{"id":2197,"date":"2017-06-21T16:24:23","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T14:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=2197"},"modified":"2017-06-24T08:37:42","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T06:37:42","slug":"ersinken-vertrinken-unbewusst-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=2197","title":{"rendered":"Ersinken, vertrinken \u2013 unbewusst"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have not had many opera experiences in my lifetime that I could describe with a clear conscience as formative: shows that were memorable and, at the same time, shaped my peculiar sensitivity to sound and to the contexts surrounding the music. My most recent such illumination, after a long break, was the Longborough Tristan und Isolde<\/em>, a production that shook me to such a degree that for the next year, I returned to it again and again \u2013 in essays, columns and reviews from completely different stagings. A year later at a dress rehearsal of Tannh\u00e4user<\/em>, I was confirmed in my conviction that Anthony Negus is one of today\u2019s most distinguished interpreters of Wagner\u2019s \u0153uvre<\/em>. The news that he was planning to open the new season with a revival of Tristan<\/em> put me in a huge quandary. I felt like a soul who had gone through the Last Judgment, ended up in heaven, and then found out that something had gone wrong and it would be necessary to repeat the Judgment. And what if there would be no salvation this time?<\/p>\n

But there was. It happened not only in the theatrical plane \u2013 the only one about which I had mild reservations \u2013 but also in the musical one, this time so close to musical perfection that at moments I really had the impression of contact with the unknowable \u2018thing-in-itself\u2019. Stage director Carmen Jakobi decided to dispense with the pair of dancers \u2013 \u2018Jungian\u2019 doubles of Tristan and Isolde \u2013 who had previous introduced unnecessary confusion into the opera\u2019s only superficially static narrative. The singers were left alone on a nearly empty stage, in a space masterfully painted with light, face to face with the audience gathered in the little opera house. What began was true theater \u2013 faithful to the score, based on the word, intricately built around the relationships between the characters. Jakobi did not stop at just removing the dancing \u2018shadows\u2019. She shifted certain accents, all the more emphatically underlining the Wagnerian masterpiece\u2019s departures from its literary prototype. With the performers, she worked through every move, every gesture and every exchange of glances, at moments creating such a suggestive atmosphere of intimacy that we didn\u2019t know where to lay our eyes \u2013 we, accustomed to viewing sex, nudity and all manner of perversions in opera, but so pitifully helpless in confrontation with the view of pure, though staggeringly intense emotion between two people. Three scenes from the production should go down in operatic history. First of all, the finale of Act\u00a0I, in which the lovers torn out of their ecstatic exhilaration behave as if they are still in a trance, not grasping and not wanting to grasp what is going on around them \u2013 the short exchange of lines between the reeling Tristan and the stupefied Kurwenal (\u2018Wer naht?\u2019, \u2018Der K\u00f6nig!\u2019, \u2018Welcher K\u00f6nig?\u2019) was literally breathtaking. Secondly, the duet from Act\u00a0II, the exquisite, eroticism-laden love scene of which Grotowski\u2019s best actors would not be ashamed. Thirdly, Tristan\u2019s great monologue in Act\u00a0III, ending with his death in Isolde\u2019s arms: a realistic and shocking image of agony the likes I have never seen either in the theater, or even in the cinema. And never want to see in real life.<\/p>\n

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Act I. Peter Wedd (Tristan) and Lee Bisset (Isolde). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis.<\/p>\n

The most beautiful thing was the spirit of collaboration that hovered over the whole production. Jakobi\u2019s directing melded with the musical work like those two yew trees with the church portal in nearby Stow-on-the-Wold. In the singers\u2019 acting, I recognized gestures observed during other shows featuring them \u2013 this time, however, chiseled out with truly Shakespearean care. The staging does not diverge even one iota from the conductor\u2019s concept. And that concept, already brilliant two years ago, has undergone further evolution. At the time, I compared Negus\u2019 interpretation with the legendary perspectives of Karl B\u00f6hm, noticing the blistering tempi, but above all the exuberant pulse of the performance, making the audience realize that torment and longing are immanently linked to the score and there is no need to additionally slow it down. This time, I had the impression that Negus had gone even further, becoming part the forgotten or disregarded performance tradition of the 1930s. Initially, I thought of Reiner; then I went back even further in my thoughts, evoking the memory of the legendary recording of the prelude to Act\u00a0I in the rendition of the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Richard Strauss. In Negus\u2019 prelude, we heard the same devastated, carved-up waltz; the textures were equally light and bright; the wonderful portamenti <\/em>of the \u2019celli revived the memory of times long past and a sensitivity to sound that has since that time been lost. In Act\u00a0II, the \u2018hunting music\u2019 was enchantingly laden with the subtle power of natural horns; in Act\u00a0III, the Shepherd\u2019s song was accompanied by the nasal, frightfully sad tone of the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3<\/em>. In this production, the orchestra did not accompany the singers \u2013 it created a separate quality, almost sublime in the prelude to the final act, where the violins in the initial Todesschmerz<\/em> motif literally \u2018rebound\u2019 with a tritone off of the F in the \u2019cello chord, and the desolation motif gliding upward in thirds created such an overwhelming impression of boundless emptiness that I had shivers running up and down my spine. The mood was complemented by the stray thrush in the garden who decided to echo the English horn melody from the prologue to Scene\u00a01.<\/p>\n

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Act II. Peter Wedd and Lee Bisset. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis.<\/p>\n

In this year\u2019s cast, there were basically no weak points, which inspires all the greater admiration that the show was put on four times, every two days, featuring the same singers. Wonderful roles were created by Stuart Pendred (Kurwenal), known from the previous staging, gifted with a baritone of quite peculiar timbre, nonetheless superbly carried and technically flawless; and by Harriet Williams, a warm and velvety Brang\u00e4ne, perhaps even better than Catherine Carby, whom I praised to the skies two years ago. A fantastic debut in the roles of the Young Sailor and the Shepherd was turned in by Sam Furness, whom I have had the opportunity to admire three times in recent seasons: as \u0160teva in the Glasgow Jen\u016ffa<\/em>, the Novice in the Madrid Billy Budd <\/em>and Joaquino in a concert performance of Fidelio <\/em>in Paris (in a few days, he will be portraying this character in a new staging of Beethoven\u2019s opera at the Longborough Festival Opera). Some critics complained of tiredness in the voice of Geoffrey Moses, in my opinion wrongly: his King Marke fully convinced me to the concept of the tragic ruler faced with a betrayal exceeding all bounds of imagination. I am certain that this was a conscious choice on Negus\u2019 part, supported furthermore by the experienced bass\u2019s enormous vocal culture and unquestionably beautiful instrument.<\/p>\n

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Act III. Stuart Pendred (Kurwenal), Peter Wedd and Sam Furness (Shepherd). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis.<\/p>\n

I fear that I will run short of compliments for the two title characters. Lee Bisset, who debuted in the second cast in 2015, turned out to be the Isolde of my dreams, finished in every inch, felt to the very depths. This is one of those singers who rivet one\u2019s attention from their first entrance onstage, engage the listener not only with perfect mastery of their part, but also with an accurate feel for the words and fantastic acting. Bisset pulled off something that Rachel Nicholls had previously been unable to manage \u2013 to show Isolde as an equal partner to Tristan, a strong woman aware from the outset of her feelings, with which she initially fights as fiercely as she later yields to them. Her dark, expressive, strikingly powerful soprano sparkles with every hue of emotion: it sounded one way in the fiery, furious duet with Brang\u00e4ne, another way in ecstatic union with Tristan, for whom she had longed for years. The latter was again portrayed by Peter Wedd, who created probably the most captivating role in his career thus far. He went straight into his role with a secure and open voice, carrying over the dense textures with a sonorous, trumpet-like squillo<\/em>. In Act\u00a0I, Scene\u00a05, both of them were stupendous: one would look in vain for a \u2018Du mir einzig bewusst, h\u00f6chste Liebeslust!\u2019 sung like that in the archives of contemporary opera houses. In Act\u00a0II, Wedd began to play with timbre: after the phenomenal duet, he brought out the famous phrase \u2018O K\u00f6nig, das kann ich dir nicht sagen\u2019 in a manner that I had been awaiting for years: searingly lyrical, yet at the same time masculine, gradually sinking into a darker and darker abyss. In \u2018Dem Land, das Tristan meint, der Sonne Licht nicht scheint\u2019, he sang with a voice so dark, it was as if every sun in the galaxy had been snuffed out. In the Act\u00a0III monologue, he went through every tone of despair, hope and torment: I don\u2019t know if there is another tenor in the world who would be able to with such a beautiful voice and yet so precisely reflect the delirium of Tristan, at a certain moment thrashing about in an extremely disturbing 5\/4 metre \u2013 used in mad scenes by, among others, H\u00e4ndel. When the knight had finally died in Isolde\u2019s arms, the Verkl\u00e4rung <\/em>began \u2013 the love transfiguration of Isolde, by Wagner fans erroneously referred to as the Liebestod. <\/em>Both Negus and Jakobi pointed out this false reading, for which Liszt had been to blame. Lee Bisset sang her last monologue in an ecstasy bringing to mind associations with Bernini\u2019s famous sculpture, looking with awe at Tristan\u2019s corpse, frozen like a wax figure. And then, in the orchestra, miracles again began to happen. During the \u2018Mild und leise\u2019 monologue, the \u2018voice\u2019 of the dead Tristan circulated beneath the skin, like the song of the dumbstruck Rusalka from Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s opera almost half a century later. And in the penultimate measure, Isolde\u2019s heart stopped: just before the final B\u00a0major chord, the oboes are left alone for a moment, holding out a long, piercing D-sharp \u2013 like the flat line on the monitor announcing the irreversible stoppage of circulation.<\/p>\n

Again I ended up in heaven. Only what am I going to do there without such a Tristan<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have not had many opera experiences in my lifetime that I could describe with a clear conscience as formative: shows that were memorable and, at the same time, shaped my peculiar sensitivity to sound and to the contexts surrounding the music. My most recent such illumination, after a long break, was the Longborough Tristan … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-2197","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2197"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2206,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions\/2206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}