Wagner, Tristan & Me

Recently, I spent three nights in a row at Disney Hall in Downtown LA listening to The Tristan Project, a Gustavo Dudamel conducted LA Phil concert performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, as directed by Peter Sellars with video accompaniment by artist Bill Viola, as well as participation by the LA Master Chorale. The Tristan Project was first performed at Disney Hall with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting in 2004, subsequent productions have taken place in New York at the Met and at the Paris Opera Bastille.

First, a few disclaimers: I am not well educated in matters of classical music, music theory, composition, and symphonies or, for that matter, Opera and Richard Wagner in particular. I have on occasion gone to see Opera – when I was young we went to performances in Central Park, and while on vacation with my parents we always attended summer evening outdoor spectacles in exotic locations, such as Opera at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome or in the Ancient Roman amphitheater at Caesarea in Israel – and since then I’ve attended a few performances, even going to see the Metropolitan Opera in HD at Century City.

Nonetheless, I never really got Opera. I have come to understand that Opera is to Church music as Soul is to Gospel – the secular version of sacred music about the foibles of all too human men and women. As for Wagner what I knew best was The Flight of the Valkyries as it appeared in Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” And, yes, that Wagner was an antisemite and that Hitler anointed Wagner as his favorite composer. Not a ringing endorsement.

Still, I have now come to an age where nothing’s better than learning something new – and I have developed the sitzfleisch and, in some cases, the appreciation for those things for which I had no patience or interest when younger. The synesthesia of being emotionally transported from the mix of sight and sound has been a constant since my earliest forays to the Fillmore East when the Joshua White Light Show was background to the musicians; and the Who’s first visual effect laden performances of Tommy. Similarly, years of writing about art has made me better able to verbalize what I feel and think when seeing artwork, or in this case, when listening to it. And for better, and sometimes worse, I’ve become more confident in stating in print my opinion of what I am seeing and experiencing.

There is one more reason why I felt compelled to attend this three-night three-act (one act a night) performance of Tristan and Isolde and that’s because of a person (or rather an author) whose work has taken up a large portion of my reading and thought over the last year: Marcel Proust. In his multi-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, Proust writes at length about Tristan and Isolde, and his main character, Marcel, is very influenced by Wagner’s Tristan in how he regards love and art.

Tristan and Isolde is based on a medieval European tale in which Isolde, an Irish Princess, is being taken by ship by the knight Tristan to his Uncle, King Marke of Cornwall for the King to marry her. Tristan had killed Isolde’s prior fiancé in combat and been wounded with a poison tipped weapon for which he was only cured by a potion provided by Isolde. On this ship Tristan will not even acknowledge Isolde, and Isolde is in a deeply depressed and near-suicidal state. Isolde is accompanied by Brangane, a healer and Tristan by his friend Kurwenal. Brangane has brought two potions with her: a love potion and one that causes death. Isolde wants to die and asks for the death potion. Isolde asks Tristan to join her in a toast, believing that she will not only kill herself but Tristan as well. Tristan agrees even though he fears he is drinking a death potion, However, unknown to both, Brangane has swapped potions and they have imbibed the love potion. Tristan and Isolde fall madly in love.

When King Marke learns of Tristan’s love for Isolde, he feels he has been betrayed and orders his men to kill him. Tristan is wounded and saves himself long enough to wait to be reunited with Isolde. In the meantime, King Marke learns about the potion and understands that Tristan is not to blame and is no betrayer. Nonetheless, Tristan lives long enough to know that Isolde is arriving to be with him, but not long enough to be forgiven by the King, or to be reunited with Isolde. When Isolde discovers that Tristan has died, she dies too of a broken heart but also in the belief that Tristan and Isolde’s love could not be contained by life, and that only by transcending life, to the state beyond it of death can they be reunited and achieve their perfect love.

To break it down further, Act I is mostly set-up with the characters of Tristan and Isolde meeting but not liking each other, Tristan drinking the potion, believing that he has been mortally poisoned. But then Tristan learns that it was not a death potion, but a love potion. Act II are the declarations of love between the two; and Act III are the consequences of love and its transcendence over life itself.

And so, on the appointed night, I took my seat in Disney Hall and Gustavo Dudamel took his place on the podium. I remained super-aware of what I was hearing while at the same time trying to let the experience wash over me.

Wagner is celebrated for being both the composer of the music and the writer of the lyrics. He envisioned his work as “total art” where every aspect, including the singers’ gestures was scripted by him. Wagner famously said that his music continues the characters’ conversations after they have stopped singing.

Wagner idolized Beethoven and the first night’s music has some of the bombast of Beethoven but seemed to this listener more “in the school of” than enrapturing. One of the elements Proust and other afficionados talk about with regard to the first act is the “Tristan chord” which is seen as the start of modern music in using atonal dissonant chords. The Tristan chord is also significant because it doesn’t resolve and this unfinished quality is seen as expressive of longing. The idea is that the mind hears notes and believes it knows where the music is headed but Wagner in Tristan never goes to the expected. And this feeling of music being unresolved speaks both to the characters and to the story. This is celebrated as one of Wagner’s innovations. I sort-of, kind-of, got it.

Dudamel was focused, intense, warm to his orchestra who were all top notch, same for the orchestra. The singers, Swedish tenor Michael Weinius as Tristan and Soprano Miina-Liisa Varela, threw themselves into the roles. Having no others to compare them to, I can say they were the best I ever heard; but not that they are the best ever performed. But, honestly, that first night didn’t do much for me. I found Bill Viola’s video images off-putting. They did more to turn me off than involve me. As I left the theater that night, I found myself thinking, “great perhaps, but not for me.”

The second night/second act was different. This was the night of declarations of love by Tristan and Isolde. The music soared and perhaps for the first time I was transported, lifted to another realm by the voices and the music. Viola’s images were less disconcerting, and I was able to make connections between the music and images in ways that added to the experience (the surtitles helped). After night two, although not won over, I began to understand that Opera offered an artistic and emotional experience unlike other arts, in that it engaged the rational and irrational, and although the story may be dramatic in of itself, voices trigger emotion and feelings that can, like a magic trick, transport and levitate the listener to another realm.

And then there was the third night/third act. I arrived at Disney Hall to hear the end of a talk given by Peter Sellars in which he discussed the inspirations for his staging, and the nature and quality of Bill Viola’s work. Sellars talked at about the Tibetan Book of the Dead as providing the technology thousands of years ago regarding what happens when we die, the same concepts Wagner would later express in his work, and that scientists and humanists are finding true today. Sellars discussed the idea of transubstantiation and the migration of the souls (which T.S. Eliot and Proust both discussed as well). In Sellars description, the idea of preparing for death means regarding death as something more than the loss of life.

For the first two nights, I had been seated on the left side balcony in seats from which I could see the entire orchestra and the singers wherever in the theater they appeared. The staging was such that the Master Chorale was set at the top of the theater and various characters sang parts sometimes on stage sometimes from the side balconies. The third night, I was seated in the orchestra, relatively close up.

From this vantage point, I could really appreciate what a great conductor Dudamel is. Dudamel stood like Vulcan at the forge — his arms manipulating the bellows that is the orchestra, his every gesture in direct contact with the sound produced, filled with passion, enthusiasm and love. It was amazing.

With the third act, I began to appreciate the challenge for the singers, the enormous demands Wagner placed on each of them. Everything came together – Tristan and Isolde’s yearning, their unresolved desire, the yearning of King Marke and others to make things right, and finally, both Tristan’s love, and his belief that in death they may find a love greater than on earth, and Isolde’s bravura aria, the famous Liebestod (love of death) – and Bill Viola’s images of a body dissolving and rising – it was image, voice, music, all knitted together in a way that transcended their individual parts into something greater, into a feeling that one could feel in one’s heart after the performance.

I also got the connection with Proust. In Proust’s novel characters are always revealing their own hypocrisy: saying one thing, believing another. In matters of the heart, the person they at first disdain, they later love. And the persons they are supposed to love, they don’t and long for another. And, in all this, as Marcel grows from boy to man (the character rather than the author) he searches for a perfect love, a love greater than anything human experience affords. He is searching for something transcendent, something beyond – and the only place that takes him there is Art. Like Tristan believing that there is a greater love beyond life, so too Marcel sees in the vocation of writer and in creating his own art a way to touch the eternal and to find perfect love.

The Tristan Project was an amazing experience that I shall not soon forget. Am I now running off to Bayreuth to be a Wagner freak? I think not. But, like the fortune cookie that says: The journey of a thousand miles starts with just one step, I have discovered in myself an appreciation that didn’t exist before. So, as this Tristan Project marathon ends, a new journey begins.