13895 Wagner News 174 - Wagner Society of England

Tristan poured out his full romantic agony. But at least Saemundson did not have to strip
off and join the succession of two naked men, one young and one old, who processed
slowly and ill at ease across the stage in this same scene. Why they did it remains obscure.
Sanja Radisic maintained the high standards of the Aachen cast with her slim, finely
honed, schoolmistressy Brangäne, and by floating her warning with real magic.
Happily the wayward production at Aachen had some good moments, as happened
after Tristan and Isolde drink the potion and suddenly recognise that they are not only
unexpectedly alive, but delirious with happiness, laughing hysterically at their situation
until its enormity strikes home. And Aachen producer Ludger Engels was at least singer
friendly, positioning his cast well forward in the little wood-walled room which did
service as a ship’s cabin and faced the audience at a diagonal throughout Act I.
Consequently the singers always carried over Wagner’s tumultuous orchestra. Act II at
Aachen was located in a rather anonymous bedroom, although Tristan and Isolde
preferred to lie side by side on a bargain-basement carpet, hastily rolled out by Tristan for
the purpose. Act III at Aachen simply had some chairs set out in a vague nowhere. By
contrast, Yannis Kokkos’ simple but atmospheric WNO version presented the scene as
well as ever, with some rope-ladders and a single spar for Act I, a suggestion of some
distant trees for Act II, and a great barren slab for Act III. If my memory of the past is
correct, Kokkos called this time for a much greater degree of physical contact between
Tristan and Isolde than before, conveying their affection as well as their passion. One of
the things about people in love is their desperate desire for each other’s company, and this
came across persuasively at Birmingham, more so than at Aachen.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Act II at Aachen should be disfigured by the usual
cut, and I looked forward to Birmingham because I have previously heard a WNOpera
Tristan und Isolde conducted by Richard Armstrong, Charles Mackerras, Carlo Rizzi, and
Mark Wigglesworth, and on these previous occasions WNO outclassed Covent Garden
and Glyndebourne (but not ENO) for one simple reason: that WNO presented the work
complete to the last bar. It was therefore a nasty surprise to find a strange cut in Act II,
not the traditional one, at Birmingham, and some further slashings to Act III. Moreover,
the present WNO conductor, Lothar Koenigs, found it necessary not only to whip up the
prelude of Act I, but the Act II duet, and even more inexplicably, every statement of the
death theme towards the end of Act I. His seemed too an unremittingly loud performance,
but Tristan und Isolde should ravish as well as overwhelm, as for instance, when Isolde
sings of Frau Minne in Act II, “Schon goss Sie ihres Schweigen durch Hain und Haus”.
Perhaps no one has quite matched the sheer loveliness of Margaret Price and Carlos
Kleiber in passages like this, but if Lothar Koenigs had kept the accompanying horn
pulsations down, and paid more attention generally to Wagner’s pp markings, the work’s
magic would have stood a better chance, as indeed Marcus Bosch gave it at Aachen.
Bosch did include the traditional cut in Act II, which was a pity as he was finest in
this act. He had been strangely insubstantial with the weighty strings which herald Tristan’s
Act I appearance before Isolde, but in Act II he displayed an ideal sense of tempo, a
flawless sense of its musical development, and an unerring feel for its psychological
drama, as well as its sheer, ineffable beauty. He drew from his modest forces (four double
basses) a sonority whose amplitude was in the best German tradition, even when very soft,
and the reduced strings meant that much fine wind detail emerged, but without loss of
overall density. He also managed well certain small details of orchestration such as that
strange, uncanny sigh on muted horns which comes just after Brangäne’s “Ein Einz’ger
war’s”. This was as haunting as on Furtwängler’s HMV recording.
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