Shakespeare in Avignon, France in 2000 (he had first learned the drama as an apprentice of the late director Peter Brook in Paris).The director Krzysztof Warlikowski, who staged the original play by Shakespeare in 2000 in Avignon, France. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Louisa Marie Summer for The New York TimesThis operatic version of “Hamlet” takes an unexpected turn before the curtain falls: The protagonist survives and is crowned king. The liberties taken by Thomas’s librettists, Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, met with criticism after the premiere; a Covent Garden version of the opera first mounted in 1869 restores the work’s original, more tragic ending.For Mr. Warlikowski, Thomas’s protagonist shares a great deal in common with the mythological figure of Orestes. “He also rebels against hypocrisy and the ills of this world,” he explained on a video call.The director will also hone in on the scenes in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Mr. Tézier noted that Thomas deployed some of his most dramatically effective music for the ghost by knowing how to pare down the orchestra. The baritone drew a parallel to another Shakespearean opera, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” and the title character’s hallucination of a dagger.“Thomas creates an atmosphere that is favorable to the text and the emotion of the moment,” he said by phone.The composer was exploring orchestral colors with new instruments by the musician and inventor Adolphe Sax at the same time as the composer Hector Berlioz, who held Thomas in great esteem. For example, the second-act banquet scene in which Hamlet accuses Claudius of murdering his father features a solo for alto saxophone. Thomas also wrote for bass saxhorn and six-keyed trombones.An ardent defender of French music against Germanic influence (specifically that of Wagner), Thomas in 1877 stated that every country “should stay faithful to its style and maintain its distinct character,” rather than submit “to the caprices of the time.” In a sign of his patriotism, he volunteered for the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War before assuming the directorship of the Paris Conservatory in 1871.His “Hamlet” has been noted for its specifically French qualities. In addition to mitigating tragedy by allowing the protagonist to survive and avenge the death of his father, romantic intrigue and sensuous instrumentation often set the tone.Ludovic Tézier has a long history with Thomas’s “Hamlet,” having made debuts in Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy in the title role. He noted that the work “allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation.”Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesParis was at the time the center of classical musical life, not just in Europe but worldwide. “Hamlet” premiered at Salle Le Peletier, the same theater that mounted such works as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” before Palais Garnier opened in 1875.The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was at the height of his fame, was captured in portrait as Hamlet by none other than Manet. The role of Ophélie, whose fourth-act mad scene helped ensure the work’s popularity, has also been an important role for sopranos from Christina Nilsson to Mary Garden (the new production stars Lisette Oropesa and, starting in April, Brenda Rae).But by 1891, Wagner’s “music of the future” became something of a game changer. “Lohengrin,” “Die Walküre” and “Tannhäuser” remained in repertoire at the Paris Opera through 1910, while of Meyerbeer’s four major operas, only “Les Huguenots” persisted.Mr. Warlikowski expressed his wish to champion “Hamlet” by “provoking questions and creating a spiritual journey through this timeless story.”Mr. Tézier emphasized that the work was not “second-rate.”“It most of all allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation,” he said.He compared the infrequent programming of such neglected classics to the unpredictable sightings of the Loch Ness monster: “There is no real explanation. But with each appearance of the monster, you have to see it because it’s a rarity. From the beginning to the end, something really happens in the music.” More

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      On European Stages, Myths and Memories Merge

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      New productions by the theater titans Krzysztof Warlikowski and Frank Castorf play games with ancient Greek folklore and modern history.STUTTGART, Germany — Perhaps no theater director working today is more haunted by memory than Krzysztof Warlikowski.To portray its tortuous mechanisms, the Polish Warlikowski favors enigmas and fragmented narratives over straightforward answers. During the past 20 years, this has helped make him one of Europe’s most acclaimed and distinctive directors. In addition to his productions for the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, which he founded in 2008, Warlikowski also stages works for many of Europe’s leading drama and opera festivals.In his latest production, “Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood,” he takes the viewer on a kaleidoscopic journey from Homer to the Holocaust to Tinseltown, telling the story of a Jewish woman who risks her life during World War II to search for her deported husband. She is portrayed both as a latter-day Odysseus and as Penelope: the wily and weary adventurer in search of his elusive homeland, and the faithful, patient wife tending the hearth.Loosely inspired by “Chasing the King of Hearts,” a 2006 novel by the Polish author Hanna Krall, the production is an epic web of associations brought to life on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s handsome and versatile set, whose darkly industrial components stand in for interrogation chambers and waiting rooms.History, mythology and philosophy, and pop and high culture, rub shoulders in a four-hour production that is consistently absorbing even if you’re not always sure what it means. (An international coproduction with Nowy Teatr, “Odyssey” was recently performed at the Schauspiel Stuttgart theater here and will tour to Paris later this month.)Izolda Regensberg, the protagonist of Krall’s short novel, is convinced that her life as a survival artist would make a great Hollywood film. The play’s opening scenes, set in war-torn Europe and shortly afterward, show Regensberg navigating a film-noir landscape of violence and menace. A giant cage wheeled repeatedly across the stage heightens the sense of claustrophobia.From there, we’re whisked to Los Angeles, where a much older Regensberg is meeting with the director Roman Polanski, the film producer Robert Evans and Elizabeth Taylor, who is set to play Regensberg in a film. The Polish actors perform the scene in English with exaggerated American accents that heighten the vulgarity and ignorance of their backroom talk.That sendup of Hollywood cluelessness is rebutted by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, “Shoah,” a nine-hour oral history of the Holocaust that is a milestone in the history of cinema, to which Warlikowski turns later in the evening. A screen lowers and we watch a famous excerpt from the movie in which Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber living in Israel who once cut the hair of Jewish women destined for the gas chambers at Treblinka. Bomba’s wrenching testimony contrasts sharply with a showy test reel we see during Regensberg’s meeting with Polanski — a spot-on parody of Hollywood Holocaust schlock in which a handsome Gestapo officer tortures and arouses his interrogation victim by playing Wagner on the piano.Malgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik as Hannah Arendt and Roman Gancarczyk as Martin Heidegger in “Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood.”Magda HueckelIn “Odyssey,” Warlikowski sifts through many of the same tropes as Lanzmann’s film, rummaging around in trauma and memory while sifting through the ethical and aesthetic implications of representing the Holocaust. At times, Warlikowski’s associative and open-ended approach leads the production in unusual directions and to unexpected places.At one point, the scene abruptly shifts to the Black Forest in 1950, where Hannah Arendt is picnicking with Martin Heidegger. As the German philosophers (and former lovers) struggle to reconcile — Heidegger remains defiant about his support of the Nazi regime — a pushy, camera-toting tourist (possibly a visitor from the future) pesters them with questions. The grim trajectory of the play is often speckled with such surreal and humorous details.For the production’s finale, Warlikowski turns to the Coen brothers by faithfully re-creating the prologue to their 2009 film, “A Serious Man.” In that atmospheric short, a Yiddish horror-comedy sketch seemingly disconnected from the rest of the film, a pious couple in a 19th-century shtetl are visited by a dybbuk (an evil spirit in Jewish folklore) who possesses the body of dead rabbi.This final scene is a jarring contrast to the “Shoah” material that directly precedes it and concludes this sprawling production on a curiously muted note. Yet the subject of existential homelessness is the connective tissue that unites “Odyssey’s” various strands.The intersection of personal and communal trauma told through one woman’s eyes is also the theme of Irina Kastrinidis’s dramatic monologue, “Schwarzes Meer” (“Black Sea”), whose world premiere at the Landestheater Niederösterreich, in St. Pölten, Austria, was directed by the German theater legend Frank Castorf. It’s a surprising production, not least because Castorf, whose fame rests on his deconstructive approach to literary classics, is not exactly known for his sensitive portrayals of female protagonists.Julia Kreusch, left, and Mikis Kastrinidis in Irina Kastrinidis’s “Schwarzes Meer,” directed by Frank Castorf.Alexi PelekanosIn “Schwarzes Meer,” Kastrinidis, a former actress in Castorf’s troupe when he led the Berlin Volksbühne (she is also the director’s ex-girlfriend), has fused Greek myths with the history of her more recent ancestors: Pontic Greeks, living in what is now Turkey, who were forcibly expelled in the 1920s. Her monologue — a stilted and nonlinear oration in heightened and, at times, archaic language — is delivered by the German actress Julia Kreusch, whose physically impassioned immersion in the text seems to elevate it. Kastrinidis’s text mixes quotidian, even banal, observations with paeans to the Argonauts and passages in which Penelope seems to fuse with pop icons like Jane Birkin. The expulsion and murder of Kastrinidis’s forebears hovers in the background. And as the first-person narration shuttles among Paris, Athens, Berlin and Zurich, Kastrinidis suggests a continuity of exile and inherited trauma and memory that explains her own hallucinogenic sense of homesickness.Perhaps to safeguard against monotony, Castorf adds two characters who don’t appear in Kastrinidis’s text, including one played by his 12-year-old son, Mikis Kastrinidis, whose spirited performance alternates between adorable and irritating. Sharing the stage with Kreusch (and occasionally a real goat), he repeatedly reminds the audience that he’s acting in his parents’ play by talking to his mom on the telephone and cracking jokes about how old his dad is.This chamber staging of a brand-new work is a change of pace for Castorf, who is now 70. His classic productions, tour de force theatrical marathons, took extreme liberties with their source materials and were frequently exhausting for actors and audiences. Kreusch certainly gets a workout in “Schwarzes Meer,” but, aside from that, there are surprisingly few hallmarks of Castorf’s style.Most surprising, it is, by and large, faithful to Kastrinidis’s text, as if the onetime enfant terrible decided it would be inappropriate to impose his ego onto his former lover’s personal and poetic cri de coeur.Like “Odyssey,” “Schwarzes Meer” is ultimately an artistic excavation of the theater of memory. In the associative games they play with Greek mythology and modern European history, both of these striking new productions suggest that dislocation and exile are fundamental to the modern human condition.Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood. Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. On tour at the Théâtre National La Colline, in Paris, May 12-21; Nowy Tear, in Warsaw, June 2-5.Schwarzes Meer. Directed by Frank Castorf. Landestheater Niederösterreich. May 5 and Sept. 24. More

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      Review: Leonard Bernstein’s ‘A Quiet Place’ at the Paris Opera

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      In Paris, a new production of “A Quiet Place” makes a strong case for a work that has long struggled to join the repertory.PARIS — “We’re going to listen to music that describes emotions — feelings like pain, happiness, loneliness, anger, love,” Leonard Bernstein once said during an episode of his beloved, televised “Young People’s Concerts.”“I guess most music is like that,” he added. “And the better it is, the more it will make you feel those emotions that the composer felt when he was writing.”Bernstein was introducing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, but he could just as easily have been speaking about his own music — even his grim and spiky final opera, “A Quiet Place.” With a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, this piece has had a tortured history, struggling to find its form before and after its 1983 premiere. It was heavily criticized, and revised several times, culminating in 2013 with a version by Garth Edwin Sunderland that could give this work — in a genre that kept eluding Bernstein — a brighter future.That version, a sweeping rethinking of the piece’s dramaturgy and orchestration, has been altered again for the Paris Opera, which is giving Sunderland’s edition its most prominent staging yet in a new production that opened on Wednesday at the Palais Garnier.In the conductor Kent Nagano, the production has the world’s finest champion of “A Quiet Place,” who several years ago recorded Sunderland’s version and again leads it to brilliant and illuminating effect. And in the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, it has one of the European stage’s smartest interpreters of family dysfunction and sexual complexity, the opera’s central themes.At the end of Act II, Warlikowski adds a scene in which a boy sneakily watches that episode of “Young People’s Concerts” after his parents go to sleep. And in its best moments, the work gives you what Bernstein described on TV: the ability to make you feel the emotions he had when he was writing an at times painfully personal opera. It remains full of flaws — mainly, clichés of mid-20th-century American ennui — yet in its current form, it is also a piece of subtlety and suggestion, a short story with the weight of a novel, an example of masterly craft and postmodern style.“A Quiet Place” — the story of a matriarch’s death, and the reconciliation it brings her broken family, inspired by Bernstein and Wadsworth’s own losses — was originally created as a sequel to Bernstein’s satirical, jazzy one-act “Trouble in Tahiti,” from the early 1950s; they were first presented together as a punishingly long double bill. Bernstein and Wadsworth revised “A Quiet Place” to be a single, three-act work, with “Trouble in Tahiti” incorporated as flashbacks. That, too, made for a bloated evening, in length and in a maximalist scoring for over 70 musicians, including electric guitar and synthesizer.Sunderland’s version is leaner in every respect. He does away with “Trouble in Tahiti,” whose bitter effervescence collided ungracefully with the thorniness of “A Quiet Place,” and reduced some characters while expanding others, reinstating some arias that had been cut. He reorchestrated the score for just 18 players, and the running time was brought down to roughly 90 minutes, with no intermission.For the Paris Opera, Sunderland kept the brevity but fleshed out the instrumentation — a Goldilocks medium between 18 and 72 musicians — including added winds and brasses, along with a harpsichord and organ, which provides heft and naturalism in the Act I funeral without sacrificing the clarity of the 2013 version. The electric guitar and synthesizer, which inevitably evoke the 1980s, are thankfully still gone.Johanna Wokalek, front right, is an addition in the silent role of Dinah, normally just mentioned by name but here haunting the stage throughout.Bernd UhligTo further avoid seeming dated, Warlikowski’s staging, while set in 1983, is not a facsimile of its time. It takes place in a single room, faced head-on, of towering walls and with sets simultaneously familiar and impossible to place: that era’s fashions, surrounded by sleek, futuristic panels. Spaces like these — designed by Warlikowski’s frequent collaborator Malgorzata Szczesniak, and typical of his productions — can feel at once expansive and suffocating, and his characters tend to behave accordingly, both exposed and trapped.Warlikowski is otherwise largely deferential to the libretto — with a few affecting interventions. Dinah, one half of the unhappy couple of “Trouble in Tahiti,” isn’t in “A Quiet Place,” which begins with her funeral. But Warlikowski casts a silent actor (Johanna Wokalek) in the role, and she haunts the stage throughout, in a blending of time and memory that mirrors the non sequiturs of the libretto’s slides into reverie and role play.It’s one of several ways Dinah is present in this production, which opens with a video (by Kamil Polak) of her fatal car accident — likely a suicide, almost certainly under the influence — and, for the rending Act I postlude music, projects a portrait of her above the coffin and crematory. In it, she is the face of the post-World War II American ideal, but with the empty expression and double-edged smile of a James Rosenquist painting.Dinah and her husband, Sam — the baritone Russell Braun, a standout, delicate and with a vast emotional range of pain, anger and aimlessness — had two children. One is the gay, mentally ill Junior (the bass-baritone Gordon Bintner, elegant in his rage and woefully redolent of “Dear Evan Hansen” in his constant, visible neuroses); the other, Dede (Claudia Boyle, a soprano who warmed up to the role as the evening went on).A new member of the family is François, Dede’s husband (Frédéric Antoun, strained at the opera’s climax), whom she met through his former lover, Junior. If that suggests incestuous behavior, just wait: We learn that Junior and Dede also experimented with each other as children.From left, Antoun, Bintner, Wokalek, Braun and Boyle near the opera’s ending, in which the family discovers that its only way forward is forgiveness.Bernd UhligJunior enters the funeral in a garish, pink-and-purple cowboy outfit — a choice that makes sense later when he is represented as a boy wearing the same costume, being held and then rejected by his mother. The opera’s conflation of insanity and homosexuality has long been one of its problems, but Warlikowski helps slightly by treating Junior’s queerness as coincident with, rather than the cause of, his arrested development. Other things that have aged poorly, though, are baked into the text; Dinah’s misery-driven alcoholism is more worthy of sighs than sympathy.There were more innovative American operas that premiered in the 1980s: Philip Glass’s portrait of resistance in “Satyagraha”; or the grand, nearly mythic treatment of leaders in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and in John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” “A Quiet Place” benefits from no longer being so directly juxtaposed with them; it is now easier to meet on its own terms, neither avant-garde nor as eager to please as Bernstein’s earlier works.And while it can sometimes feel like a rote regurgitation of postwar culture and its miseries, the ambiguous ending is something of a departure from those clichés. In Warlikowski’s staging, Bernstein’s uneasy final chords accompany an image of Dinah’s family sharing a sofa. The only way forward for them is forgiveness — not the most common way for an opera to end, but a recollection of a classic: Janacek’s “Jenufa.”Look closely at the four of them: Sam and Junior, reunited; François; and Dede, who scoots, visibly uncomfortable, away from her husband. They are still suffering, in a cycle you could see continuing to the present day. The distinctly American darkness of “A Quiet Place” may be more relevant than we’d like to think.A Quiet PlaceThrough March 30 at the Paris Opera; operadeparis.fr. 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