“Our intentions are anachronistic,” said the German director Roland Schwab about his Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, adding, “I want to achieve a sense of escapism.” That is not the usual approach in Bayreuth, where Wagner’s canon is typically subjected to Regietheater reinterpretations that imbue his work with provocative psychological themes or attempts at sociopolitical commentary. As I have long argued, however, Bayreuth productions have become so routinely laden with directorial “concept” that the most radical thing a director could now do is mount an unapologetically traditional staging.
Schwab comes close, giving us an effort that focuses on the hopeless love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Isolde. Tristan has won Isolde in mortal combat as a wife for his childless uncle, King Marke, but he falls victim to a love for her beyond all mortal understanding. Schwab does not send us in search of the characters’ traumas, nor does he consign their passions to the realm of mental illness, drug addiction, or social alienation. There is no ambitious critique of society, and, despite the vaguely modern dress of the characters, little indication of the time or place inhabited.
The action takes place in a mostly enclosed oval-shaped space. An aperture in the ceiling reveals the heavens, which are reflected in an illuminated pool below. In the first act, we see the bright blue skies of the daylight realm, where furtive romance is impossible. When passion begins to overtake our main characters, storm clouds gather and spin, drawing the lovers into an artfully parallel whirlwind. As they enter Act II’s realm of night, where their affair can flourish, the sky glowing above them and reflected below is transformed into a vast starfield; rapture overcomes them in this celestial space. At the opera’s climax, when the couple is discovered, Tristan is impaled by a cluster of fluorescent beams—a sharp representation of the “cursed light” he’d earlier lamented—rather than by a weapon wielded in envious hands. His and Isolde’s emotions carry us readily along without pointless irony or empty nihilism. Indeed, Schwab’s only missteps are to distract us with a series of mute couples who occasionally appear, apparently representing Tristan and Isolde in their adolescence, young adulthood, and old age, and to place a red neon installation of the Hindi word for “eternity” at stage right.
Schwab was originally commissioned to produce this ingenious and crowd-pleasing Tristan last year as a placeholder between the interruption caused by COVID and the more permanent staging that will open the 2024 festival. With only a few months of preparation time, the hasty effort saw only two performances last summer and just two more this year before it was ushered into oblivion. Last year, it premiered alongside Bayreuth’s first new Ring Cycle in nine years and was thus jammed into an already crowded schedule. The scheduling woes caused many Bayreuth stalwarts to miss it altogether, but those fortunate enough to attend registered no complaints about the enchanting visuals.
Catherine Foster returned as Isolde this season. Her voice remains ebulliently powerful but has lost some of its bloom. She was still capable of making the high notes, though an overreliance on vibrato diminished the clarity and elegance of her tone and muddied her German diction. The American tenor Clay Hilley sang Tristan. He has a large, clarion sound that in its best moments recalls the storied career of his predecessor Ben Heppner. Alas, those moments became fleeting as the evening wore on. By the time Hilley reached Tristan’s treacherous Act III monologues, much of his power had left him.
Among the supporting cast, the bass Georg Zeppenfeld resonated with clarity as the wronged King Marke. In his Act II scene, in which he tries to make sense of his wife’s infidelity and nephew’s betrayal, he overcame the tendency toward grumbling typical of singers this low in the register. He emerged affecting and moving. The veteran mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer won well-deserved plaudits as Isolde’s maid, Brangäne, and Markus Eiche complemented her comfortably as Tristan’s squire, Kurwenal. Olafur Sigurdarson was a woolly and miscast Melot.
The German conductor Markus Poschner received the podium assignment for a consecutive year. He led a powerful performance that maintained constant energy while exploring the score’s emotive subtleties.