Opera
Old demon
Rodney Milnes
Tristan and IsoIde (Coliseum) Not that wretched Wagner again', my poor mother once said as the 78s of the Dutchman overture plopped down the sPindle of the autochange HMV radiogram for the nth time one day at Casa Milnes (her favourte composer was Mende's- auhn). Forty-odd years on, I felt more or less the same while trogging off to the Coliseum in the middle of a Saturday afternoon for nearly six hours of the old demon. Wagner held me in thrall for over half my operatically-conscious life to the exclusion of virtually everything else, cer- tainly everything non-German — French and most Italian music were beneath con- tempt, as older readers may recall — until a blinding, neo-Pauline flash after a parti- cularly dour Ring (at the Garden) sug- gested that Don Carlos (at the Coliseum) covered more or less the same ground as the Ring and Tristan lumped together, but in an eighth of the time and with the added 'fl Us of tunes. Anger at years of adora- tion lavished on music some of which is fit ?nly for adolescents and fascists (tauto- NY?) has sharpened impatience to the Pulitt of resentment: I'm damned if I'm going to be drawn unprotesting into that wretched man's hypnotic, all-consuming, ultimately authoritarian world. That's enough autobiography. Ed. Not quite. So I spent much of the first act last Saturday thinking how nice it would have been if Gounod (a great, great Master I now realise) had got hold of the Tristan legend first: finished in two hours,' bags of melody, suggestive rather than Power-station instrumentation, and with any luck a happy end. Such treasonable olaneies were fuelled by a production set in °tYgian blackness, with the only touch of Colour Brangaene's russet frock, with Tris- !an dressed as the Dutchman in oilskins, lighting apparently by Albert Speer, only Intermittent evidence of direction, hordes of extra sailors miming bathetically to ?ff-stage chorus, little indication of what !anguage the performance was being sung in, and the eventual confrontation of the lovers rendered anticlimactic by the fact hat in assorted mime sequences they had Practically had each other half a dozen times already. And yes, yes, I know Sir Reginald Goodall is the greatest living Wagnerian, but surely some of those chords, some of those unison phrases, ought to have been just vaguely together? Too many entries sounded like cards being shuffled, slowly.
But by the end of the second act I'm ashamed to say the old demon had won hands down. Surrender was the only answer. To hell with ensemble: no one understands how and why this music works as Sir Reginald does. One may have missed the immediacy of the sound he conjured up in the small Cardiff theatre for the memor- able WNO Tristan of 1979, but the com- bination of the Coliseum bloom and his characteristic insistence on total clarity of texture has its own virtues: the bone- structure of the score is there, clothed in the most succulent, pliant yet translucent flesh, and its most important component — pain — is presented with near-intolerable intensity. Zeit und Raum are suspended. If we have to have Tristan (a curmudgeon writes) then this is the way to have it.
Minor irritations apart (the sci-fi dispos- al of Kurwenal was another) this was by a long chalk the best Giitz Friedrich produc- tion we have seen in London since that first Rheingold, and just about the most intel- ligently conceived Tristan of my experi- ence. (Peter Hall's, marvellous though it was, did rather freak out in all directions at once). The late Heinrich Wendel's abstract set, first seen in Holland eleven years ago, is both very Seventies and utterly timeless with its helpful suggestion of spiral, vortex, nebula or what you will. Its confined, often brightly lit acting areas certainly concen- trate the mind amidst the encircling gloom, and Friedrich's direction within them is fresh, purposeful and technically impecc- able. The arrangement of the lovers in their long duet was beautifully managed, their ever-shifting positions complex yet natural-looking and tenderly erotic. The stunning second-act coup-de-theatre, which I pray no other columnist describes lest it be ruined for future audiences, is there for a purpose other than waking us all up, a purpose to do with Friedrich's bleakly, properly pessimistic view of the work. The other world that the lovers seek to escape to, whether love or death, is illusory. It is shyly conjured up once more in the Liebes- tod, but only briefly. The sole reality known to humankind, the giving and re- ceiving of pain, returns. There is no escape.
Goodall and Friedrich were fortunate with their cast. Johanna Neier, one of the leading Isoldes of the day, has sung the role all over the world. She gamely agreed to re-learn it in English (to some effect in the later acts) and to sing through a cold on the first night. This appeared to affect only her breath-control (some choppy phrases); her tone is glorious at the top, always mellow and round, and the way she some- times lights on to notes, pianissimo after a little break, is most beguiling. She is a fine acress and above all musical: everything she sang meant something. The same was true, after a tentative first act, of Alberto
Remedios (Tristan). His slightly reedy but comely tone is well suited to the third-act delirium, which he put across with alarm- ing, indeed unexpected verisimilitude: his working relationship with Friedrich had plainly been a profitable one.
John Tomlinson (Mark) alone allowed one consistently to admire Andrew Por- ter's brilliant translation, thus loading the dice somewhat: well might the adulterers have hung their heads in shame. His heart spasm to the 'Tristan' chord was a marvel- lous Friedrich gloss: pain is shared out equally. Linda Finnie (Brangaene) and Geoffrey Chard (Kurwenal) were first- rate, Malcolm River's knuckle-chewing Melot nicely fleshed-out, and Edward By- les's solicitously shambling Shepherd curiously touching. A great performance, I think. I hated surrendering. Damn the man.
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