A very different take on Tristan and Isolde
Le Vin Herbé: the drugged wine or, as we might say nowadays, the spiked drink. In this opera by Swiss composer Frank Martin, premiered in 1948 and rarely seen since, that drink is the very same one that ignites Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. In that opera, we practically feel the drug in our own veins, so potent is Wagner’s musical evocation of the ungovernable passion between the two lovers.
You might think that Wagner’s stupendous opera would put the tale permanently out of bounds for any other composer. But Martin saw other possibilities in it. In Le Vin Herbé, the eroticism is purged away, and a sense of dark, unavoidable destiny takes over. Compared with Wagner’s opera, the two lovers, here known as Tristan and Iseult, are enmeshed in a much more complex story, which constantly pulls them away from each other. They are imprisoned by the jealous and betrayed King Mark, escape, live in the woods, and are then found asleep by the king, who spares them. Tristan suffers pangs of conscience, leaves Iseult, marries another Iseult, but cannot forget the first.
“Endless the bliss, endless the torment” sings the chorus about this tale, but the bliss barely registers in the score, devised for just seven solo strings and piano. Members of the Welsh National Opera orchestra under James Southall played it on stage with grave beauty, and the WNO chorus sang Martin’s mournful lines with passion, but even so the music rarely took flight. The mournful side-slipping harmonies and penitentially austere sound-world seemed more apt for the life-story of a particularly self-mortifying saint, rather than two of the most famous lovers in literature.
It’s a tribute to director Polly Graham’s vigorous production that the opera nevertheless moves. The blackclad chorus was constantly active about the bare stage, sometimes accusatory, sometimes comforting, as when Tristan’s mortal wounds were tended by several of the women.
Tom Randle as Tristan struggled with some of Martin’s cruelly high lines, but the aria where he ponders his betrayal of King Mark had the sting of real feeling. Caitlin Hulcup as Iseult possessed a movingly chaste, untouchable quality. Best of the smaller roles was Sian Meinir as the jealous Iseult of the White Hands.
In all, the production showed that the legend can bear a very different interpretation to Wagner’s; it’s a shame it was so compromised by the music’s passionless creep.