Raw Passion from Life to Art

Romance, Trysts and Intrigue:

The Secret Love Lives of the Great Composers

The University Club

January 24, 2017

A recital/lecture by soprano Sarah Moulton Faux and pianist Michael Fennelly

Il perfido Giacomo Puccini

Who knew that the inspiration for Liu in Turandot came from Puccini’s virtuous and self-sacrificing maid who committed suicide when his wife accused her of having an affair with her husband? The accusations were unfounded but the composer at the time was actually having one of his many affairs with that maid’s cousin, a vivacious young woman who would provide the inspiration for Minnie in La fanciulla del West.

Richard and Cosima Wagner, looking respectable

Or who knew that Wagner had been involved in a prolonged affair with the great pianist and composer Liszt’s daughter, Cosima, who was married at the time to Hans von Bulow, a pianist and the conductor of the premieres of both Tristan and Die Meistersinger. She bore Wagner three children (all named after Wagnerian characters) before von Bulow granted her a divorce. Cosima was now free to marry Wagner at which point he became Liszt’s son-in-law.

Sarah Moulton Faux

Mustering a hybrid recital meets lecture, an underutilized format that has wonderful potential, soprano Sarah Moulton Faux and pianist Michael Fennelly regaled us with a rich and stimulating evening.

Reading from a witty script, our host and soprano for the evening Moulton Faux served up a feast of these juicy morsels of gossip and many more like it from the annals of music history. Her exegesis was punctuated by a series of musical illustrations that brought her tabloid worthy stories to life.

The repertoire was incredibly diverse. Songs, arias and lieder from some of the greatest composers ranged from the high romantic period to the early twenty-first century, including an under appreciated woman composer from the American South.

Pianist Michael Fennelly

About halfway through the program, pianist Michael Fennelly dropped a bomb on the whole evening. In a profusion of wild Dionysian energy he played from memory Liszt’s piano transcription of the overture to Wagner’s chthonic opera Tannhäuser. The piano was like putty in his hands all evening long, but especially in this piece he manage to coax out of it sounds and moods and feelings that were utterly gripping. It was definitely one of the highlights of the evening. During the whole extended piece I was overcome with the thought, “We do not live in Dionysian times.” None of the recent Met productions of Wagner have come any where near tapping into the moments of unbridled passion that pepper the great composer’s work. Fennelly came the closest I have yet to hear in a live performance in our time. It was awesome.

Sarah Moulton Faux shined in the opening number, La canzone di Doretta from Puccini’s La Rondine. She brought the warm glow of personal emotional connection to Schumann’s Widmung from one of his song cycles. She very charmingly recounted in an aside that it was one of the songs that she had performed at her wedding. She also sounded great in Arthur Sullivan’s Arabian Love Song, another discovery and a real highlight.

Robert and Clara Schumann

And in the climax, the last piece of the night, Je veux vivre from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette we witness the singer in full form, completely loose by now and warmed up. Her rendition was joyful and carefree.

Each of her selections were framed by a little backstory, her own personal research into the tabloid gossip from the lives of each of these great composers. The premise of the evening asks the question: how did each of these visionary artists manage to conjure such raw emotions, such wild passions, such reckless abandon in their works? The answer is that they lived it.

With one notable exception. It is said that the American composer Lola Williams carried a lifelong love affair with her favorite poet, William Shakespeare. Though the 300 some odd years separating them meant that it would forever remain unconsummated. However, this unfortunate fact only seems to have heightened the power of her music.

– Lui & Lei

A Faithful Wife Is Hard to Find

Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer

Metropolitan Opera

May 4, 2017

The Flying Dutchman searches for a faithful wife
Photo credit: Met Opera

Late last September, the 2016-2017 season at the Met opened with Wagner adrift on the high northern seas with Mariusz Trelinski’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, and so it seems fitting that we virtually close the season with another, earlier Wagner that also takes us indelibly out to sea for our next to last Met voyage of the season. Staged for the first time in 1843, Der Fliegende Holländer is the composer’s fourth operatic foray and it is, thankfully, shorter than the Wagnerian fare we have grown accustomed to over the last few years.

At roughly a continuous two and a half hours, without intermission, it is decidedly more compact than his later classics, but that doesn’t mean that the narrative is fast paced. Already at this point in his career it took Wagner ages to get from point A to point B. Scenes unfold so slowly that they demand the utmost extremes of endurance from everybody involved (audience and performers alike). Though perhaps I’m beginning to think that’s precisely the whole point with Wagner: he just harps on and on about stuff without any theatrical sense of pacing or timing. Which is not to say that the whole thing isn’t pleasurable. Gorgeous musical moments abound at every turn, no matter how stalled out the story is and how flat – or should I say, over-intellectualized – the emotions register. With Wagner it’s not about compelling narratives but it’s really all about the musical journey, where massive waves of wonderful sound engulf the audience and transport it away.

The women do their spinning
Photo credit: Met Opera

Having only just revisited Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851), an opera from almost a decade later, in which the musical drama unfolds with an economy and an emotional density that is completely and utterly lacking in Wagner, Der Fliegende Holländer felt like some kind of strange overly heady sprawling exercise. A ten-minute movement in Act II of Rigoletto will not only thrust the dramatic tension forward with a riveting sense of urgency and musical invention, but it will touch on half a dozen human emotions, from anger to love, rage to supplication, tender affection to exasperation, fatherly care and frustration to defeat and desperation. Wagner on the other hand often abandons forward motion in favor of excavating personal moments of introspection, maybe, to put it generously.

So this opera may be shorter than Die Meistersinger and Tannhäuser, but it is by no means any sweeter. Quite the contrary: Der Fliegende Holländer presents one of those questionable archetypal mid-nineteenth-century self-sacrificing women that were in vogue across the literary and operatic genres of the time. Dostoevsky’s novels often feature, at the very least, one such specimen, if not more. Christlike female martyrs were all the rage apparently in the era of male neediness two centuries ago, even if the trend wasn’t limited to the period.

The Flying Dutchman makes landfall
Photo credit: Met Opera

In a nutshell: a wealthy Dutch sailor (the one after whom the opera is named) is cursed to travel the high seas for all of eternity unless he finds a good woman willing to marry him and remain faithful till death do them part. Sailor can set foot ashore only every 7 years to find said “good woman.” Sailor meets another boat where the captain promptly agrees to give him his good daughter in marriage in exchange for some of his riches. It just happens that the lady in question is already kind of obsessed with the story of this very same Dutch sailor (apparently a major blockbuster at the time) and daydreams of proving herself to be the special “good woman” required for his redemption. When father introduces her to the hero himself, she swoons and things seem to be heading toward a happy ending with a cheerful wedding in tow. BUT, the young woman’s old boyfriend pops up all whiny because she does not care for him anymore. Dutch sailor misunderstands the situation and storms off, thinking she is just another slutty unfaithful woman, incapable of keeping her word for more than a minute or two. Our heroine, to prove her eternal love, jumps off a cliff, thus breaking the curse instantly. Curtain, as “good woman” and Dutch sailor ascend united to heaven.

Senta's Choice
Illustration by Robert Neubecker

Much has been made of the choices of this particular opera’s heroine, Senta. And much of the recent debate has focused on her role in the story. She has been reduced to a mere fangirl who languishes under the weight of her idolization of a pin-up of a corpse-like hunk who has been built up by the ballad tradition passed down by popular culture, making her a female Don Quixote of sorts who is drugged on her favorite stories and looks to them to give her banal life some semblance of meaning. Or else emphasis has been placed on Senta’s savior complex – her belief in her superwoman abilities to redeem an irredeemable and perhaps unlovable man. We’ve all known the type, and so has the legendary Dan Savage.

  

Senta goes into a fangirl trance over her pin-up of a hunk
Photo credit: Met Opera

Putting Senta’s masochistic (or heroic, depending how you see it) motives aside, it seems like most of this discussion has neglected some pretty key misogynistic features central to the plot and its dramatic tensions. The whole drama hinges on the fact that the Dutchman cannot find a faithful woman. If there were women capable of loyalty in marriage or Senta did not raise suspicions of infidelity, there would be no opera here. Which is offensive to say the least. I mean, we’re talking about a sailor not able to find a loyal woman.

Maybe Wagner’s personal experience with marriage (or married women) had something to do with this. As one story goes, Wagner was apparently having an affair with Liszt’s daughter, Cosima, who was married at the time to Hans von Bulow, a pianist and conductor of the premieres of both Tristan and Die Meistersinger. She bore Wagner three children (all named after Wagnerian characters) before von Bulow granted her a divorce, at which point he married Cosima and became Lizst’s son-in-law. The composer had a colored past to say the least when it came to questions of fidelity. In this case the male heart is not exactly exempt from guilt.

Senta expresses her convictions to the headmistress
Photo credit: Met Opera

The central question of feminine fidelity, however, is put forth by Senta herself in her big second act ballad. It is perhaps the most famous set piece in the whole opera, which undeniably features some of the most beautiful music of the evening:

But he can be saved, this captain so pale,
If woman’s heart in her mission not fail!
But when will he find this woman
So rare, this woman so rare?
(Act II, Scene 1, Senta’s Ballad)

By her own admission, or at least that of the author of the ballad which she has learned by heart and sings in a trance at the opening of the act while the other women, her boring conformist peers, are hard at work, women are unfaithful (so as not to say “sluts”). A woman who will faithfully love “this captain so pale” is a creature “so rare, so rare.”

Senta assures the Dutchman she knows what she's getting into
Photo credit: Met Opera

Now, either the Flying Dutchman is an unlovable monster (though there are no explicit indications in the libretto of that), or else this opera casts more doubts on the nature of womanhood than any opera before the Duca ironically sang La donna è mobile (which said more about his own fickle tendencies than those of any of his fawning fan girls).

Pray for the man at sea,
That his woman be true to him!
(Act II, Scene 1, Senta’s Ballad)

According to Senta’s ballad, women are not naturally prone to loyalty. Is this not, rather, the theme of the opera?

Will you, indeed, give yourself to me forever?
Shall I in truth, a stranger, thus be blessed?
Say, shall I find the time of sorrow ended –
In your true love my long-expected rest?
(Act II, Scene 3, Dutchman’s proposal)

In the world of Wagner’s opera, a good wife is indeed hard to find. Senta goes so far as to prove her hardcore inner-fangirl status by throwing herself off the cliff – all on behalf of a man whom she has only (hardly) just met. They die a heroic death (together?). By proving her “faithfulness unto death,” the Dutchman finally gets the repose he has long sought after. His ship dissolves into mist; their souls rise up to the heavens – forever united though with no real common bond of love to speak of. The composer didn’t bother to develop any kind of relationship between them.

A last encounter on the fatal staircase
Photo credit: Met Opera

From our Family Circle seats we could not see the climactic suicide, because it occurred too far upstage for our sight lines, nor could we make much sense out of the sudden glow of heavenly light that rather awkwardly suffused a rear corner of the stage. From the top of the house it was only partially visible. Most of the people who filed out of their seats with us were perplexed by the ending. What did it all mean? Did they die together? Did she liberate him? Was her sacrifice for naught? Did redemption come to anyone after all this sound and fury? The emotionally payoff didn’t amount to much.

The faithfulness of woman is at the center of the story. Not just the self-sacrificing female savior, but one who will be eternally true to her man, as if this were some impossible feat. Is that the offensive part? The question hangs unanswered, heavy in the air. This production did little to weigh in on the debate.

Il maestro in action
Photo credit: Met Opera

Nevertheless, the Met Orchestra sounded crisp and clean and clear under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Once they launched into an inspired performance of the overture, I knew we were in good hands. In fact, I can’t wait to see what kind mark he will make on the company. His conducting was forceful and poetic, muscular and sure-footed. This embodiment of Wagner sounded like it could actually forge boldly into those later Dionysian places his work is so known for – especially in terms of the Met’s recent productions, that have lacked the Dionysian indulgence so characteristic of this composer. A Wagnerian score demands a kind of reckless abandon and energy. It has to be expressive. None of this pussy-footing around that has characterized too much of the current gentile world of the arts in which we seem to be eternally damned to live. Nézet-Séguin seems poised to go there. And that makes me happy.

A sorrowful, masculine presence, only slightly ghostly
Photo credit: Met Opera

The cast was equally stellar on the whole. German baritone Michael Volle as the Dutchman was mysterious and sexy, though only slightly ghostly. He played the bereft sailor as a sorrowful, masculine presence. His instrument has all the power and stamina required to forcefully assert itself over the orchestra and fill the hall, with a manly desperation but also hope and impetuousness that were pretty impressive. In Volle’s hands I think I may consider warming up to Wagner. True, his arias went on and on about the same stuff but he sounded so good that I actually did not mind that much.

Soprano Amber Wagner as Senta was also stellar – perhaps the star turn of the evening. I feel like she stole the show in a number of ways. She brought Senta’s famous ballad in the beginning of Act II to life with emotion and musicality, launching with earnest passion into the excitement of the hunky sailor story. She went into a fangirl trance with a delicacy tainted with lunacy, especially in those forceful attacks that punctuate each of the stanzas of the ballad. It is one of the most famous pieces from the opera for a reason and this Californian soprano was up to the task. In fact, I never would have said she was American. She has one of those Northern European voices that stops you in your tracks no matter how big a wave of sound the orchestra might be producing in the pit. She was another revelation of the evening.

Amber Wagner steals the show
Photo credit: Met Opera

Tenor A. J. Glueckert as the old boyfriend Erik was perhaps the only weak link. He didn’t have the same girth of sound that the leads had. The Wagnerian tenor though is a different kind of beast. There is just so little finesse in the Wagnerian vocal line, whereas there is so much to belt out, so much muscle required of the voice, especially the tenor. If you’re looking for melting emotional moments, you’re in the wrong place. This is decidedly a heady experience. The Wagnerian tenor knows no tears.

In fact, where is the emotional payoff? It seems to be non-existent in the Wagnerian operatic experience. It’s all intellectualism all the time when it’s Wagner night at the Met (even the audience seems to be more on the haughty intellectual side when compared to your average Verdi public). I have to admit that it has been a reluctant turn to the Wagnerian oeuvre but once you actually take the plunge it ends up revealing itself to be pleasurable in its own way (though one should not expect fast paced plots, witty librettos, soul stirring moments or relatable human emotions). These works need to be experienced at least once in the life of an opera lover. More than that is pushing it.

– Lei & Lui

Passion Italian-Style in WWII Paris

Puccini’s Manon Lescaut

Metropolitan Opera

November 25, 2016

Manon reminisces about simpler times
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

The Met’s new production of Puccini’s first big breakthrough opera from 1893 is back for its second year in a row with a new cast. When we saw this production on the opening night of its run last winter, Roberto Alagna had stepped in to save the day due to an “unexpected” cancellation by the chronic canceller Jonas Kaufmann, opposite the gorgeous Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais. Back then it was our first Manon Lescaut and we liked it fine, though we did not feel it was something worth writing home about. This year, maybe because of the new (superior) cast or due to some Wagnerian exposure, we actually liked this Puccini highly melodramatic opera much better.

Manon unleashes her diva
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

With the new cast, the dynamic tension between the characters shifted ever so slightly. Carlos Alvarez brought out his rich and lyric tenore spinto. His voice is vibrant and fits squarely in the Puccini canon. He played a cocky, headstrong des Grieux, with his male assertiveness coming across in his brutal attack on certain notes in key dramatic moments. His No, pazzo son in the climax of Act III turned out to be one of the most moving moments of the evening. I found that the threat of separation between the two lovers tugged on my heartstrings. Alvarez’s performance was gripping and the fact that I was virtually moved to tears completely blind-sided me. I usually find Puccini too sentimental, too saccharine, too sappy for my tastes, and yet he still manages to sneak up on me especially during scenes like this one that feature big bursts of muscular emotions set to music.  

When it comes to Anna Netrebko, it seems like she was born to sing this role. There is something about the way she embodies Manon that seems at first blush to be entirely out of character but that ultimately brings to the fore elements that you don’t usually see from other singers. While Netrebko and her voice seem a touch too mature for the Act I incarnation of this innocent country maiden who is on her way to a convent, she played her Manon as a fresh faced ingénue who was completely unaware of the innate diva-esque powers of seduction that she naturally possesses. It was a revelation in many ways, not least of all because she owned the role vocally, even while only feigning innocent naïveté. So by injecting her larger than life diva quality even in these nascent moments of Manon’s early blossoming, Netrebko endowed the character with something very special, not to mention fitting for what this young woman may in part also be deep down.

Manon possesses her inner diva
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

In the first act, she discovers what she is capable of. In the second, she finds herself in a quandary of sorts. Having been forced by her opportunistic brother to leave the man whom she really loves, she uses her natural gifts to carve out a very posh niche for herself in the rarified Parisian world of the rich and famous in which she seems to serve as little more than a glorified whore. Clad in her plush full-length furs and surrounded by a slew of Art Deco luxuries, Netrebko dreamily croons In quelle trine morbide about missing the simpler life she enjoyed with des Grieux, her more passionate lover, the man whom she abandoned without even saying goodbye. She pines for those times when she had fewer toys but soaked up a whole lot more love, long kisses and amorous embraces.

In this case, Manon is actively a trickster. She knows exactly what she is doing when she manipulates des Grieux back into her embrace in Act II. She is a dangerous seductress using the only weapon in her arsenal as femme fatale, and that is her antico fascino che accieca. Poor des Grieux immediately falls for it, to his own knowing chagrin. Netrebko plays the moment beautifully. A slippery snake who knows the power she holds over men. Des Grieux then really sees through her deceit and artifice when she reverts back to her opportunistic materialist self after they are alerted that her arrest is imminent. Rather than high tail it out of there, she goes back to her boudoir for the jewels and the gold, and Alvarez breaks into one of his most heart wrenching numbers in the first half of the opera, Ah, Manon, mi tradisce il tuo folle pensier, which he belts out with a manly desperation. She continues to play him and he is distraught. It is in moments like this one that makes me think that Puccini really nailed it. This whole movement in the music and the narrative very concisely captures the spirit of Prévost’s novel, in which Manon is a cold blooded heartbreaker and des Grieux let's his crush get the better of him at every turn, yet he just can't help himself, and so he always goes back for more. Crazy he is indeed.

The Column of Trajan and the painting visible in the boudoir backdrop
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

Set against the backdrop of a Nazi occupied France, Richard Eyre’s distinctive take on the opera opens in Amiens, France, only this time the year is 1941. The village of the original has been transformed into a provincial French township and the fashion has been adapted to match. On the whole the updated setting enlivens the story, despite initially feeling like another futile experiment in the modern history of operatic Regietheater. Upon further reflection, however, some of these directorial decisions do in fact add several insightful layers to the story as it stands. Not only does it come off completely sexed up – the costumes and sets look great – but it also introduces deeper motivations for such plot points as to why Manon is headed to a convent in Act I and as to why the arrival of the gendarmes in Act II is extra heartbreaking, not to mention the deportation twist in Act III.

Manon flirts with her sugar daddy
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

Talking with a scholar of French literature and culture during one of the intermissions, I was taken by a particular insight that sheds some light on how we might go about decoding some of the liberties Richard Eyre took with this concept, especially considering the bold decision to set the opera in a France under German occupation in the year 1941, rather than the late 18th century (the novel is set in the first half of the 18th century, Puccini moves it to the second half of that century). The suggestion is that Manon is Jewish and like many rural Jewish girls of the time she is being shipped off to a convent in order to escape persecution – a relatively common occurrence. Then in Act II when the soldiers burst in to abscond with her, it is because Geronte has not merely denounced her for lechery, but rather that he has reported her Jewishness to the authorities. And so in barge the Nazis. A particularly cruel form of revenge for having found her in the midst of a tryst with her former lover and his prior rival. It’s a very powerful reading, and it very likely is what the director and his team were going for.

Not every aspect of the production fits into this reading and for it to work at all you have to use your imagination, particularly in Act IV. But the broad outlines of this notion seem to be there, and the direction makes every attempt to make it all mesh. The Act III role of the prostitutes and prisoners who are being shipped off as slave laborers to the new world would then seem to provide a parallel to the rounding up of individuals to be sent off to concentration camps. In fact, they are all systematically stripped down one-by-one during the humiliating roll call portion of the act and dressed in sad gray smocks with numbers stenciled on them, so Holocaust references would not be a stretch.

The Nazi deportation forces cart her off to the camps
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

By the time we get to the final act, however, Eyre’s staging of Act IV only functions on the level of metaphor. The lovers find themselves in a wasteland, both the work of their all-consuming passion and of the war that has been raging on in the meantime. This is one of the main points in which the words being sung in the Italian are incongruous to the action on stage, and I usually find this practice harder to condone. The long slow death of the beloved nevertheless plays out against the backdrop of a war-ravaged cityscape and, when sung by the likes of Alvarez and Netrebko, it is a harrowing experience for all involved. An appropriately Wagnerian finale, a Liebestod in the Italian fashion, as Puccini intended it.  

The slithery snake sneaks up on her prey
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

Rob Howell’s signature rotund set design (with striking similarities to his work in the Met’s current productions of Carmen and Le nozze di Figaro) cleverly includes in Manon’s courtesan quarters in Act II a mock up of the Column of Trajan in Rome that features an array of Kama Sutra poses and a screen with an enormous image of Cupid pinching Venus’ nipple from the iconic painting by Agnolo Branzino, The Allegory of Venus and Cupid. The part of the painting that is on full display includes the right side of the composition in which the monstrous figure of Temptation holds forth in one hand the promise of love and pleasure in the form of a honeycomb; in the other she holds the menacing prick of her scorpion tail. These elements provide a kinky backdrop against which Manon's big courtesan scene unfolds. It displays clues to the pain that will inevitably follow in the wake of love's great transitory pleasure, especially as these two lovers sing of lips that wound and heal – dolcissimo soffrir, indeed!

The set for this act must also include a great big bed and this makes Puccini powerfully unique. The libretto and the writing are among the most Dionysian outside of Wagner, but Puccini is Italian and so the quality is distinctly more warm-blooded. Just to read the text for the big love scene when des Grieux and Manon are reunited is to go on a trip to Venusberg that is not otherworldly, but profoundly of the here and now. It’s deep, if you let it work its magic on you. It can be a bit misleading for its verismo undertones, but to understand Manon Lescaut, it seems to me that you have to know not only Cavalleria rusticana, but also Tannhäuser and maybe even Tristan und Isolde, which makes it a perfect pairing for this season at the Met.

The wasteland provides the backdrop for the final movement
Photo credit: Ken Howard/Met Opera

Manon Lescaut’s Act II contains one of the deepest most Dionysian expressions of operatic abandonment in the Italian canon that I have seen. And it is only thanks to Wagner (of all people) that I have come to this understanding. This opera can take you places if you let it and it does contain raw bits of the Puccini works to come. The beginning gives you a glimpse of what is to come in the first act of La boheme. Act III gives you a glimpse of the winning formula that brought us the E lucevan le stelle movement in Tosca. And there are other prolepses of what is to come in Puccini’s later work. But his attempt to descend into the Dionysian in the second half of Act II and what happens in Act IV all amount to something very deep. This is not Verdi, and it’s not Wagner, nor is it the later Puccini. Richard Eyre’s production does not entirely disappoint.

– Lui & Lei

Guilt, Alienation and Other Wagnerian Disorders

Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

Opening Night Gala

Metropolitan Opera

September 26, 2016

An Isolde for our times
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lei: As for every yearly outing to the Met opening gala, I strutted to the Met all dressed up, but unlike other years, my sense of anticipation was somewhat tamed. More than excited, I was bracing myself for five hours of Wagner. Talk about a sparkly beginning to a new season! Still, I’m for trying everything once, Wagnerian operas included, so here we go.

Lui: In the category of best-dressed female attire at the Metropolitan Opera gala, it was a rather lackluster soiree (present company excluded). As far as I could tell the men took the evening. I saw a number of fabulous, colorful tuxedo jackets that ultimately outshined the feminine fashion on display – and one of said tuxes was even paired with a big blue feather fan.... I mean, really, where have all the ball gowns and tiaras gone? Please, please come back to me.

Metropolitan Opera in grand fashion
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lei: Seriously, when at a gala the gentlemen sport more eccentric attire than the ladies something’s wrong. But back to Wagner: from the very start of the overture we knew we were in for something very dark and stormy. We were presented with projections, as though through a periscope, of a modern-day tempest-tossed ship at sea. Through the arc of the opera things do not getting any lighter: we are brought into the ship (in a claustrophobic, dollhouse-like Act I); to the deck of the ship and an adjacent shipyard storehouse (at night, in Act II); and finally to a dark medical room, with occasional trippy excursions into Tristan’s gloomy hallucinatory neuroses that include a burned-out childhood home and a profoundly guilty conscience (in Act III).

The somber alienation of modern love
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: Mariusz Trelinski’s was a very somber, dark, shadowy production, with tones that felt film noir-y. I would place it temporally some time in the late twentieth century, given a fixation on a series of modern technologies like some kind of sonar radar, without a bleep anywhere to be found on the event horizon. In act III the stage featured vital life signs monitors and a huge projected electronic grid. Definitely not the latest technology, not contemporary world stuff, but close. These seemed to represent all the rational systems of weights and measures modern scientific thought attempts to impose on reality – the very reality that our two love-drugged protagonists want nothing more than to escape.

The stairwell in the dollhouse set
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lei: The director definitely added a whole layer of Tristan’s tormented psyche by using recurring projections of a little boy suffering trauma (parents’ death caused in his mind by a fire he was somehow responsible for) and a recurring figure of a man in a white uniform (representing possibly the consoling surrogate father figure of King Marke that will also be a cause of grief since Tristan is in the thick of “stealing” the unsuspecting king’s bride-to-be Isolde). While the projections were a bit distracting, they did have their sense in terms of giving us the director’s take on what’s wrong with Tristan. A massive guilt trip makes sense as a force pushing him to just get away from reality and take his lady Isolde with him. Her character is a little bit more linear, even though one would wonder why any woman in her right mind would fall for a tortured suicidal mopey guy as Tristan, love potion or no love potion.  

Lui: By Act II it becomes clear that it the story of a couple under the impression that the world is will and idea until the world reveals itself to operate on its own rules. And so they opt for complete retreat into the only world that is the true embodiment of will by the ultimate act of will. So these two lovers desire nothing more than infinite night, which seems to be more than a mere death impulse. Love pushed them to the brink not only of life but also of consciousness. Tristan goes beyond any simple desire for death or suicide as in Act III he goes on a voyage into his soul, an inner personal exploration of his mind and his past into what it seems to mean to possess a self. Which leads me to believe that Wagner (and this director in turn) mean to suggest that there may be more to the mysteries of existence than this life lived in the moment under the sun’s shimmering light of day has in store.

The eclipse of sun and moon
Photo credit: Met Opera

Lei: That’s all very deep and soul-searching, but Isolde and Tristan showed very little physical chemistry in this production. Sure, their singing was sublime and their duets at times truly wonderful. But their acting did not mirror either the absolute love or the all-consuming, irresistible passion that the music and the libretto denote. Stemme and Skelton looked like they were on an awkward first date at best, but definitely not as if they couldn’t live without each other. When in Act II they are surprised by the King’s men, there is nothing scandalous or outrageous about their being together. From the libretto it sounds like they were found half naked with their limbs intertwined but here they were just hanging out in a hangar full of toxic waste barrels – oh yeah, Tristan emphatically took his tie off and Isolde got rid of her coat, whoooa, sexy times!

All hands on deck: Romance on the bridge
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: It seems to be suggested that they engage in some kind of intimacy when the translucent scrim comes down at the end of Act II, Scene I, but the seduction of Wagner’s music is so hampered by this bit of stagecraft that all of his hard-core Dionysian sensibilities are completely muted. The nookie nookie on the ship’s deck behind the projections of the sun eclipsed by the moon was potent symbolism, but it took the audience away from the moment. What’s with this prudery? They want to blot out the light of the dutiful sun with the indulgence that the dark side of the moon promises, but the magic of what makes Wagner great is gone. The composer opens up this Venusberg-style space for us in his music and demands our indulgence in it; especially considering absolutely excessive decadent length he forces us to endure of it. They just did it better in the chthonian 1970s and early 1980s productions, which are much closer to the spirit and the music if you ask me. In Trelinski’s take the lovers seemed alienated not only from the world but also from themselves and each other. Maybe this is a sign of the times: the Wagnerian condition of alienation is also a uniquely modern one.

Lei: On top of the total lack of sexual tension, costumes by Marek Adamski were particularly ugly and uninspired. The production is already dark and stark with not much to watch. It lasts forever. Why not give the poor public something to engage the eye a bit more? I get the modern vibe, but still. All men were in either military uniforms or indistinct workmen, sailor-like garb. Isolde wore shapeless PJs in Act I, and an ill-fitting double-breasted trench coat in Acts II and III. Granted, in the so-called outbursts of passion, the ugly coat was taken off to reveal a plain unflattering velvet gown. And she wore combat boots with it. I get the Birgit Nilsson line that the secret weapon for a Wagnerian soprano is to wear comfortable shoes but still… At least Isolde had a luminous bright blonde wig – the only ray of sunshine in the whole stark thing.

Hot and steamy? Amidst the toxic waste
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: It was heartening to hear some of the New York audience boo the production. But it was pretty clear that the ones in our section were just the old stick-in-the-mud purists. I’m not sure that type of operagoer is willing to do the heavy lifting it takes to decode this kind of experimentation, with the emphasis on “willing.” We’re not Wagner types and so it is already an imposition to get us to sit through five hours of his work. So it’s all heavy lifting for us. A little less, a little more when it comes to trying to wrap your mind around the mental masturbations of the director never did me any harm.

Lei: It is a majestic opera and easily my favorite Wagner outing to date (Die Meistersinger and Tannhäuser being the first two). I’m starting to see how Wagner imbues his plots with less emotion and more cerebral concerns. There is very little in the way of viscerality but he sure knows how to explore an idea or two through music. I can see why he blew the minds of so many poets and artists. You sit and trip out on his slow but steady jaunts through a big cosmic theme. These operas are anything but action packed, but the intellectual punch they pack is considerable.

Lui: Which is why I’m surprised that so many Wagner diehards are offended when a director rises to the challenge of raising Wagner’s game with an honest new setting of his pieces. Wagnerian operas are ripe for it and beg for further intellectualizing elaborations in their settings. This composer adds layers of metaphor and philosophical reverie to his core narrative material and then dramatizes not the action but the abstraction he has imposed onto it. And then we all sit through it, with only a portion of the superhuman endurance it demands of its orchestra and singers.

Eros and Thanatos with Isolde in the hospital ward
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lei: The singers all sounded great and they all carried out their Herculean tasks admirably. Nina Stemme is undeniably a little powerhouse, a force to be reckoned with from beginning to end, sounded particularly lovely in her duets with Tristan and her final Liebestod was pretty spectacular in its exalted lyricism. Tenor Stuart Skelton had many wonderful moments, especially when he threw his little conniption fits. Bass Rene Pape is always good, and as King Marke here he was guttural, stern but round sounding, human but commanding.

Wagnerian love, a modern condition
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: My only wish every time I see Wagner is that there isn’t more sheer pleasure taken in the singing as an aesthetic end in itself. Rather than poetry he is a prose composer. What he demands of his singers is sizable force and endurance rather than lustrous beauty and finesse. Although these operas seem to consist of a lot of yelling in German over a lot of music, I nevertheless come away feeling that most of that music was ineffably gorgeous and abundantly pleasurable, despite the fact that I never come away humming any of the tunes themselves. Tonight’s musical takeaway though was the Tristan chord and several of the other stock phrases or mottoes that very unambiguously punctuate this piece. It is said that the music was born first, and then the words, which I can believe since the musical ideas really guide you through the plot far more than the words or even the story.

Lei: Based on a superficial exposure to no more than three or four different recordings of this opera, Sir Simon Rattle seemed to favor a rather languid, or dreamy take on the score. His tempos often felt slowed down, drawn out, as though to match the pacing of the orchestra to the oneiric vision of the stage direction and seamless flow of the set transitions from one convoluted early scene to the next. The transitions during the long semi-conscious death sequence in Act III were also sufficiently dreamy. Everybody involved had us all hanging on the cusp of consciousness.

Betrayal of the "father" by the son
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: Wagner is definitely not in a hurry to get anywhere. And so why should we be? If there is one thing he is good at it is dilation and delay. Or as Rossini said in a letter to Emile Naumann in 1867: “Monsieur Wagner a de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quarts d’heure.” In Tristan und Isolde by the end he truly makes his points effectively, but by no means economically. Our Monsieur is long-winded but breathtakingly beautiful, I’ll give him that. He takes a very long time to make his points. All the better if a director gives us a little something to work with while we get there.

Lei: After seeing Tristan und Isolde I do finally get Wagner’s lure. I am not a convert by any stretch but I see how it could be someone’s piece of cake. There’s something about these waves of beautiful complex intense music that wash over you and carry you places for several hours. The sung-through business though leaves me more lukewarm, it’s definitely a challenge for singers and impressive to hear and does have some peak moments. But also so much space-filling fluff in which characters go on and on elaborating on themes and ideas. Wagner’s work is so wordy and cerebral. I prefer concise, to-the-point visceral passion, less words but more effective and memorable ones. But that is the bel canto lover in me speaking.

Wagner goes noir
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: This was more satisfying by far than last year’s Otello though. Despite its liberties, I left feeling exalted and stimulated by such an intense evening at the Met. Wagner may be a bit wordy in his orchestrations and overly verbose in his libretti, but tonight came off like a tightly clenched fist. A city like New York deserves its edgy fresh takes on the classics, if nothing else then to prove the value of the traditionalists’ approach. A healthy balance of this slightly more intellectually challenging fare plays well against big period pieces in tights and powdered wigs, cuirasses and broadswords does the city and most of all the art form a world of good.

Lei: Fair enough – now that I checked the Tristan box, it’s time for some real pleasure: I am definitely extremely excited to get my Rossini fix with Italiana in Algeri and Guillaume Tell this month!

– Lei & Lui

Of alienation and modern love
Photo credit: Ken Howard