They say you never forget your first time. In an ideal world, Katharina Wagner’s new production of Tristan and Isolde was perhaps not what this reviewer would have chosen for his initial Bayreuth experience, but there were compensations aplenty to be found in some of the singing, and especially in the superlative orchestral playing under Christian Thielemann. Not that the staging was disastrous: there were lots of interesting, at times inspired, ideas but as a whole the underlying conception was diffuse to the point of incoherence.
At Thielemann’s hands Wagner’s famous Prelude unfurled in a tightly controlled arc. The opening bars, so often arrhythmic, were strictly in tempo here save the obligatory lengthening of the third note in the cellos. The results never sounded driven or forced; rather, there was a welcome sense of two in a bar (two groups of three, to be technical) from the outset. The famous sunken pit at the Festspielhaus allowed the winds to be heard clearly without forcing, and the dovetailing between different sections of the strings had an almost choreographic quality. While Thielemann created plenty of imaginative tonal shadings, it was his pacing that was particularly masterful, so that even after the high point matters never felt anti-climactic or lacking direction. Much of what followed was marked by the same imaginative control of detail.
The curtain rose onto a grey, geometric set, a complicated series of industrial-style gantries and staircases, some of which subsequently moved around à la Hogwarts. Playing the interpretative game that a Regie [literally, ‘directorial’, i.e. strongly interventionist] production requires of its audience, one could relate the different levels on which the singers were positioned to the different parts of the ship which was the composer’s setting for Act I. In a strong departure from the libretto, Tristan and Isolde were eager to come to grips from the outset, with their sidekicks physically having to keep them apart. In Scene 5 they finally managed to isolate themselves from their chaperones, and straightaway Isolde pulled Tristan into an embrace. This, of course, rendered the love potion redundant, and so instead of drinking it later in the scene, the two lovers symbolically joined hands and poured it away.
Act II played out in some kind of prison/asylum setting. With no explanation, Isolde and Brangäne, and subsequently Tristan and Kurwenal, were hustled on stage as prisoners by yellow-clad toughs. Their actions were observed from the top of the walls by manned spotlights, a clever new context for Tristan’s fulminations against the ‘light’. In the hymn to the night, the two singers turned their backs to the audience and gazed at shadow projections of human figures on the back of the set – a beautiful if ultimately mysterious effect which thankfully had no adverse effects on their audibility. When Marke appeared, he was not so much sorrowing uncle or cuckolded husband as sinister gang-leader: the final scene saw Tristan bound, blindfolded, and eventually stabbed while defenceless.