Tristan rattled Rattle
Simon Rattle thinks back to his first staged performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Amsterdam in 2001.
“I remember wanting to lie down on the rostrum and curl up in a fetal position and sob,” he says.
Wagner’s hypnotic love story, composed from 1857-59 and premièred in 1865, has returned to the Metropolitan Opera in a psychologically fascinating, nautically centred contemporary staging by the Polish director Mariusz Trelinski. The run, marking 50 years since the new house at Lincoln Center opened, continues for a month, and the Oct. 8 matinee will be telecast to movie theatres around the globe.
Tristan had not opened a Met season since 1937 and before this staging Rattle had not conducted a full performance since 2009 in Vienna.
Composed during Wagner’s affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner’s Tristan was a musical landmark for its chromaticism. Rattle says Wagner’s transformation is evident from the autograph score.
“His handwriting was famously beautiful and accurate, and sometimes he even used to send his musical handwriting to ladies as a kind of seduction tool,” he says. “When you look at the manuscript of Tristan, it simply doesn’t do that at all. I mean, it is perfectly legible, but it’s obviously done at such burning haste.”
Wagner set the first act on Tristan’s ship, the second outside King Marke’s castle in Cornwall and the third at Tristan’s castle in Brittany. Trelinksi and set designer Boris Kudlicka move all three acts to an ominous, dark and starkly lit warship, setting the first in cabins, the second on the bridge and in a lower-deck weapons bay, and the third in sick bay, where Tristan drifts in and out of consciousness and has flashbacks to his youth that include a doppelganger boy.
This production evokes Peter Sellars’ 2005 Paris staging dominated by Bill Viola videos, and Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia.
Rattle said last week “I’ve been begging the orchestra to be more like chiffon than wool,” and after a pulsating, glistening rendition he was greeted by overwhelming cheers and applause. Some boos were mixed in for Trelinski. Tenor Stuart Skelton (Tristan), soprano Nina Stemme (Isolde) and bass Rene Pape (King Marke) also received bravos.
“What is asked of the tenor is beyond anything the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals should allow,” Rattle says.
His time as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, which began in 2002, ends in 2018, and he starts next September as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra.
To prepare for Tristan, he studied the marked-up conducting scores of Gustav Mahler and Wilhelm Furtwaengler.
“A mine of information,” Rattle says.