Weathering Wagner
IT WAS somewhere around the five-hour mark when I desperately wanted out. My notebook records my distress: ‘‘Tristan waits for Isolde’s ship. Is this ship arriving in real time?’’
Below me, in the stalls, medics had already been called. The afflicted audience member appeared to walk from the concert chamber under his own steam, but I couldn’t help thinking of the bookmark that had come free with my programme. On the front it said, ‘‘Leave your mark in the music’’. On the reverse it said, ‘‘Leave a gift in your will’’.
You know that moment on a long-haul flight when you desperately crave sleep, but your body is cramped and upright, absolutely no position is comfortable, and the end is still hours away? Ladies and gentlemen, buckle your seatbelts for Wagner.
Last Saturday night, Auckland’s Town Hall hosted the first New Zealand performance of Wagner’s 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde. Presented ‘‘in concert’’ by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and a team of international guest singers, there was no set, no costume changes, nothing to detract from the power of a sixhour Wagner-fest.
The audience for this one-off event included 1100 devotees – and this journalist, intrigued by the concept of ‘‘opera as endurance’’.
‘‘It’ll be an experience that is going to open your eyes,’’ says Chris Brodrick, president of the New Zealand Wagner Society, ahead of my musical marathon. (Yes, there are societies dedicated to the German composer whose fans, controversially, included Adolf Hitler.)
Brodrick is speaking by phone from Christchurch. ‘‘We’ve got about 400 members. From Auckland right down to Dunedin. We’ve got a member in Te Anau. They probably don’t get to many meetings.’’
Brodrick says there are ‘‘certain things’’ a person should do in his or her lifetime. ‘‘You should read War and
Peace. You should sit through a Wagner opera.’’
My current bedside reading is less Leo Tolstoy, more Sarah KateLynch. I don’t listen to classical music, opera leaves me cold and, last year, I left midway through a performance of the immeasurably more populist Madame Butterfly.
‘‘Get a record or a CD and listen to bits,’’ suggests Brodrick. ‘‘The beginning, and maybe the end of each act, then at least you know you’ve got a break coming.
‘‘It mustn’t be seen as exclusive. It’s only exclusive because it takes a bit of work. Most people want instant gratification. This is not going to give it to you.’’
WAGNER, AS various encyclopedias will tell you, is credited with revolutionising opera through his concept of ‘‘Gesamtkunstwerk’’ or ‘‘total work of art’’. Tristan und Isolde has been referred to as the beginning of modern music. According to the local society newsletter, the ‘‘roots of impressionism, expressionism and abstraction all grew in its fertile soil’’.
Brodrick, in all seriousness, says: ‘‘We’re talking about a work that is probably one of the most influential . . . art works in the history of Western culture, across all art forms. Because what Wagner was doing was taking music from the ‘stand up in front of the footlights and belt it out’-type singing to something that was much more involved psychologically, and it’s working on a psychological level.
‘‘The music moves through its three, four hours, and it’s actually never resolved. If you think of Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep, you end up at what you might call a home point – it rounds off. Wagner doesn’t do that. He actually keeps taking you away from the home, so the only time it’s ever resolved is right at the end.’’
I did do some homework. On the morning of the concert, I pay $25 and take a seat in a conference room at the Langham Hotel, where Australian author, broadcaster and Wagner expert Peter Bassett is about to deliver a two-hour lecture, ‘‘ Tristan und Isolde under the microscope’’.
It’s a 60-strong elderly liberal arts crowd. Balding men in leather jackets. Women with wispy neck scarves who know how to balance a cup, a saucer and a jam and cream scone.
The story of this opera, says Bassett (bow-tied, modulated tones), can be told in a single sentence: ‘‘A young man is sent to fetch a bride for his older uncle, but the young man and the bride fall passionately in love on their homeward journey and then spend the rest of their lives trying to reconcile their obligation to society with their passion for one another.’’
The medieval legend has had multiple incarnations. James Franco starred in the 2006 Ridley Scott movie version. Lars von Trier’s science-fiction drama art film Melancholia features music from Wagner’s very famous prelude. Here’s Bassett, who is leading a tour party of 15 Australian fans to tonight’s concert, on that particular passage:
‘‘The first phrase is played three times with a rising pitch. There’s a rest before each repetition, and this phrase contains the kernel of all that transpires in the following drama.
‘‘In the first two bars there’s a descending sighing phrase which suggests suffering; in the next two bars there’s a rising four-note phrase suggesting yearning. Where these two phrases overlap is the socalled ‘Tristan chord’, which expresses with profound economy the indivisibility of suffering and yearning.’’
Bassett’s powerpoint slide shows the chord in purple marker pen: ‘‘Wagner’s focus here is not on ecstasy but on the inseparability of pain and desire.’’
The man in charge of all that ecstasy? Eckehard Stier, Auckland Philharmonia’s music director. He has appeared as a guest conductor
with the likes of the London Philharmonic and the Munich Symphony Orchestra, and, according to the programme notes, his interpretations of the symphonic works of Mahler and Shostakovich ‘‘are internationally acclaimed’’. I meet him a week before Tristan
und Isolde opens. He tells me: ‘‘Personally, I am not a fan of long performances, but I have to say the length is rewarding at the end, because in the last 10 minutes you listen to the liebestod from Isolde, the famous liebestod [literally ‘love death’].’’
Tristan und Isolde took Wagner more than a decade to complete. Its first lead singer died suddenly, having performed the role only four times. Two subsequent conductors collapsed during the second act, and later died.
‘‘Don’t laugh,’’ Stier said, for an earlier Sunday
Star-Times story. ‘‘This piece is telling a story about destiny, fate, power and ecstasy. Everyone really gets into it, really involved. And yeah, if you do something too strong and you are too excited about it, a heart attack will come.’’
His job on performance night, he says, is to be ‘‘calm, friendly,
It’ll be an experience that is going to open your eyes.
optimistic’’, because the orchestra can tell if the conductor is nervous or negative.
What will he do before the concert begins? ‘‘Have some pasta, a good sleep and a cool heart.’’
AT 3.30PM on Saturday, July 19, the town hall foyer is packed for the 4pm start. There’s a woman with fluorescent blue hair, and another with handknitted rainbowcoloured leg warmers. There is velvet and denim, satin and sneakers. Who goes to these things? Everybody, apparently.
My throat is already tickling as the first act begins. I cough, uncontrollably, and wonder at the stamina of the small boy, aged maybe 7 or 8, who sits, rapt, in the balcony opposite.
I notice the ornately sequinned flat shoes of Annalena Pearson, who is playing Isolde, and the tiny tattoo on the right shoulder of Daveda Karanas, the mezzo-soprano playing faithful maid Brangane. I recall that Lars Cleveman, aka Tristan, is also credited with forming Sweden’s first electronic underground band.
I wonder why all female flautists look ethereal. I decide that a female orchestral bassist is as sexy as a female rock bassist, and that one of the cellists looks a bit like George from Grey’s Anatomy. I marvel at the September
Vogue- sized score on the conductor’s podium. And then I stop noticing anything.
Tristan and Isolde have just swallowed a love potion they thought was a death potion, and my arm hairs are prickling, unbidden. It’s the music. And the words. The complete work of art. ‘‘Alas, inescapable misery instead of a quick death . . . sweetest maiden . . . dearest man . . . where am I . . . am I alive?’’ The act ends in a C-major trumpet fanfare. Somewhere to my right, in the stunned silence, a single voice: ‘‘Wow.’’
You can queue at the bar for beer, wine or an $8 mince and tomato pie. Aucklanders Hilary Nobes and Neil Jenkins are eating homemade Anzac biscuits during the 20-minute drinks break.
‘‘I virtually missed lunch, so it seemed sensible to bring something to eat,’’ says Nobes.
She’s more of a Bach fan. ‘‘The thing I don’t like about Wagner is that there aren’t many cadences, in the sense that the music goes on and on and on until the very, very final end. It doesn’t have a resting place – you’ve got to keep concentrating.’’
Which is why Jenkins loves it. ‘‘He wrote for drama.’’
We rejoin the throng and head into act two. It’s twilight now. The boy in the striped jersey is down to shirtsleeves and a bow tie. The musicians in charge of the cymbals and triangle have left the stage. Tristan and Isolde discuss night and day, light and dark, and never waking. I know from my research that this is the erotic bit. Or, as Bassett had put it in the morning’s lecture, ‘‘They remark on the dichotomy of the material world of phenomena and the luminal sphere of inner consciousness represented by night – yes, they really do. This is love on a lofty plane indeed’’.
I fidget through King Marke’s arrival (bass Runi Brattaberg graduated as a documentary photographer before training to become a singer), and at the end of the second 80-minute stint I am very, very ready for Tristan to throw himself on a sword.
The crowd disperses for dinner. I’ve signed up for the boxed buffet special, in the Aotea Centre. The beef bourguignon is passable, the sweet and sour chicken dreadful.
My table, however, is cultured. Almost everyone here has been to at least one complete showing of
Der Ring des Nibelungen – aka the Ring Cycle, Wagner’s famous three-day, one-night operatic epic.
I meet Howard Gorton back in the foyer. He’s visiting from Hawke’s Bay. Wagner’s music, he says, ‘‘really does something’’. What? ‘‘It’s very hard to describe.’’
As the third act starts, the small boy’s arms are dangling over the balcony. It’s 8.30pm. It was Italian composer Gioachino Rossini who once noted that Wagner has some beautiful moments – and some dreadful quarter-hours.
People are beginning to shift in their seats, legs are crossed and uncrossed. I realise that a woman in side profile a few rows in front of me has a nose straight from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. My mind is wandering, my bum is numb, and the elation I felt in the first act has gone.
Tristan dies, his servant Kurwenal dies, the courtier Melot dies. Inevitably, so does Isolde. I am moved. Of course I am – this ‘‘love death’’ was described by Richard Strauss, the composer born one year before this opera was first performed, as the ‘‘most beautifully orchestrated cadence in music’’.
‘‘Transfigured in death, she sinks down on Tristan’s body,’’ says the programme. ‘‘In the orchestra, the last straining discord eventually finds its way home to the luminous, all-enfolding key of B major. The opera has ended.’’
Bravo, cries an audience member. The ovation lasts for ages. I take a taxi to my couch and turn on the television. I can read
War and Peace tomorrow.